Quite a lot going on at the moment! I spent nearly all of yesterday (Wednesday) working on several helpdesk issues ranging from setting up two new Palm Centro cell phones to diagnosing a sound card issue on a laptop to stuff I can’t even remember at this point! It’s the longest I’ve spent away from my desk in one day in a while, and my brain is fried, so I sat down to crank out this post. Perfect time to write a blog post, right? :-) (I polished it a bit later before publishing.)

I have contemplated the HTC Shift in the past. It does not appear to be released in the US yet, however, and the price when it is will likely be $1200 to $1500. That’s not bad for a 7″ screen UMPC running Windows Vista (and Windows Mobile!), but I’m ready to compromise: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. It used to cost between $400 and $500, but Amazon.com carries it for about $230 right now because its big brother just came out, the N810. What do you get for the N810’s $440 that you don’t get for the N800’s $230? A slide-out thumb keyboard, an 8% smaller unit, and a built-in GPS receiver (that costs more to get full use out of).

But first things first…why get one of these things anyway? Well, I do have a laptop, a nice 12.1″ Core 2 Duo Lenovo 3000 V100 that I like very much. It’s small enough and light enough to carry from home to work and just about anywhere else, when it’s packed up. It’s my main PC at home; the desktop rarely gets used! However, my office is in a central-yet-distant location from nearly everyone else in the building at Lakeview, and since the middle of 2007 I’ve been using HelpSpot to track helpdesk requests. It is easy to work within HelpSpot when I’m at my computer, but I often must trek to the office of an individual user to help them with a problem (yes, remote control is an option sometimes, but hardware problems are another story and many times, demonstrating something to the user in person is much more powerful for training purposes). When I do this, I often get sidetracked by others needing assistance and, like today, may end up working on 4-6 different issues before I’m back at my own computer! By that time, I probably won’t remember half of the actual problems I worked on, much less all the details it would be useful to log for future reference.

My laptop is simply too heavy and bulky, even as small as it is, to carry around everywhere, especially if I’m carrying hardware as well. My Treo 650, on the other hand, never leaves my pocket unless I’m using it. However, while there is a mobile version of HelpSpot that is usable, I must log in repeatedly from my phone to use it, and the small keyboard and screen are not conducive to typing extensive notes. Enter the N800. It’s not a cell phone, but here are a few highlights that it does have:

• WiFi access (with a better radio than most laptops from several reports)
• Bluetooth
• 4″ touchscreen
• Gecko-based web browser supports nearly all sites that Firefox supports on the desktop (including JavaScript/AJAX) and has Flash 9 support
• Built-in video camera along with Skype and Gizmo video chat ability
• Google Talk (my favorite) and other IM services
• IMAP, POP3 and web-based email
• Multimedia playback in multiple formats
• Expandable memory using up to two SD cards
• On-screen keyboard with expandability using a Bluetooth keyboard for a real, touch-typing keyboard
• Linux-based system using the Maemo platform for free add-on software

There’s more, which I know after reading nearly ever review ever written about it, but that’s the gist. Mine is coming from eBay with an iGo Stowaway Ultra-Slim Bluetooth Keyboard (it’s only $50 from Amazon right now) and an 8GB SCHC memory card for less than it would all cost from Amazon brand new. I am very, very excited to get my hands on this thing! It will let me do a lot, but it should also solve my helpdesk logging problem: I’ll carry my N800 and keyboard with me, using it to log helpdesk requests as I work on them, giving me more detailed and time-accurate logs. Everything else it can do? Really, really tasty icing on the tiny tablet cake! And the N810? I want touch-typing, so the keyboard on that is just a nicety (especially with the touch-typable Stowaway coming with the N800 for me). The smaller size would be nice, but it’s not that much smaller, and the screen is the same size (both 800×480 resolution). The GPS would be nice but I’ve read reports that it’s slow, and to get actual directions on it costs an additional $130 to $200 or something. All three come nowhere near being worth twice the price! And the N810 only supports miniSD and microSD cards, rather than standard SD. The standard cards are bigger and cheaper.

The Nokia Internet Tablets are getting popular, too. Over at Amazon.com they were in the top three hot sellers over Christmas in the PC category! You can be sure of seeing some N800 posts coming up right here, and count on them coming right from the N800 itself!

Wow. I didn’t see that coming, but I suppose I didn’t watch all that carefully, either. MySQL AB is the company behind the exceedingly popular MySQL database engine, which powers this very blog and all other WordPress blogs, among practically millions of other websites and software (including the helpdesk application we use, HelpSpot). I’ve been using MySQL for database development for years and years, long before I ever hit the Church IT scene. I’ve used it on shared hosting account, dedicated servers, and on my own Windows machines and virtual servers. It rocks! It will be interesting to see what happens with Sun in charge. I’m cautiously optimistic. For years there were rumors that Oracle would buy MySQL and close them down to reduce competition. The announcement is called Helping Dolphins Fly over on a Sun blog (kudos to Matt Mullenweg for the link), and MySQL has the news posted themselves as well.

The Ministry Technology Institute just had its first class yesterday afternoon! I’m on their Advisory Board and I’m also taking advantage of the opportunity to go through their classes as a good way to both provide feedback and of course, learn something new, which I manage to do just about always and everywhere. They are still taking applications for the charter class of their certification program (become a Certified Ministry Technologist!) for another few weeks. Nick and Steve are both top notch and have been around the block a few times, in addition to the classmates from around the world that are already a part of the Institute. It’s an online-only program, and they have plenty of info at their website if you’re interested. The charter class is also available at a reduced cost, so now’s the time to get it on it!

Tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm Eastern is the next episode of the Church IT Podcast, hosted on TalkShoe by Jason Powell, the King of Church IT (if you were at the Fall Church IT Roundtable last year where I accidentally coined that nickname, that joke might be funny :-) Don’t miss it if you can make it (I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not, unfortunately I may not have the opportunity this time). There is still the option to download a “Classic” Java client for TalkShoe chat, but they just introduced a new Web version that does not require a download ahead of time and looks more like an IRC chat window. It’s in alpha but looks nice; you can use either one you want.

Speaking of chat, if every two weeks is just too long to wait for the Podcast, you can jump in to the IRC chatroom “24/7 CITRT Roundtable” set up on the Freenode server (IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, has been around forever, or just about, in internet terms, but is not quite as common as it used to be). Justin Moore posted a couple of excellent posts talking about the #citrt chat room and about how to use IRC. He also links to Jeffrey Thompson’s screencast demonstrating graphically how to install the ChatZilla Firefox extension and join in the chat. If you’re a Church IT person, you need to be in there at least from time to time and build your network of geek friends while sharing technology tips!

So, there’s three ways you can get involved in the Church IT community without giving the seat of your chair the opportunity to rebound from your butt imprint. Go!

This past Tuesday, I installed ISA 2004 Service Pack 3. I’ve got a recent configuration backup from the last time I had some SSL certificate issues (that was fun enough I think I’ve blocked it out too much to blog about it!), so I figured trying it out couldn’t hurt, and it had a lot of fixes. So I start the install through Automatic Updates before I go home for the evening, since if something happens fewer will notice after hours. As I pull into my driveway, my phone alerts me that Exchange ActiveSync failed, and I get an SMS notification from our monitoring service saying that ISA could not be pinged. I hope the system is just restarting the Firewall service and it will come back up. Two hours later, it hasn’t. I drive back in, hit Restart After Automatic Updates (you know what I mean), and let it reboot. I am very, very happy to report that it worked! After the reboot, internet access worked my Treo was able to sync again!

Something interesting to note is that while inbound traffic from the internet appeared to be blocked before the restart, I was able to use Remote Desktop from another server on the internal network to remotely instruct ISA to reboot. So it had not locked down all network access, just external. Good to know if you administer the box primarily via remote control! In fact, due to a lack of KVM switch ports, I have to manually plug the keyboard/monitor/mouse back in to ISA physically if I want to work on the console.

Although everything appeared to be functioning normally, today I got a report from a user who was getting a network error when attempting to connect to the iTunes Store from within iTunes. I tried it on my desktop, and got the same error. Fortunately, I remembered that back when I installed a prior ISA service pack (I don’t recall if it was 1 or 2), I had a similar problem and was able to track down the issue to the Compression Filter in ISA. If you go in the ISA Management Console to Configuration->Add-ins and check the Web Filters tab, by default there is a “Compression Filter” enabled (the description: “Enables HTTP/HTTPS compression”). Disabling this filter allowed iTunes Store to work just fine!

However, the reverse is true in ISA 2004 Service Pack 3. If you have disabled the Compression Filter, you must re-enable it for the iTunes Store to work in Service Pack 3! This is very useful information, so I thought I’d share! If you don’t know why iTunes Store doesn’t work, it can take a bit of Googling to determine the problem, at least it did for me originally. Perhaps the issue is more widely known by now.

We have at least one weekly email that gets sent out to staff members each week. It’s a short report that each person fills out and sends to their immediate supervisor. It is supposed to be sent out early Monday morning every week. The administrative assistant that has been tasked with sending these to everyone has an email scheduled in Outlook ahead of time, but not only do these have to be set up manually in advance every week, but they also have not been getting sent automatically.

I could troubleshoot Outlook and try to see why it’s not sending the messages properly. But I’d rather fix the problem at its source, farm the email sending to a server and allow the admin. assistant to turn off her computer over the weekend while I’m at it. I’d also like to make the email appear to come from each person’s supervisor; as it is hitting “Reply” sends replies back to the admin. assistant and not the supervisor. Reply-to would fix this, but that requires compounding the complexity by sending individual emails to each group of people with the same supervisor!

What I want is an email scheduler. I’m open to how it works, but my initial thoughts are:

1. It should be web-based
2. It should run under Apache on Linux, preferably with Perl or PHP (personal preference on all of those)
3. It should send email using our Exchange server as the SMTP server
4. It should let me set up multiple administrators who may create emails, fill them out with From (or Reply-to), Subject, and Body, and select the time of day and frequency of the mailing.
5. It should be free and/or open source, or at least very inexpensive.
6. It shouldn’t try to do everything, unless I want everything that it does (how’s that for a requirement?!).

I’m willing to budge on one or more of those items if given a good reason. I’ve done a bit of web searching and have located a tool called LBE Email Scheduler, which is shareware that sells for $20 for personal use or $200 for business use (a cursory glance did not immediately reveal whether non-profit pricing was available). It’s Windows-based and seems to have the features I’m looking for, but I like the idea of running a server app rather than sending client-side. Server apps are much easier to give multiple users access to. My searching has been hampered by a bazillion (approximate :-) results for spamming tools, which, although some of them could probably be modified to do what I want, really isn’t what I’m looking to support!

I’m willing to consider creative solutions. Possibilities I’ve thought of so far, in no particular order and not particularly connected:

• Set up WordPress-based intranet and use the cForms II plugin to create the report as a form that could be posted on the intranet. Would still need a weekly reminder email with a link to the form.
• Find another method that gets away from using email but still sends a reminder each week (I’d like to get away from email entirely, but I don’t think there’s a better way to at least remind people!)
• A couple of other wacky things using combinations of other open source projects that are probably too complex and that I don’t feel like linking to properly right now :-)
• Build my own script to the specifications I outlined above.
• Use SharePoint. I mention this because I know someone will say something about it :-) I’ve used SharePoint Services for about 4 hours two to three years ago, and that’s it (I installed it because it came with Windows Server and I wanted to play with it). I’m not going to be at the SharePoint Training that Jason Lee is hosting for a few reasons, all of them unfortunate and mostly my fault, but it’s not worth crying over spilt milk. Regardless, I know WordPress and at the very least Perl and PHP, so unless there’s a really, really good Windows-based solution that’s free or very cheap, I need a lot more convincing.

Here end my ponderings thus far, and begin the comments from you! (Thank you in advance!)

Happy New Year plus One Day! I didn’t get my promised new year post out yesterday as planned. That’s OK, the day was as uneventful as this entry :-) Back to work, with more post fodder! I have another one I need to write right now; that’s one reason this is short. I’m not making any specific New Years Resolutions this year, it’s just not worth it.  I’ve got some interesting things I’m trying already that I’ll post about at some point if I feel like it and it works :-)

End of the Year

And thus 2007 comes to a close, with a not-so-subtle nod to HTML/XML closing tags. Which is fitting; I’ve spent a good chunk of time with the church websites this past quarter. The results aren’t public yet, but things are moving along. (There’s a poll to take at the end of this post, for good readers who make it to the end or bad ones who skip ahead ;-)

The past week and a half have been very relaxing. My in-laws came around Christmas, and are back through tomorrow. It’s been good to see them, and my son is enjoying getting to know them a little since they live 2.5 hours away, and his long-term memory isn’t all that great yet! He turned one last week, and immensely enjoyed his banana bread “cake,” some of the most sugar he’s been allowed to eat.

I’ve had less time to spend online than I’d planned, and the time I did spend was primarily reading, learning, and helping a friend get his website up and running (he used to be Lakeview’s Media Pastor, now he’s a professor and runs video production company Media 21 on the side). I also spent some time reading through WordPress core source code and Trac. I was able to submit two or three small patches that may or may not make it in some form into WordPress 2.4, coming out in January! I also updated most of my WordPress installs, including this blog, to version 2.3.2 within seven hours of it being released this past Saturday.

WordPress Babblings

Why the focus on WordPress? Well, I calculated recently, and I’m actually involved with (running myself or set up for work or family or friends) twelve WordPress installations right now! This blog runs forty WordPress Plugins, and some of those I use on the other installs as well! I’ve been having a lot of fun working with WordPress from the technical side, but this past semester, as I’ve mentioned, I had a Technical Writing class that pretty much took all of my writing creativity, resulting in my lowest monthly post count ever in December! I thought when the semester ended I’d be right back in the saddle here (and I managed a post or two), but it turns out I needed a break!

If you’re interested, here’s an approximation of what those twelve WordPress installations I mentioned are:

• This blog (1)
• My son’s blog (1)
• My wife’s blog (1) (now about obsessions and compulsions! Some of which I share, or at least strongly approve…)
• Pastor Nathan’s blog (1)
• Blogs of a missionary from Lakeview and a Director at the Indiana Assemblies of God District Office (2) (still somewhat in development)
• Two WordPress-as-Content Management System installs for Lakeview, not public yet (2)
• Media 21 website for Rob Price (1)
• An inactive install at one of my domains for testing (1)
• An old blog I ran for a while a few years ago (1) (Don’t you wish I’d give you a link? It’s not hard to find!)
• An unofficial blog for my homeowners association (not turned over to residents from the builder yet, can’t get enough people out to the meeting to vote! Hence blog!) (1)

That makes twelve! I may also get around to setting up an internal WordPress installation for our intranet, which is how I got started with WordPress for the church in the first place but of course, the intranet got stuck on the back burner!

I’ve promised in the past that I would post about the work I’ve been doing on the church websites and converting them to WordPress. As you can see, I’ve been doing a lot more with WordPress than just the church, and I’ve discovered a lot of tips, tricks, plugins, and all kinds of WordPress stuff, and a lot of general website stuff as well! I know some Church IT readers are interested in this kind of thing, as they are involved with or are responsible for their own church websites. Others probably don’t care in the least! I don’t want to overwhelm readers with WordPress and websites, but I’m curious how many of you are interested.

Why have I not written much about WordPress until now? Like I said, I haven’t been sure how many of you would be interested. Also, I kept finding new information so fast I didn’t have time to post the old. And I wanted to provide some context first; I want to start at the very beginning. (“…a very good place to start. When you read, you begin with A B C.” Oh wait, this isn’t the Sound of Music! :-) Anyway, I want to start at the beginning and describe the reasons for choosing WordPress, what the catalyst was for the project, what steps we’ve been taking, what’s changed as the project has continued (another reason not to post, things keep changing!), and then get to the meat like plugins and links and implementation. I haven’t had the time to fill in the high level stuff yet, so I’ve skipped jumping in in the middle! Another good reason to hold off is politics. Not the presidential election, as interesting as that may be to some, but a church website at a larger church has reach among many areas and departments, and while the sailing has been more smooth than I could have hoped for on a project of this size (really! I have awesome coworkers!), there are always bumps and friction when working with others and I don’t want to publicly vent or air dirty laundry.

End of the year…and more WordPress Babblings

This is the part where I say Happy New Year! And also where I ask you to vote for how much I should talk about WordPress and websites here in 2008:

(Poll coming here as soon as I get the darn plugin working correctly! Sorry!)
There should be a post tomorrow as well; as they say, when one tag closes, another opens! :-D

OK, that’s a bit of sensationalism there in the headline! I actually love my new (from new building) office (bigger, with an attached workroom), but there are a few minor downsides to being located in the very middle of the building (that’s good), at least a sixty second walk away from everyone (that’s good and bad). (No offense to Josh, our Technical Director, who does actually just work down the hall “next to me”; I’m generalizing, not leaving you out! And there are a couple of other people slightly less than sixty seconds away, but they’re not in earshot.) One of those downsides is that when the office is closed halfway through the day as an early holiday treat, people often (and by often, I mean it happened today and I think it’s happened once in the past) forget to tell you to go home. Of course, the upside (I suppose) is I actually have enough work to keep me busy all day…

This doesn’t always happen; I have been included on this via phone announcement before, and I think they even remembered to tell me personally once. Actually, that may have been for a group lunch, not for a go-home-early party. At least they have remembered before… :-)

I have a dedicated web hosting server that is currently hosted at a large hosting datacenter. I’ve had the server for a few years and it’s served me well, but I don’t need the power and I don’t want to hassle with (or pay for technician time for) upgrades to the control panel software or the system software (Apache, PHP, MySQL). PHP and MySQL, in particular, are quite out of date, so much so that things I run many, many copies of, like WordPress, are not compatible with the MySQL version installed! The server is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3), and I’ve learned quite a bit having root access to a Linux server. However, it’s too expensive for me to continue renting, in addition to my above reasons, and to top it off with VMWare’s Virtual Server, I can install and play with as many virtual Linux machines as I want at any time!

So I am switching all of my domains (mostly mine and those of some friends, but I have hosted a Lakeview website on this server for over a year as well) over to a shared account on DreamHost, which is inexpensive and allows for unlimited domains and more disk space and bandwidth than my dedicated server, should I need it. They also offer a cool new service called DreamHost Private Servers, which lets you move from a shared server to a server with dedicated resources (CPU and RAM) that can not only spike above your guaranteed minimums as the server has capacity, but will also let you reconfigure (and pay more for) more resources incrementally at any time for that Private Server, with the change taking place in minutes. You can choose from regular and MySQL Private Servers, or both (they split out MySQL servers onto different machines than the web hosting files on all accounts). Each Private Server starts at only $15/mo for 150MHz processor and 150MB  memory guaranteed resources, and goes up from there depending on how many resources you want (you are only charged for your resource usage at each setting for the time you are at that setting).

I am in the process of moving the hosting for all of my domain names to my DreamHost account, and the process is going smoothly. However, there is a lot of useful information on the dedicated server that I’d like to keep for posterity, preferably in an accessible format and not just an archive file. It doesn’t have to be on the internet, but having it running as a virtual machine on my local computer would rock! My main limitation in converting the machine to a virtual server is that I can’t reboot it into a special CD or something, since it needs to remain running and accessible to me remotely at all times via SSH. The hard drive on the dedicated server is 60GB, but only 20GB of that is used, so it will take a while to move everything but it shouldn’t be too bad.

I have done a little bit of research on moving a Linux machine into a virtual machine, and have found interesting articles here (especially in the comments as far as doing a hot-copy), and here. I haven’t done the research to decide for sure, but I like the idea of installing the same or similar Linux distribution on a virtual machine and using rsync to copy the changed files from the physical server. This would likely reduce the amount of data transfer by an order of magnitude. Then I still have to determine all the fun details of how to get the virtualized server to recognize the new hardware properly and get all of those tweaks done, which is harder to find information on due to the differences between specific Linux distributions.

My goal is to complete this as well as the transfer of all my remaining domains over to my DreamHost account by the end of this month so I am not billed for the dedicated server next month. We’ll see how that goes. If you have any bright ideas (especially if you’re a Linux guru), I’m certainly open to suggestions and recommendations!

Disclosure: The link to DreamHost above is an affiliate link. If you sign up through that link without using a promo code, I get the referral credit, which I would of course appreciate but is not required. You can visit www.dreamhost.com directly yourself. Or you can get $50 off an account and give me the credit and some of the referral amount by using promo code SZP50OFF, which is a better deal for both of us :-)

Now that the semester is over, I can spend a few moments on this blog after my brief (13 day) absence!

I recently upgraded the firmware on all of the HP ProCurve switches we installed as part of our building project last year. It is so nice to have managed switches! We have ProCurve Manager Plus (we have version 2.1), HPs switch management application, and it makes upgrading the software on all of the beefy HP switches a breeze. What it doesn’t do is update the “smaller” switches, a.k.a. “less expensive,” such as the 1700-24 or the 1800 Series, which are web-managed only. Those switches must be upgraded using the web-based interface. We only have about four switches from those series, in various “edge” locations outside of our three primary network closets. The 1700-24 switch we have is currently running firmware version 1.05, while version 1.09 is the current release. This is supposed to be easy, just log into the web interface, click go to the Software Upgrade area, pick the firmware file and click Apply.

Unfortunately, I got an error message when I did this; the same error in Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6. The top frame where I had put the update file location would reload to a “page not found” page, while the lower frame where a status bar appeared remained frozen at 0%. I re-downloaded the update, tried several more times from both browsers, no dice. This is what the error looked like:

I decide to take advantage of ProCurve’s free technical support, and give them a call. I did wait on hold for about 20 minutes, but I was first directed to a live operator who asked me which product I was calling about so I could be placed in the correct support queue! I ended up speaking with Brandy, who tried an upgrade on her switch along with me and then collected a screenshot (see above) of my problem and the configuration file from my switch, via email. She had me try upgrading to version 1.07, the one in between my current version and the newest, with the same results. All of this seemed perfectly reasonable, and I didn’t feel like I was getting a script at any time.

Since it still didn’t work, Brandy made sure she had my number and was going to verify the information I sent her with an internal support person and get back to me. She called back less than two hours later, and although I missed her call, she left a voicemail and sent a follow-up email, and said they had decided to replace the switch if I would reply with my preferred shipping address and the switch model and serial number information! How easy is that?

Overall, although I have not received the replacement switch yet, I am very satisfied with the level of support I received on this issue, especially since this is possibly the least-expensive managed switch we have purchased from HP. The included technical support (and of course the lifetime warranty) were two huge reasons for choosing ProCurve, and the investment is bearing some fruit in those areas! The only other time I have needed to call them was when our Wireless xl switch controller module died within a month or two of installing it. They replaced it (we paid over $2000 for it) next business day (died on a Friday so we were down for the weekend), with perhaps a shorter phone call than this one! The fact that they offer a lifetime warranty on this module is amazing to me, because it is essentially a computer–you can clearly see the RAM modules, the processor, and other components on the module when it is not inside a host switch. Even HP desktops, with similar components (OK, the quality of the components may not be exactly similar), don’t get a lifetime warranty!

Go ProCurve! I am a fan…I hope I remain one!