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Recently I’ve been redoing a few machines at work.  The great thing about reinstalling a Windows XP box is that I know everything is completely up to date and there always seems to be a nice performance increase associated with it.  The downside is that users tend to loose a lot of the little tweaks that they have done to personalize their machines.  This is just a short list of what I do to minimize the loss of customizations.  This is focused mainly on Windows XP and references some stuff from Office 2003.

1. Backup Personal Files

Its always important to talk with the user face to face and have them show you some of the things they have saved on the machine over the years.  Even though we have a policy that says you should not save things locally, everyone does it anyway.  We are not computer Nazis so we don’t restrict the machines to prevent this.  It is more of a CYA (cover your ass) policy that we can point to when they loose something important.

Most of the time you can get all the personal files by copying and backing up the My Documents, Favorites, and Desktop folders.  These 3 are found in the “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>” directory.  Every once in a while there are some folders/documents in the root of the ‘C’ drive.  Also be sure to check the desktop for folder shortcuts that point to somewhere on the local drive.  There have been numerous times in my career that I have found links to data in obscure places.  Its better safe than sorry.

2.Outlook autocomplete

Just about every user I’ve redone on our network complains that the autocomplete is gone.  They don’t know its called that but they do assume that I’ve lost all of their contacts because they used to be able to type the first letter and have a list of everyone they email.  Outlook autocomplete is stored in a .nk2 file located in “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” folder.  Copy this file back to the same location after Outlook is configured.  Its important to note that the .nk2 file is named after the mail profile of the machine.  If the mail profile on the old machine was ‘default’ then the file will be called ‘default.nk2′.  When the new machine is setup, either use the same profile name or rename the copy of the .nk2 file to match the new name or this will not work.

3. Word Autotext

The secretaries have all kinds of autotexts setup on their local machines that are specific to their needs.  A lot of them use 4 or 5 character combinations to automatically insert letter heads, electronic signatures, and other blocks of text used over and over again.  No one remembers to tell you they want this saved because they don’t remember the couple hours they spent setting this feature up.  I’ve started backing this up without thinking now.  Word autotext is stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates” in a file called Normal.dot  Copy this and place it in the exact same location on the new machine.

Some people may point out that if you back up the whole user profile from Documents and Settings you won’t lose any of that stuff and it would be a lot easier.  I’m against this method because 9 times out of 10 you are redoing a Windows machine because of some virus or spyware that you can’t seem to get rid of.  Chances are you will be pulling this problem over to the new machine because you are copying a lot of unnecessary files.  To keep that clean install feeling, I prefer to pull over only what is necessary.

This is just my opinion though.  What do you guys normally backup?

LAMP is a term used to describe certain web servers.  It stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This is mainly going to be a point of reference for myself.  I recently set this up on my macbook so I could install wordpress and learn a bit how themes are made.  I didn’t want to play around directly with my actual Phildawg site and screw something up.  This way I have a blank template, or even a copy of my current site, to play around with.  This also came up recently when I found out my friend James is starting to do some side work designing sites for people.  Currently he uses live sites on the internet while he is building.  This just isn’t practical.   So here is what I did/am doing.

Lets start with the L.  Grab a copy of your favorite linux distro.  Right now I am working with Ubuntu 9.04 but there are many different flavors available.  You can download an iso to burn to a cd or you can order a CD via snail mail.  Installing Linux has gotten insanely easy these past few years and I may do a post later on about how to do just that.  For now, it should be easy enough to just boot to the CD and follow the on screen prompts. (I’m assuming you are doing this on a seperate machine and do not need to go into dual booting or need to save anything currently on the machine.  This will be a dedicated machine in your house)

So you have linux installed and updated.  Great.  Its actually pretty easy from here.  Moving along to the A, its time to install apache.  Open up a terminal window (In Ubuntu click applications in the top right, select applications, and click on terminal) and type in the following command:

sudo apt-get install apache2

After pressing return it goes out and installs it.  You may need to type ‘Y’ to start the install.  Once you return to an empty command line you are done.  Easy as that.  One simple line.

Now lets get MySQL and PHP.  PHP is used by wordpress which is what I am using for this site.  In your terminal window type in the following commands and follow the prompts:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Congrats.  You have everything installed.  The only config file I needed to edit was an apache config file so that PHP would work properly.  Open up the config file by typing in the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

and at the bottom add in the following line without the quotes. “AddType application/x-httpd-php .html”.  Save the file and close it.  Then restart the apache server with the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If you get an error saying that apache could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName then you need to create a file to fix this.  In the terminal again, type in the following:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqnd

You should get a blank window that pops up.  Type in “ServerName localhost”  (without the quotes) and save the file.  Close the window and restart apache again.  Personally it didn’t really affect my wordpress install but its nice to not have errors.

That’s pretty much it.  You have a webserver to play around with now.  The only weird thing I came across is that my installation of Firefox didn’t know what to do when it encountered a php file.  It kept prompting me to save the file instead of starting my wordpress setup.  To fix this just clear the browser cache.  In Firefox click on edit and choose preferences.  On the privacy tab  click on clear now in the private data section.

Couple other things to note, for wordpress you will need to create a database to use.  From the commandline, get into mysql by typing:

mysql -u root

It should change your prompt to “msql>”.  If you already setup a password for root during the setup you will need to use the command

mysql -u root -p

and then put in your password at the prompt.  If you haven’t changed the root password from the default yet I recommend you do that first by typing in

SET PASSWORD FOR ‘root’@'localhost’ = PASSWORD(’yourpassword’);

Only change the text yourpassword and leave the single quotes.  Remember this password so you can create the various databases for your sites.  Now to create a database type in the following:

CREATE DATABASE databasename

Your database is now created and you can type “\q” (minus the “”) to get back to the terminal prompt.  If you are done you can type exit or just close the window.

Hopefully later this week I’ll find some time to go through installing wordpress on your new LAMP server and setting up some forwarding so you can access your test sites from outside of your home.  This is going to be ideal for my friend James because he can then do all of his developement on a server in his own home but still give him a way to show the clients the progress he has made without dragging them into his house.  There will be a special thanks to @erimar77 from Eric-Martin.com for helping me out with the port forwarding and the site I use to make this happen.  But I’ll leave it at this for now.  You’ll just have to check back for the next steps.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the series Dune by Frank Herbert.  It says: “There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.”   This is totally true and not just about fathers.  I’m totally beginning to think that I’m not really immortal any more.  I’m pretty out of shape right now and I definitely don’t have great eating habits.  Not to mention, I’m getting old!  It scares me to think that this could be the best shape I’ll be in in my entire life.  Its all down hill from here.

I started thinking about this more after reading an article in Time.  Yes I sometimes read and yes I have a subscription to Time.  For those of you that know me, Time magazine has strong differing views on politics but I think its good to get information from both sides.  It was basically about things you should be doing to stay healthy and keep medical costs down.  The article in the print edition was a nice read but the article on their site is broken up into like 37 pages!  I really hate when sites do this.  There is no length constraint inside the browser so stop breaking things into pages!  The story of A User’s Guide To Good Health At Every Age starts here. but the relevant portion for my age group is here.

The section on diet could not be more opposite than what I really eat half the time.  I stick to a lot of processed food and my buddy Jorin has once commented that I won’t eat it unless it comes in a wrapper.  Definitely not good.  I think I’ve come a long way since that comment was first made and the fact that I am not over 300lbs anymore is testament to that fact.  I’m trying to broaden my tastes to include things I normally never eat such as asparagus, spinach, and other single ingredient foods as it mentions in the article.  Most of them are not half as bad as I remember.  But its hard to limit portions and snack on healthy food when everything on the market has been scientifically designed and marketed to taste better than what i should be eating.  If a big stack of celery tasted as good as chips and could be found in a vending machine, maybe we wouldn’t have this obesity problem in our country.

Exercise is another story.  I’m trying to actually exercise a little now.  I did a 5k on Saturday in St. Louis at the race for the cure.  It was definitely fun and I’d love to do another some time.  Doing just a 5k isn’t really enough though.  HHS, recommends getting 2 1⁄2 to five hours of moderate cardio, or 75 minutes to 2 1⁄2 hours of intense cardio, each week, plus weight training twice a week.  How many of us even get 30 minutes of moderate cardio a week?  I know for a long time I wasn’t.  Everyone says they don’t have time in their busy schedules but you can ask that same person what happened on their favorite TV show every week.  Its all about just making the decision to do it.  If you can find time for TV, you can find time for this.

I began thinking about all of this because I actually scheduled a checkup with my doctor today.  I haven’t been to the doctor in quite some time and I normally only go after I’ve done something stupid like give myself 3rd degree burns or impale my hand with a screwdriver.  When I called to setup the appointment the lady asked me how old I was and then immediately asked me if I’ve ever gotten my cholesterol checked.  This is it man.  I am getting old.  I guess part of me wants to do all that I can to stay ahead on this stuff and actually get myself into the best shape I’ve ever been.  I just hope its enough to overpower my general laziness about life.

I guess all I’m saying is that we are getting old.  If you have health insurance its time to start using it.  I guarantee your co-pay will be way less than the bill when something goes terribly wrong.  Besides, its not like medical professionals just come to you about this stuff.

If only things worked like this...

Last Saturday I finally got the tree in my back yard removed.  It was pretty freakin huge.  And hollow.  Huge and Hollow.

Huge!

Hollow!

I’ve been trying to get this done for several weeks but it has been raining every Saturday since the first limb fell off and tore the power from my house.  It was quite an ordeal and all the wiring from my breaker box on out needed to be redone.  It was quite a learning experience.  I made several calls to different people associated with the power company to learn the current codes.

That Friday was full of suck

Aside from having to put up new piping, meter box, and wiring, I also had to put in a new grounding rod and redo some wiring in the breaker box.  It was kind of a pain but I know a lot more now about electricity.

I didn’t want to come home to this again so I called up some friends to cut this tree down.  It took several weeks for this to happen since it rained but June 6th the weather finally cooperated.

I was just here last month.... stupid kids.

I don’t know if you all noticed in the second picture that the power line was laying on the ground again.  That’s because the line was knocked down a second time.  Once again I had to call the power company to come out and reattach power to my house.  At least this time I didn’t have to do any repairs myself.  But now at least its finally done and I won’t have to worry about it again for hopefully quite some time.  You can check out all the pictures I took of this process by hopping over to my Picasa web album called Project Tree. Only 3 baby squirrels died in the removal of this tree so I am calling it a success.  Be warned that there is a picture of said baby squirrels in the mix.

I have plenty of other fun projects for my house that I am currently putting off.   I need to build new stairs to the basement, paint the kitchen and upstairs, maybe do some landscaping. I’m sure they will all give me a few more life lessons learned the hard way to share with you.  That’s all for now.  I’ll leave you with this picture of me pretending to be my old tree.

The green shirt was a nice touch.

As some of you may already know, I’m thinking about starting an Internet radio show with a couple good friends of mine.  Technically the show had already started and I was going to be a guest for one episode.  It was featured on RiverFrontRadio and seemed like a pretty sweet deal.  Unfortunately that very night the show was handed a contract that raised the monthly cost of the show and charged a hefty premium to start the show.  Bummer.

James, Justin and I have decided to look into doing all of this ourselves.  Now we aren’t very far in the planning stages.  James is working on reworking The Know Show website so we can continue to post updates and hopefully generate some buzz.  I should mention that the reworked site is not up yet and this is still the old RFR version of the site.  Hopefully we will find some time to get that reworked.  We sat down together the other night so we could decide what exactly we want to do with the show.

Now as my friend Steven mentioned to me today over twitter, that last show was very unorganized and should probably be labeled The I Don’t Know Show.  This is what we are hoping to avoid.  We planned out some regular segments and want to actually plan out shows before doing them.  For right now we want to have some general rants from each of us about varying topics, a segment featuring news both national but hopefully more local to the St. Louis area, and an entire segment dedicated to me and my lack of sports knowledge called  “Phil Knows Sports”.

Since we kinda have some direction with where we want to go with this we are looking into our streaming options as well as equipment needed to figure out the monthly cost of operations.  Once we know what that will be and are almost ready to go, we will hopefully look for some sponsorship to break even on the costs as we develop a listener base with extra money going to advertise the show.

Be sure to check in with me here at Phildawg for updates as this plan developes.  I’ll be sure to post something to let you know when the new site is active and we have started posting some material as well as a tentative go-live date.  I think this will be the first time I’ve invested money in something I find super interesting that is more than about making money.  This show will be for fun and we hope you will find it entertaining as well.

This accurately describes my efforts

If you are like me and most of America you have been thinking about losing some LBs (pronounced “el bees”).  If you are really like me, thinking it as far as it got.  I’ve been thinking about it so hard that the me in my head is already ripped and I’m tired in the evening from all the running I’ve been doing in my head to get there.

Towards the end of last year I started running.  I was doing pretty well actually considering I was just a beginner.  Then it got cold and I decided I would wait out the winter without joining a gym because I want to save money.  Well spring came and went and I never stated again.  Now I’ve put back on about 30 of the 70 lbs I lost.  Tonight I finally took the next step and put my running shoes on.  The results?  I’m reminded about how much running sucks at first.

I had this problem last year too and I remember it being about a solid month of running at least 4 times a week before I started to like it.  I’m learning all over again that running is an aquired taste.  I’m not a doctor and you probably shouldn’t take my advice without consulting a physician but here are a few things I plan to do to start running again and keep at it.  I find sometimes reading about it sometimes helps keep me in  the mindset of doing it.

First and foremost is to pick a schedule and stick with it.  I want to make sure I run at least 4 nights a week so I am going to run Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I chose these days because I happened to start today and would like a day of rest before my second day.   Monday because I want my third day to be immediately after the second because I need to force myself to stick with it and I tend to stop caring after doing something twice.  Tuesday to rest since I’m just getting back into it.  Wednesday because I don’t want to stop for more than one day.  Thursdays I have softball for the next couple months so that may be out until after and then Friday.  Eventually I would like to get up to 3 days on, followed by one no more than two off but not before the habit is formed.

Second, I’m choosing to start off with a time frame of 30 minutes.  Does this mean I run/jog for 30 minutes?  Lord no!  I’m a pack a day smoker right now and I think my body would revolt if I tried that.  I jog at a fairly good pace until I feel the need to walk and then add another block.  About a year ago I paid for a trainer for a few months and probably the best thing about having a trainer is that they are there to push you to do more than you normally would.  so every time I want to stop I add a block.  Then I walk until I feel I can jog again and repeat for a full 30 minutes.  If my 30 minutes ends and I am currently jogging, I go until I need to stop and then I walk for 8 minutes to cool down.

Each week I will pay attention to how far I run until I stop.  At the start of the new week, I’ll increase my stopping point by 2 blocks.  Again this is just a part of pushing myself to do more.  Last year I was able to fit about 3 miles in that 30 minute period which I felt pretty good about.  I’d like to get back to that.

Of course there may be days that I don’t reach my goal.  Its important to listen to your body and stop if there is actual discomfort.  It won’t help to injure yourself because then you won’t be able to build that healthy habit.  I chose 30 minutes mainly because I thought I remembered reading that you should exercise for at least 30 minutes a day 5 days a week to stay healthy.  Eventually I will have to invest more than 30 minutes per run but 30 minutes is a good place to start.

Also something I do, that I do not recommend, is have a cigarette at the end of my run.  I know that’s terrible but I haven’t quit yet.  At least I’m doing something more than thinking about it!

I’m not an economist.  I’ll never claim to be.  I do however like to speculate on things that are going on and share my thoughts on hot topics.  The price of gas is notably going back up again and has been for the last month or so.

Prices here in the St. Louis area are hovering around the $2.50 mark. ($2.80 for premium which is what my car uses)  I guess I can say that I am officially confused about this whole thing.  I’ve read a few articles on this subject and I’m seeing different conclusions.  Tonight I read an article on Over valued Oil over on Forbes website that claims that the supply of oil is increasing beyond the demand and we should expect to see a correction of prices at the pump.  I could buy into that but looking back, a lot more affects the price per barrel than just supply and demand.  Beyond that, is the demand for oil really decreasing?  The Forbes article says they are cutting the expected world oil consumption from 2.2 million barrels a day to 1.8 million.  But does this include the number of barrels stockpiled by emerging powers like China?  China appears to be increasing its storage capacity which seems like a good plan while oil is so “cheap” right now.

Now as I mentioned before I think there is a lot more than supply and demand when it comes to the price of oil.  Right now the price per barrel is pegged to the dollar.  Over the last 10 years, the US dollar has fallen 33% which in my mind, suddenly makes oil a lot cheaper for people in Europe.  And why wouldn’t it?  One Euro is getting close to $1.40 US.  How expensive do you think things will get if suddenly the dollar isn’t the national reserve currency anymore?  Think about how bad it would be if oil reached 150 euros/barrel.

People complained last summer when gas was $4/gallon but how long after prices dropped again did it take for people to start picking up SUVs and trucks with low MPG ratings?  I guess maybe I should put my blinders on like the rest of this country and just assume that when the Dems say that large deficit spending is gonna bring us out of this mess that it actually will.  Maybe then I could actually sleep at night.

I haven’t really dug into the Media Center that much which is kinda surprising because I use my main desktop at home on my 37″ TV in my living room.  As I mentioned in a previous post, this is how I manage to get by with no TV service.  What I can tell you is that setup for Media Center is really pretty simple.  They have wizards to adjust your screen resolution and setup your libraries for where your media is stored.  There is also the option for recording TV if you have a video card equipped for all that.  Very cool.  Something I don’t find very cool is the lack of out of the box file format support.  Support for things like avi and mkv files is not automatically built-in.  I’m sure I can download the necessary codecs and make it all work but after a long day of finding drivers for my legacy hardware on their new version, its the last thing I want to do.  If VLC can play about anything why can’t Windows?

Some of the streaming features that are in beta look pretty neat.  Being able to stream 3 seasons of Arrested Development is neat.  With a remote control, the windows 7 media center might make for a slick setup.  I’d like to see support for setting up downloads for video/audio podcasts built in as well.  It would be slick to pull down my favorite revision3 shows and click onto them with my remote.  I’m also surprised that as media center matures that Microsoft hasn’t put it on a tiny stand alone box that comes with a remote as a way to compete with apple tv.

What are you guys using for your media center needs?

Okay so this definitely took a lot longer than I thought and again I am going to blame this on the fact that I went with the 64 bit version of Windows 7.  I’ve had my SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 since I built my first computer back in the late 90’s.  For me it has been everything I have needed.  Its supported my surround sound needs through 4 or 5 different desktops now.

The problem with using the 64 bit version is A) you need find a 64 bit driver and B) it has to be digitally signed.  Creative cut support on this card several years ago and never made a Vista driver.  This one took a lot of hunting but I found a driver that works.  You can download that here.  I extracted the folder to my desktop and then opted to go into the device manager and choose update driver on the multimedia audio device.  Then point the wizard to look in that folder and it will install the driver.  Simple enough right?  Maybe, maybe not.  If you experience errors because it is an unsigned driver, try downloading and installing Ready Driver Plus.  It will add some voodoo magic to your boot-up to turn off the requirement for signed drivers.

Now you should have sound!  Good. Great. But my surround sound doesn’t work.  Its only 2 channel.  To work around this, install the Creative Audio Console.  For me, I had to set the speakers in the Creative audio console to 4/4.1 and then go into the Control Panel –> Hardware and Sound –> Manage Audio Devices –> Configure, and set it to 5.1 sound.  Not sure why but then all my speakers would then make sound during the test.  When the Creative audio console was set to 5.1 my front right and front left made no sound.

If you find this a bit much to go through, maybe you should just pony up around $40 or $50 and buy a sound card from this decade.  For me though its a bit about the challenge, and a lot about the fact that it was my first ever sound card and I’ve never left it behind.

Well I finally got around to installing Windows 7 RC1 and so far so good.  I am running the 64bit version so I have several drivers I need to dig for.  I haven’t done anything with it yet but I wanted to post my first victory, getting my old linksys wireless card to work.  I couldn’t find any drivers for my Linksys Wireless – G PCI Adapter on the manufacturer website but after some persistent googling I found a driver that works.  For those that are curious my card is the WMP54G Ver. 4.0.  Since the driver files needed are so small I decided to host them from my site so you don’t have to keep looking either.  Feel free to download them here. 

As I continue on this little adventure I’ll be sure to post more info on where I got my drivers, what I like about the new version, what I hate, and whether or not I will keep this on my main computer.