DaVe’s Musings

CNET has an interesting article about Hyperic going open source. The Hyperic HQ software monitors what’s happening on company networks and reports events to administrators. This is the type of software that no one who is managing servers should be without, and now the solution is completely open source. Hyperic HQ allows you to:

• Auto-Discover all your software and hardware inventory
• Monitor every layer of your infrastructure
• Control servers and services remotely
• Track configuration, log, and security events
• Optimize your operations with a web-based multi-user portal
• Improve alerts through policy-driven definitions and automatic recovery

Other competing open source solutions include:

• OpenNMS
• Nagios
• Big Brother

Hyperic looks like the most advanced of these solutions, but I’ll be checking them out and updating this review with my findings.

Are the latest four Microsoft security patches not installing for you?  Is KB917537 one of the fixes? Well, it seems that this patch will not install unless you shut down the IIS Admin service and its dependent services manually (thanks Microsoft!).  My suggestion is to uncheck this patch from the list of four new security fixes and install the other three first.  Reboot if necessary after they have installed. Stop the IIS Admin Service and all its dependent services. Install KB917537 and reboot.  Now you’re all set!

Microsoft just released a neat little utility called Private Folder 1.0. It’s unsupported and will only run on “genuine” Windows XP.  What it does is give you a new folder called “My Private Folder” that is password protected to prevent anyone who may be sharing your computer from accessing the files in that folder.  From their web site:

Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is a useful tool for you to protect your private data when your friends, colleagues, kids or other people share your PC or account. With this tool, you will get one password protected folder called ‘My Private Folder’ in your account to save your personal files. Download and have your private folder today!

No word on what encryption it uses or what happens if you forget the password.  Download it today and give it a try!

Here’s the code to add a timestamp to your vBulletin message board for ad code such as DoubleClick:

 

  

Dell installs all their servers with an annoying Dell background image (1.8MB!!!) on the main logon screen. This image slows down terminal service connections because you have to wait for this high color image to load. The first thing I do is remove this background from any new Dell server.  To do this, edit the registry key:

My Computer\HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper

Just erase what is there.  You’ll be much happier.

Need to make complete copy of a web site but don’t have direct access to the files? I’ve had this happen for several clients whose web developer would no longer give them access, or who wanted a copy before they terminated their relationship with the web designer. Well, HTTrack is a free utility that does the following:

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

Of course, it will not copy scripts, but for static web sites, it works pretty well.

The FLVPlayer WordPress plugin is a nice utility to add Flash videos to your WordPress site, but it has not been updated by the author in numerous months and does not completely work as described in the installation instructions.  Here are the steps I had to take to get it to work:

1. Download the latest version of the plugin (v0.4.2)
2. Extract the files to a folder on your computer
3. Upload the folder “flvplayer” and its contents to your “wp-content/plugins/” folder
4. Edit the repository/index.php file to have links back to your web site and not the author’s.
5. Upload the contents of the “repository” folder to the directory where you store audio/video files. Since I did not have this folder already, I created a folder called “media” under the root of my web site folder and moved the contents (not the whole folder) there. You do not need to upload the “.svn” folder.
6. Upload the contents of the “themes” folder to your “wp-content/themes//” folder. Just the contents, not the whole folder. You do not need to upload the “.svn” folder.
7. Activate the plug-in in your WordPress admin console by going to Plugins, and clicking on Activate for the “FlvPlayer” plugin.
8. In the WordPress admin console, go to Options -> FlvPlayer and set the following:
   WordPress Page Address: /videos/ (Set this to what you are going to name the WordPress page that we set up in the next step. DO NOT name this the same as your “media” folder where you store audio/video files.)
   Video Repository (URI): http://www.davemccomb.com/media/ (Set this to the folder where your media is stored. See Step 4 above.)
   Video Repository (on server): /home/www/davemccomb/public_html/media (Set this to the physical path where your video files are stored.)
   Use Friendly URI: True / False (Set this if you want friendly URIs.  You must also add those lines to your .htaccess file.)
   Files to exclude: (This is a list of all the files in the “media” folder that you do not want to appear in the dropdown list. You need to immediately add on the following to this list: ,index.php,__player_jwflv.swf,__player_asysound.swf )
   Display list type: List / Dropdown / None (Select how you want the video files to appear on the page. I like dropdown best.)
   Video Player: Proxus / FlowPlayer / Jeroen Wijering FlvPlayer (Select which Flash video player to use. I like the last one, but feel free to try them all. The Proxus player must be purchased or else it shows the word “Demo” in the window.)
   Mp3 Player: AsynSound (Only one choice here.)
   CSS: 1 (I just left this alone.)
9. Click Update Options. If you see: flvplayer__video_redirect failed to update!
   flvplayer__video_repository failed to update!
   flvplayer__video_repository_file failed to update!
   flvplayer__friendly_uri failed to update!
   flvplayer__exclude failed to update!
   flvplayer__display_type failed to update!
   flvplayer__videoplayer_type failed to update!
   flvplayer__mp3player_type failed to update!
   flvplayer__css failed to update!
   info_update failed to update! 

   Ignore these errors as there is a bug somewhere in the script. While there are errors reported, you should also see “Options Saved” and be good to go.

10. Upload your audio/video to the folder you specified in Step 4. (”media” in my case) If you do not upload anything now, you will not be able to see any results on your page.
11. In your WordPress admin, go to Write -> Write Page, and create a new page. I set my page title to “Videos” and left the content blank. Under “Page Template” you must also select the “FlvPlayer” template. DO NOT set the Page Title here to the name of the folder you store videos in. Click “Create New Page.”

That’s it.  You should now be able to see your videos at the page name you set up. Mine are at http://www.davemccomb.com/videos/

Ok, so I may be a little bit behind the times, but I just discovered Pandora. This web site is based on the Music Genome Project and allows you to create up to 100 radio stations based on your favorite artists or songs. You input your favorite artist or song and they build a radio station around that artist or song based on a number of algorithms that they have. The stations are pretty accurate and allow you to discover a lot of new music. The basic ad-supported version is free, but you can also buy a membership with no ads. They also have some restrictions on how you can play the music based on the streaming music license they have. All-in-all it’s a great product and an excellent way to discover new music.

So, I’ve been looking for a WordPress event calendar plugin, and while I found the Event Calendar 3 plug-in, I wasn’t happy with it. It does not support multiple day events, recurring events, etc. I found PHPiCalendar, but that only reads in iCal files, and is not integrated into WordPress, except through a plugin which gave me a number of errors on WordPress 2.0.2.

I then turned back to EasyPHPCalendar which I have used before. It is commercial software ($19.95 and up depending on options), but well worth the price as I have not found ANY open source software that comes close to it in terms of features.  I am integrating it into WordPress now and will give you an update on my progress.