bobpeers -> blog

To be honest up until I started this blog I knew very little about blogging software. Sure I had heard of MoveableType, Wordpress and Blogger but as far as which was best for me and how they actually worked I was clueless.

I knew I wanted a few things from the start.

1. GPL Licensed
2. Hosted on my own host.
3. Running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
4. Fairly easy to install
5. Extensible and hackable if I want to make my own changes.

I try to use free software whenever possible these days. My laptop is actually a dual boot windows XP Professional / Fedora 8 machine but I can honestly say that I boot into Windows less and less. The last time was probably a couple of months ago when I had to develop something work related requiring Office 2003.

I wanted to host my own site just because I like the flexibility this affords. Domains are very cheap these days and hosting is also cheap, especially if you don’t require huge bandwidth or space. This way I get to write my own htaccess file and change the way the host works as I see fit.

It had to be LAMP because I run a development server on my laptop with the same setup so it’s great for me to install the same software locally and test with different setups. Also if I make more radical changes to the code I don’t break things on the main site (even though this sometimes happens when I screw up, usually making chages too late in the evening!.

Easy to install just because even though my main site is all coded by me in PHP I didn’t feel l ike spending ages reading how to use the software first. I’d rather install, use, and then learn more about it over time and if I feel like delving deeper to make code changes then I can do so at a later date.

It seemed after some research that Wordpress fit all these needs and I’m glad I made this choice. Installing was a breeze, it probably took me 20 minutes and that was going slowly to make sure I didn’t miss a step. I think if I had to install it again it would take 10 minutes at most.

If anything there’s too much choice when it comes to extensibity. With over 1,600 official themes and nearly 1,500 plugins listed trying to find exactly what you want (especially when as a newbie you’re not sure what plugins you might want)is pretty difficult. As a result I’m starting off slowly with only a few plugins to stop comment and trackback spam, probably my two biggest worries about blogging.

The biggest change for me is letting go and relying on plugins written by other people where I’m not really sure how they work. After developing my own site and knowing the code backwards it’s a strange feeling to suddenly be just a user of sortware and not a developer. Still it’s either this or reinventing the wheel so I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

Here’s a really helpfull guide to using .htaccess files with Apache, great for cut and paste examples for when mod_rewrite is giving you a headache.

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-htaccess.html

Type these words into Google and you quickly see there’s plenty of problems with networking and Vista. My own particular problem drives me crazy as it seems there’s no fix apart from manually resetting the network adapter every time it drops the connection.

It doesn’t happen straight away, but after some time (often after the computer has been woken from sleep) the network icon says I only have ‘Local connection’, not local and internet. Even this isn’t strictly true since I cannot connect to my router, I actually have no connection at all.

If I right click the icon and select ‘Diagnose and repair’ to open the fancy ‘Vista Network Diagnostics And Troubleshooting tool’ it suggests this.

After resetting the network adapter everything works fine again every time. This sort of bug is very irritating, even more so for my girlfriend who is not so technical ;-).

I can hardly believe Vista shipped with so many network issues that still haven’t been resolved. Hopefully the soon to be available Service Pack 1 will fix this but I’m not holding my breath.

It seems that the well known system requirements for Vista have caused some confusion, even amongst IT professionals.

The other day at work I was sending a couple of 2-3 year old HP desktop PCs in to IT support to have Windows XP Professional installed along with Office 2003. These are not cutting edge machines but they have 3GHz Pentium 4’s and 512MB of RAM, more than enough for a business PC running office applications.

Their response was that they didn’t think they would run Windows XP without 1GB of RAM. My 4 year old laptop with a 1.3GHz processor and 512MB of RAM runs XP and office just fine and the last time I checked the requirements for Windows XP it said 128MB of RAM was required.

I know that new computers all have at least 1GB of RAM but the idea that you need this to do anything is just not true (at least if not using Vista). It seems that people have heard so much about how you need X MB of RAM or a dual core processor that the average processing power of a PC is far greater than most people require.

I often see adverts from high street computer stores describing quite high-spec machines as ‘good for basic text editing, email and browsing the internet’ when that’s the sort of thing that can be done on a mobile phone these days.

It’s one of the (many) reasons I use Linux, it does all I require and much more without making me feel like I need to upgrade my laptop every 6 months.

I recently bought a new computer for my girlfriend, it’s a HP dc5750 and has Vista Business installed and, strangely I think, also has the 60 day trial for Office 2007. Why they insist on installing this trail version on a business machine is quite beyond me as surely most businesses will already have a license to Office 2003, for example, and just use that.

So I uninstalled the trial version and installed Office 2003. Unfortunately this leaves Business Contact Manager (BCM) in place with plugins for Outlook, Excel etc. so each time I started any Office 2003 application I would get a dialog informing me that this version was not compatible with BCM.

After a short search I found the fix without needing to uninstall BCM.

Open the registry editor (click start and type regedit).

Navigate to the following keys where HKLM stands for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Microsoft. BusinessSolutions.eCRM.OutlookAddIn.Connect3

Change the DWORD LoadBehavior from 3 to 1

For other Office applications goto:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\***\Addins\BcmHistoryAddIn.BcmConnect

Once again change the LoadBehavior from 3 to 1 where *** is the application name.