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Posted on: August 30th, 2009 by Famous Phil
It has been a while, but I’ve been moving back to college and such and haven’t really had the time to write new blogs about technical topics. I hope that after this next week is through, my normal college schedule will be finalized and any bugs in the FamousPhil calendar / countdown system will be fixed (yes, there are bugs 
). This is a blog that I drafted about 4 months ago, but haven’t really finished until now, so I feel that now is an appropriate time to open the topic then provide video / photos later. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: component, computer, engineering, fun, home automation, ir, php, serial, web development, x10
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Posted on: August 23rd, 2009 by Famous Phil
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Posted on: August 22nd, 2009 by Famous Phil
A week ago, I noticed that Microsoft has released Windows 7 (the release to companies and their developer network users) to my MSDN account. I have been a long user and have sworn by it because at service pack 3, it is very stable, fast and secure. Windows Vista came out and I gave it a quick look and decided that it was too big of a pig for what little it improved on from XP. Now I am doing the same stuff with Windows 7 and the rest of this post will detail why I like it!
My first look at Windows 7 came in the form of a beta last April (2009). I had a spare hard drive on my desktop computer that is meant for testing operating systems like this. I spent a few hours going through an installation process very similar to Vista and I compared all the memory and cpu usage details to that of a similar Windows XP and Vista install. Compared to XP, it was about the same, compared to Vista, it was about 50% less. This alone hinted that I would very much like this version of Windows. I then uninstalled it and prepared for a Windows XP to 7 migration when the release becomes available to me.
We are now at the release version of Windows 7 that will be supported through the end of the Windows 7 frenzy. I decided that I should upgrade my systems from XP now because its the final week of summer and I may not get a chance to perform an upgrade without any risk until next year sometime (and personally, I want the new flashier features that XP doesn’t have and Vista sucks at showing).
The Windows 7 install was very much like that of Windows Vista, its a very flashy interface and very easy to navigate. There wasn’t that much to it, simply do the “next next finish” routine that Windows has implemented so well. After the install, the release version I have looks somewhat like the beta was but is much more refined and clean. I also see that it uses a touch less than Windows XP does on a fresh install to this computer. To me, that is wonderful. On the fresh install, it only requires me to install 3 drivers which is better than Vista and XP combined!
Overall, I would recommend Windows 7 to anyone who can get their hands on a release copy and hates Vista. I would consider it stable enough to use for every day work and it has caused no harm to me. Although I have only been on 7 for a mere 5 days, I already like it a lot more than I ever liked XP and its a massive improvement over the failure called Vista.
Tags: 7, Microsoft, MSDN, windows
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Posted on: August 16th, 2009 by Famous Phil
Terminal Services Rock for those Windows apps that I can't live without! #Powered by Twitter Tools
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Posted on: August 12th, 2009 by Famous Phil
As time to return to UB approaches quickly, I have started moving towards preparing for my trip back. This means that it is time to finally make the full migration over to Ubuntu Linux from my old Windows based computers. I want to make this move because I will gain a lot of stability that Windows simply can’t provide. The unfortunate part of this move is the incompatibilities that I face with Windows applications running on Ubuntu. To solve this problem, I have decided to do what big businesses do – that is run a terminal server that can serve both thin clients and allow for remote desktops within Ubuntu.
The reasons for using a terminal server for me are:
So, Yesterday, I got terminal services perfectly configured on my server 2003 machine. With everything working perfectly, including the thin client, I started installing the typical applications that I use for windows. The problem I quickly ran into was that some applications won’t install on Server 2003, yet they will run fine on it. For example, Adobe Photoshop CS3 will run perfectly after you fool it to initially install.
Question: how would one fool the Adobe CS3 install program to install an application to Server 2003?
Answer: You are going to need a program from Microsoft’s website called Application Verifier. Here is the link, it may or may not be valid, so use Google if it doesn’t work.
After Application Verifier is installed, pop in the Adobe install disk and exit any installer program that pops up. Now open up the application verifier (probably in your start menu). Now that you are in Application Verifier, do the following:
To fool the app into thinking its on XP SP2, teh following options should be used:
Now save everything (don’t exit Application Verifier though). Now goto my computer, browse to the cd drive, right click and open it, go into the CS3 folder, and double click the setup.exe program. With application verifier running, this should install fine now. After the installation is complete, you can remove Application Verifier as you probably won’t need it again.
Hope this helps anyone with this problem.
Tags: application, application verifier, fool, lie, version
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: August 11th, 2009 by Famous Phil
Before I get started, my dog is doing much better for those of you who are wondering.
So now that business is out of the way, lets get down to the point of this blog. A long time ago when I first started using 1&1’s mailxchange hosting, I wanted a way to make my calendar show up on my website and remain updated with my phone, web email access, and outlook. Through webdav, I was able to achieve this on 1&1’s mailxchange service. Now that I am hosting my own Exchange 2007 server, I want a similar solution, this blog outlines that solution.
Now that the problem is described, lets start working on a solution. First there are no direct methods for accessing an ical, ics or similar file directly from an Exchange server that I am aware of or could find on the web. This is unfortunate and makes the solution a bit harder to make possible. Being a lazy programmer, I figured I could find a script that is mostly written and just modify it. Fortunately, I found many scripts that were supposed to work but they were all written in Ruby. I’m not a huge fan of Ruby and spent minimal time trying to fix the errors with these scripts on my server. This is when I began searching for a PHP solution to my problem.
Luckily, I did find a PHP script which generates the xml necessary to produce and ical file. This script was very close to what I needed so I grabbed it. You can grab the original script I found from here. I only had to slightly modify this script to make it work on my FamousPhil calendar. My modifications included changing the download to just saving a file to the local server. I then added a cron job to automate the running of this script every 6 hours. My calendar now is updated in 6 hour intervals.
This solution works perfect for me. I also posted my revised scripts to http://dev.matthouse.us – Script #6 which is directly downloadable here. Simply change the conf.php file appropriately and the ical downloader script will give you an ics file download everytime you open it via the web browser. I’ve verified that this script contains my entire calendar.
Hopefully this will help anyone else looking for a solution to post their calendar publically on thier own PHP enabled website.
If you would like cheap, reliable Exchange 2007 email hosting – 10GB of space and all the trimmings including you@yourdomain.com, Please visit http://amphosted.com/exchange.html. All of these features come at a mere $50/year which is much cheaper than any other provider I have seen with these features. Although I own the server and do most of the management, Amphosted has powerful antifraud tools in place as where Matthouse does not, therefore, they are the official provider of this service. I also authorized 1 month of FREE service and a 30 day money back guarantee.
Tags: calendar, exchange, ical, ics, webdav
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Posted on: August 9th, 2009 by Famous Phil
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Posted on: August 6th, 2009 by Famous Phil
I’m trying to think of a good way to start this blog but I really can’t think of a good way so I guess I just start with what happened a few nights ago.
Over the past few months, our dog has been showing signs of old age (he is 13, which is quite old). He shows signs of having difficulty walking and climbing steps. He also can’t get up on the bed like he used to, etc. Over the past few months, he has started having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and instead of waking someone up (or coming to see me when I’m up at 1am), he goes out to the other room to urinate on the rug. It has always been the same spot, so we removed the big carpet so it only affects a small rug made for this and can be cleaned up really easy. In the past few weeks, we’ve noticed he has been drinking a lot of water but thought noting of it (its hot out). That is the background.
Monday night was fine as usual, our dog came into my room for a few minutes to say good night to me. He then went to his usual sleeping spot in the bathroom. Early in the night around 10pm, he threw up his entire dinner on the bathroom. He then apparently went on a urinating rampage and went not only in his usual spot in the other room, but on the bathroom floor and another spot in the house as well. We just cleaned it up in the middle of the night and waited until morning. In the morning before I got up, my father took him outside to lay him down. I heard the awful news later that morning when I woke up. My father said that he was staggering when walking, he smelled awful, and wasn’t really that alert (although a touch alert). These are the 3 signs normally of a dieing dog from what I’ve read.
Thinking the worst, we decided to let him die at home peacefully and left him lay out in the shade where he went at 6am until 5pm. He was still alive, so we decided to gate off a room in the house so he could go in his sleep peacefully without making a mess of the entire house again. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. So we are now up to Wednesday. So we let him sleep all day Wednesday. He didn’t eat anything, or stay awake for more than 5 minutes so far for a 30 hour span. He drank very little water for the 5 to 10 minutes he was awake.
Later in the day Wednesday, he got up around 5pm and started hinting towards he wanted to go outside. We got him outside and that got him really alert, the most he had been the entire span of this ordeal. He also showed signs of hunger, eating a little bit of ice cream (his favorite treat), and drinking some water. He also managed to wet the make shift stretcher he was on so we could carry him in and out. Because of this, we decided he should see the vet.
Earlier today, we took him to the vet. The vet said that everything is fine with him except for an xray showing something at the base of his brain. The doctor suspected it is an ear infection which explains why he can’t walk. We also suspect that he managed to eat some pork from the pork chops we had on Monday night. We usually prepare his dinner (usually chicken) with ours, so its quite possible the pork got mixed in accidently, and it makes him sick. The walking as expected is from arthritis in his hip.
Luckily, other than the ear infection, he has a clean bill of health. The doctor said that he should live a while more and is a healthy dog for his age overall. This is why I’ve been sort of away and out of it as of late. I worry a lot for him and I can’t stand to see him or anything suffer.
Tags: death, dog, ear infection, family, pet
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Posted on: August 2nd, 2009 by Famous Phil
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