Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

My Presentation at the Peachpit Booth

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I give a demo on Mac OS X 10.4 Cool Features

I was at Macworld Expo on Thursday and Friday. I’d gone primarily to gather information for a book I’ll be starting next week. But while I was there, I did a quick presentation at the Peachpit Press booth.

Peachpit has one of the nicest booths at the show these days. It’s a big booth with lots of tables full of books. Behind a wall, there’s a small theater where authors give presentations in front of about 20 chairs. I suspect that a lot of people sit in on presentations just to get off their feet for a while, but I’d like to think that some of them come just to see a particular author.

They wired me up with a wireless microphone (huh?) and I plugged my 12″ PowerBook into their projection system. When it appeared that no more than half the seats would be occupied, I started my presentation.

You have to understand that the more I plan for a presentation, the worse it is. So I don’t plan much anymore. Instead, I kind of “wing it.” I’ve been winging it for years now and I haven’t embarrassed myself yet.

My preparation for this presentation consisted of about 45 minutes seated in the Moscone Hall lobby, sucking at the Internet from a free wi-fi “connection” that was floating about the hall. I looked up my articles for Informit, which are also on the Peachpit Press Web site, and chose a few topics from them. What I really wanted to talk about was the article I’d written called “Five Funky Finder Features,” but it hadn’t been published yet. Fortunately, I found a copy of it on my hard drive, so I noted the topics on a steno pad. Then I thought of a few more topics to talk about, jotted them down, and was done.

I started off by introducing myself and telling them the story about how the Mac changed my life. (If you haven’t heard that story, you might want to search these blogs once they’re all online. I’m sure I wrote about it somewhere.) I told them about how the Peachpit Press and Informit.com Web sites are great sources of free information and even showed them my page on the Peachpit site to prove it.

Then I launched into my topics, using the notes I’d jotted down to keep me from forgetting what I’d planned to talk about. I answered questions as they came up — the hardest part was hearing what people were asking. (The hall is so darn loud and my ears were still stuffed from the plane ride.) After telling them about something, I’d ask whether they knew about it and was very surprised to find that I was teaching them new stuff. That was the goal, so I succeeded.

I showed them some of my favorite widgets, too. And how to set up iCal to show birthdays from people in your Address Book. This will be in a future Informit.com article.

The last thing I showed them was how you could connect a Garmin GPS to a Mac using a PC cable and adapter, then show waypoints and routes on the maps and satellite photos using Terrabrowser. The idea was to prove that Mac users could do just as many cool things with their computers as PC users. I think I got the message across.

The seats filled up gradually. Some people left, others took their place. One woman, who was pretty new to Macs, probably didn’t realize that she was my first choice to get a free copy of my Tiger book (heck, I didn’t want to carry them back home). She left before the end and missed out. I gave out that book and the two Visual QuickProjects I’d brought along at the end of my presentation.

It had been fun and I was glad I did it. Peachpit videoed the whole thing and I think they’ll be releasing it as a video podcast on their Web site. When I find out more, I’ll add a link on this Web site.

Almost Ready for Prime Time

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Why I really ought to learn CSS.

I’ve been tweaking this site night and day, trying to get all the kinks knocked out of it. It appears that although the Theme designer came up with an attractive design for this WordPress theme, it was full of errors in the CSS. And because I really don’t know CSS, it was quite a struggle for me to fix the problems.

Among the problems:

  • References to styles that didn’t exist in the style.css file.
  • Omission of code to prevent the sidebar from dangling below the rest of the page without a proper background.
  • Incorrect references to styles (id vs. class; don’t ask me more than that).
  • Styles set to display: none; so anything the style was applied to did not appear at all.
  • Other stuff I can’t even remember (and don’t want to).

In fixing these problems, I introduced a few new ones. That’ll happen when you know just enough to make you dangerous.

I learned a lot. I learned that no matter how good and professional a theme design might look, it may have problems lurking under the surface. And I learned how to troubleshoot and fix the problems — or at least how to intelligently describe the problem to someone who knows what she’s doing so she can tell me how to fix it.

The she in this case is Miraz Jordan, who has been using WordPress for considerably longer than I have. Her site, MacTips.info, runs on WordPress. And she knows what she’s doing because she uses CSS all the time. She maintains “standards-based” Web sites while I mangle them.

So as I finally work the kinks out of the site and prepare it for general release, I need to publicly thank Miraz for her help. Without her, I never would have gotten the site to look half as good as it does.

And I have a new New Year’s Resolution (other than the usual “lose weight”): learn CSS.

Now if only I can figure out those PHP commands I need to add the RSS feed code…

I Switch to WordPress

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I realize that Tiger Server’s in-the-box blogging tool is not what it’s cracked up to be.

I spent most of this week working on my server configuration: 3 out of 4 days, to be exact. (On Monday, I had a helicopter charter, then had to write an article for Mac Addict.) I haven’t gotten very far.

The goal this week was to turn on the Web server and put at least one Web site on it, then set up at least one blog.

The Web site setup went well. Apache is part of Mac OS X Server (and Mac OS non-server, if you want to get picky). The server includes a Server Admin application that makes setting up individual sites and enabling the Web server pretty easy. I created a folder for the Wickenburg Airport Web site — which is temporarily pointing to the wickenburg-az.com site I run — and copied the files to it. There aren’t many files. I built the site when I ran the FBO at the airport, but when I sold out, I pared down the site to the bare minimum amount of information so I wouldn’t have to update it very often. I wasn’t about to ditch the site. After all, I own the domain name and it’s nice to find some information about the airport on the Web.

I ran into one small problem with the setup, and that has to do with IP addresses. Setup asked what the IP address was for the site. The options were All, 192.168.0.2 (the local network IP address), and something else, which I can’t remember. I thought All would be the right option, but when I attempted to access the site from another computer on my network, it didn’t work (even after updating the .htaccess file on my production computer). I tried 192.168.0.2 and it worked. But I didn’t trust it; I didn’t think it would work from any computer. So I fired up my eMac and logged in via a dial-up connection I borrowed from my sister years ago for testing. (She still uses Earthlink on a dial-up account.) Sure enough, it worked from that computer, too.

I was very pleased about this, because not only did it prove that my server worked, but it proved that the Complete DNS Management feature on GoDaddy.com, where my domain names are registered, also worked. That means I can manage my own DNS without setting up a DNS server.

Next was the blog. I followed the instructions — such as they are — to enable the weblog feature of Tiger Server. The Weblog is created with a version of Blojsom. While Blojsom might be a highly configurable, powerful blogging software solution, the folks at Apple have done their best to limit customization and usability. That pisses me off, because the weblog capabilities in Tiger Server was one of the selling points that got me to buy Server in the first place. To make matters worse, I couldn’t get it running well enough to start fiddling around with customization options.

I posted a question in the Server discussion forum at the Apple Web site, asking how I could set up a blog and have a domain name point right to it (rather than something like www.aneclecticmind.com/blog). The idea was to build entire Web sites — like wickenburg-az.com, aneclecticmind.com, and langerbooks.com — with blogging software. These sites have frequent entries that I want to appear on the home page for a while, then get archived off based on date and category. EXACTLY what webLog software is good for. As a matter of fact, langerbooks.com was built with iBlog, the same package I use to maintain this blog. (Offline composition capabilities make it a nice tool for a laptop.)

Less than 2 hours passed before I got a response. The author of the response told me to try WordPress.

Now please understand that the last thing I wanted to do was switch to a different blogging package, one that wasn’t part of Tiger Server. As I said above, I bought Tiger Server partly because it had blogging software built right in. But because I was already stuck and couldn’t go any further with the installation I was working on, I decided to look at WordPress. And I liked what I saw.

Long story short: I downloaded WordPress and found two different documents that explained how to install it on Mac OS X 10.4. Of course, neither document covered how to install it on Mac OS X 10.4 Server. So, for example, even though I had MySQL installed, it was not the recommended version and it was a weird Tiger Server installation. It had trouble “talking” to PHP, which was also already installed.

I followed the first set of instructions I found, which used a package called MAMP. I wasted about 4 hours on that. I posted a question on the WordPress discussion board. That led to another message this morning, which recommended a different set of instructions. I followed that today. Twice. It required me to uninstall the Tiger Server version of MySQL and install the recommended version. Fortunately PHP was okay. I finally got the WordPress configuration windows to appear. And I even made some headway setting up a template for wickenburg-az.com.

Of course, to test this properly on my local network, I needed to assign a domain name to it. Right now, it’s gilesrd.com. But don’t go there now. It won’t work. I screwed up something in the configuration. WordPress’s “codex” Web site was up and down all afternoon, so I couldn’t get the info I needed to fix it. I looked it up tonight from home and found the answers I need. I hope to have it fixed by tomorrow.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the content will all be there. It’s still in early testing.

One of the things I need to do is set up multiple databases in MySQL and multiple WordPress installations. That’s the way you can get it to have multiple Blogs. And I’m going to need at least three of them. I figured I’d play around with this one for a while, then get serious and set up the ones I need. Then start filling them with archived entries — wickenburg-az.com alone has over 300 pages — and finally tweak the DNS to point to my server again.

I have time. There’s still about 7 weeks left on the two month hosting plans I set up for each site when I moved it off my server. And I can always extend that. I think I might do aneclecticmind.com first. And little by little, this blog will probably move over to that site.

I’m looking forward to a lot of evenings of copy and paste.

A Podcasting Update

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Maria Speaks Episode 22: A Podcasting Update.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Episode 22 of Maria Speaks: A Podcasting Update.

I haven’t released a podcast in nearly a month and I figured I’d better put one out, just to let you all know I’m still alive and kicking. Here’s a quick update of the things I’ve been up to.

I’ve been busy, but not terribly so. I finished my QuickBooks 2006 for Macintosh book in November and got my author copy in the mail just the other day. It should be in stores within a week. If you’re looking for a book about QuickBooks for Mac, I hope you’ll look it up. I don’t think you’ll be able to look up another book on the topic — my book seems to be the only one.

I started writing my November Widget Watch piece, but got sidetracked. I’m starting to get a little bored with widgets. I hope to finish it next week and get it online as a podcast soon after that. It’ll be an enhanced podcast. Do you like those? With the screenshots and links and all?

I’ve been writing a lot of articles for Informit.com. Unfortunately, Informit doesn’t publish them as quickly as I write them. So although there are about five of them in the pipeline, I don’t expect to see the first of them for at least two weeks. Upcoming topics include Finder features, using Backup 3, and setting up an AirPort Express. I can’t remember the other topics. Heck, I can’t even remember what I had for dinner last night sometimes.

In the past, I’ve released Informit articles as podcasts and enhanced podcasts. I need to know from listeners: should I keep doing this? Do you want to hear the articles as podcasts? Or am I wasting my time and your bandwidth by creating them? You can always read the Informit articles online at the Informit.com Web site. Use the search box to search for me by author name. In case your memory is as bad as mine, the name is Maria Langer.

I’m also working on an article for Mac Addict magazine. I wrote for Mac Addict a few years ago, but I’m not the kind of person who aggressively seeks out magazine work, so I didn’t get any new assignments. (I guess they weren’t interested in seeking me out, either.) I got a call from one of the editors last week, looking for someone to write a bit about Excel for a big piece they’re doing. So I’m doing it. I like writing for Mac Addict because the magazine is fun. I assume the article will be out in the February or March issue.

I’ve begun talking to one of my editors about a brand new book that I’ll probably start writing right after the holidays. It’ll be a Mac book — that’s all I can say. And it won’t be part of any series, so I get a chance to write in a more flexible, free-form style. I love writing Visual QuickStart Guides, but they tend to keep my writing skills — such as they are — all boxed up. It’s nice to let them out for exercise once in a while.

I booked a flight and hotel room for Macworld Expo in San Francisco. I’ll be appearing in the Peachpit Press booth on the Thursday of the show, so if you’re around, I hope you’ll stop by and say hello. I’ll do a presentation about Tiger. Something interesting and fun. I’m tired of talking about productivity stuff.

I started doing video inside my helicopter while I fly. I bought a camera mount that attaches to the horizontal bar between my helicopter’s two front seats. The camera mounts about 5 inches above the bar. It faces out the front of the helicopter and the view includes the top half of my control panel, the part with the interesting gauges on it. You know — airspeed, vertical speed, artificial horizon. I’ve found that on cloudy days, the view is pretty good. Not too bright out the window to make the panel too dark to see. The best video comes during takeoff or landing or while flying in interesting places, like down canyons or alongside cliffs. The idea is to take the interesting video and turn it into a video podcast, with narration, to give people an idea of what sitting in the front seat of a helicopter is like. I need to work a bit more on the mount; the vibrations are a bit too much right now. But I hope to have a short video done soon. Is that something you want to download from Maria Speaks or should I start a separate podcast? The episode would be at least 20 MB in size. Let me know what you think. Don’t be shy.

This past week, I did the first broadcast of a live radio show. I do a lot of work for the local AM radio station here in Wickenburg, KBSZ-AM, including their Web site, Webcam, podcasts of their talk shows, and, most recently, streaming audio. That’s right — you can tune into KBSZ-AM from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a fast Internet connection. There’s a guy who listens in from Italy every single morning and when they broadcast a football game, all available connections are full. If you want to try it out, visit www.kbsz-am.com and click the Streaming Audio link. Then follow the instructions on that page to connect. I recommend weekday mornings, when Pete does his live show, as well as Saturdays, when there’s a succession of live DJs spinning disks.

Anyway, my show, Classic Rock Cuts, is on every Wednesday evening at 8 PM MST. That’s 10 PM on the east coast and 7 PM on the west coast. I did the first broadcast on Wednesday and I admit I was pretty nervous. My friend Keri — Alias Miss Holley King, the Rockabilly Queen — helped me with the tough part: dealing with the broadcasting board. We only had a handful of dead air seconds and I only played a commercial over the music once. The automatic recording of the show that I’d set up on my Web server had so much background noise that it’s worthless as a podcast, so the world will be spared from it. I think I’m ready for next week, when I feature holiday tunes from classic rock artists. I’ll use an old fashioned tape recorder to record the show and, if it isn’t too painful to listen to, release it as a podcast.

I’m looking for sponsors for the show. Peachpit Press has already signed up for a full year of one-minute spots. If you’re interested in sponsoring an entire show, e-mail me at MariaSpeaks@mac.com and I’ll get the details out to you. It’s a lot cheaper than you might think.

But the big project I’m working on is the conversion of my Panther-based, WebSTAR Web server to Mac OS X Tiger Server. I bought Tiger server because I was sick of WebSTAR’s unreliable performance and I wanted to use some of the cool features that come with Tiger Server. So at the beginning of each week, I do some installation work and spend the rest of the week debugging what I’ve done. I have a lot to learn — that’s clear. But I’m really enjoying the challenge, in a weird sort of way.

You can read more of what’s going on in my life — as well as a play-by-play of my server installation, written for the geek wannabes — in Maria’s WebLog. Visit my Home page at www.aneclecticmind.com and click the Maria’s WebLog link to find it. That’s also where you can find more about NaNoWriMo, which made me hated among novelist wannabes back in October.

Right now, I’m waiting to hear from you. What do you want to hear in these podcasts? More Mac how-to stuff? Or stories about the weird things going on in my life — like what you can find in Maria’s WebLog? Or about flying helicopters in the Arizona desert and beyond? Or all of the above? Go to the Home page for this podcast at www.aneclecticmind.com/mariaspeaks/ and use the comments link to share your thoughts.

I’m a lot more likely to churn out interesting podcasts if you tell me what you think is interesting.

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening, Bye!

Server Install Complete

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The server installation goes better than I expected.

I had to wait until after 10 AM to take down the server, wipe its hard disk clean, and install the Tiger Server software. That’s because the computer was busy recording KBSZ’s “Around the Town” show and saving it as an MP3 file so I wouldn’t have to.

The first time I tried to restart from the DVD disc, the computer defaulted back to its internal hard disk for restart. Darn CD/DVD reader problems again. I opened the side of the computer, banged on the drive a little, and shut it back up. Then restarted. It worked.

I had downloaded a “worksheet” PDF document from Apple’s Web site and filled it in in preparation for the big moment. It asked things like the IP address, administrator names and password, Ethernet configuration, disk name, and type of setup. So when the installer started asking questions, I had answers. I finally clicked the Install button and held my breath while the installer checked the DVD disk. Actually, I didn’t hold my breath for the whole time because it took about 15 minutes. Imagine my relief when it had no trouble reading the DVD and began the installation. About 15 minutes later, it was done and ready to restart.

I used my worksheet to answer a few more questions. Then, when I was finished, I got my first look at Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server. It looked just like Mac OS X 10.4, but had a few interesting icons on the Dock and one or two extra folders in the hard disk’s root level.

I spent the next fifteen minutes or so updating the “out-of-the-box” version of Tiger server with about 500 MB of updates from Apple’s Software Update server. Thank heaven for the DSL connection. It would have taken a VERY long time if I was still using a cable modem.

My next step was to restore the software that had been running on the server that morning. Not restore from backups, mind you. Restore from original copies of the software. I did Evocam first, since that was the easiest, and had the Webcam up and running in minutes.

Next was Nicecast, for KBSZ’s Internet simulcast. Had a bit of trouble getting the audio out, but after a restart, it worked fine. Of course, I had Jo at KBSZ check it there; because of weird DNS/IP looping problems, I can’t test it from a local computer. Jo couldn’t hear it. Later, I stopped by the station and gave it a try. Someone had turned down the volume on the computer’s speakers.

FileMaker Pro and the AppleScripts and Fetch shortcuts was next. By that time, the CD/DVD drive had decided it wasn’t going to read anymore CDs. Fine. Be like that. I put the CD in my production Mac and used the network to access the CD from the server. I did the install that way and it came off without a hitch. The configuration took a while, though, and required that I rewrite a few of the scripts for the new directory structure on the server. Fix, test, repeat. I was getting used to it.

I also set up Audio Hijack Pro to record the four shows it would need to record and modified the script that would get the 8 AM news on KBSZ’s Web site each morning at 8:18 AM.

When everything appeared to be working right, I set up the computer to automatically log in with me as the user and launch the stuff it needed to launch at startup for truly automated operation. Then I crossed my fingers and restarted.

Everything started up as it should, but FileMaker Pro displayed an error message. It appears that it cannot open files unless it is the foreground application. Although I had set it up to open last, other programs were slower to open and became the foreground application, thus preventing FileMaker from doing its thing. Not acceptable. I thought about writing a script that would delay FileMaker’s launch so it would be the foreground application when it finally opened, but came up with a simpler solution: I just set up the other applications to hide after launch. That left FileMaker Pro as the only application that wasn’t hidden, thus leaving it in the foreground.

Restart. Perfect.

I set up the computer to shut down and restart each night at around midnight. This is to force FileMaker Pro to refresh its databases with current day’s information. In the future, I’ll find a utility that’ll automatically restart the FileMaker Pro databases for me.

I messed around with the FTP setup for a while and didn’t get anywhere good. I might have to rethink the directory structure. It appears that I can’t FTP into the root directory for the computer. That’s unfortunate, since I created a bunch of folders in that location that I’d like to get into. It looks as if I’ll be moving them and modifying the scripts that look for them where they currently are.

Today, I won’t be spending much time in the office. I’ll stop in to check things out, then come back later to press a CD for my radio show. This morning I need to pick up my helicopter from Prescott, where it just had its annual. And I have a charter at 2 PM. Possibly another charter sometime this afternoon, too.

Thursday morning, I’ll play around a bit with Blojsom, the blogging software that’s part of Tiger Server. I’ll be replacing wickenburg-az.com with a blog-based Web site, making it possible for a team of people to add content and to automate the formatting of pages. I have a Doctor’s appointment later in the afternoon, so I won’t be spending as much time on it as I’d like. So it looks like Friday will be my next full day working with the server.

No rush, though. Rather do it right than do it quickly.