Tag Archives: software

Snagged the Server!

Posted on by
Comment

Another eBay success.

I managed to win an auction for a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. Apple sells this for $995; I got it for $449 including shipping. According to the seller, it’s in an unopened box, so it sounds legal to me.

I’m excited about this. I’ve been sitting on the fence about switching to Mac OS X server for about two years now, but my recent dealings with the folks who sell WebSTAR made me decide to take the big step up. I run a bunch of Web sites on the G4 in my office. I also run a FileMaker Pro database Web publishing server, Webcam software, and audio streaming software.

I used to run e-mail there, too, but the IP address I had was somehow linked to a spam account and all my e-mail was getting bounced from the sender as spam. What a hassle that was. So I moved my theflyingm.com domain name to a GoDaddy.com server and use that for e-mail and hosting my podcasting files. Although I now have a different IP address, I think I’ll keep theflyingm.com on GoDaddy’s server. They offer a ton of bandwidth for a very affordable price.

Now, I need to come up with a plan of attack for the new server. I want to take my time about setting it up, so I’ll probably start by moving all the Web sites I host over to GoDaddy.com for a month. Then I’ll set up my new server’s features, step-by-step, and get the Web sites all in place. I’ll “flick the switch” back to my server and, with luck, there won’t be any service interruption at all.

Those of you reading this who don’t know about GoDaddy.com and have a need for domain name registration or Web site hosting should really check them out. They’re affordable and reliable and have excellent free technical support by phone. (E-mail tech support stinks.) They also have a lot of how-to documents on the site to answer the easy questions.

Speaking of how-to documents, I got an answer to my MIME Mapping question that pointed me to a file named .htaccess. A Google search got me the information I needed from the JavaScriptKit Web site’s Web Building Tutorials pages. I think this will be a gold mine of information for me as I work directly with a Unix-based Web server for the first time.

As I work my way through this project, I’ll probably report my progress here and provide detailed how-to information in the companion Web site for my Mac OS books — that’s where most readers interested in this kind of stuff are mostly likely to look for how-to information from me.

Oddly enough, I haven’t felt this excited about a computer project for a long time. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and to learning the new things that’ll make it all work.

Oh, and the good news is that I didn’t win the other hard disk auction.

Shopping on eBay

Posted on by
Comment

I try — and fail — to get a few good bargains. But I’m not giving up.

I talked to my brother the other day. He lives back east, in the NY/NJ metro area, with his wife and dog. They live in suburbia, on a curving, tree-lined street where the houses don’t all look like each other. The first time I visited him, he had maple trees growing in his gutter. He’d just bought the house, which needed some work, and he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the gutters yet. The trees were only a few inches tall. When we lived in New Jersey, we had a 4-foot maple growing on our roof for a while.

Anyway, my brother buys just about all of his electronic equipment on eBay. The other day, he’d just bought himself a new cell phone and was waiting for it to arrive. He already had the hands-free, bluetooth headset that would work with it and was trying it out with his wife’s phone. It seems like every time I talk to him he’s telling me about some new gadget he bought on eBay.

I’m in the market for a few electronic devices myself. So I blew the dust off my eBay account and logged in. What I discovered is that eBay is no longer the garage sale of the Internet. It’s now the flea market of the Internet.

Why the difference? Well, a garage sale is usually full of used stuff — much of it junk — that the owner no longer wants. A flea market has much of the same junk, but it also has brand new, still in the box (abbreviated NIB for “new in box” on eBay) items. Call me spoiled, but when I buy a piece of computer hardware that I need to depend on, I want it brand new.

The first thing I needed was a portable external hard disk that I could use with my PowerBook. Experimentation the other day with iMovie and my video camera ate up the remaining 5 GB of unused space on that computer’s disk. I’m not replacing the hard disk — Mike went through that with a local computer consultant a few months ago and it was a 2-month nightmare. Instead, I’ll get a portable FireWire hard disk I can use to store big, fat media files. Like video. (Although it wouldn’t hurt to pare down my iTunes library on that computer; 12 GB of music is a bit much when I carry around the same songs and video on my iPod.)

So I hunted around on reputable sites — including the Apple Web site — and found a name brand and model I liked. Then I searched on eBay. I had literally dozens of matches, many of them NIB. Wow.

At the same time, I decided I needed some more RAM for my G4, which will soon be upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server. The machine, which is currently doing server duty with the dreaded WebSTAR, has 384 MB of RAM. That was quite generous when the machine was new 4 or 5 years ago, but nowadays, it just doesn’t cut it. Especially with the Webcam and audio streaming software running on it. Near as I can figure (without opening the box), one of its 3 RAM slots should be free. I figure I’d put 512 MB in there to pump up the RAM. And, if I could get the RAM cheap enough, I’d buy 2 512 MB “sticks” (apparently the RAM lingo) and throw away (or eBay) the 128 MB one I pull out. I did a search and found dozens of compatible RAM sticks. Whew.

I started bidding. And after two days, I noticed a pattern that I had noticed once before. You can be the winning bidder right up until about 10 minutes before bidding ends. Then someone comes along and outbids you. If you’re paying attention, you can bid back. That results in a bidding war and, if you’re not careful, you’ll wind up paying more than you really wanted to.

I’m careful. And I know how much these items are worth at their cheapest (or cheapest I can find) retail source. So someone outbids me and I start the process all over again with another item.

I have a theory about this. I believe that some vendors who sell the same thing over and over — dealers, in a way — have buddies who help them out near the end of an auction. Their buddies come along and bid to get the price up. They’ll bid right up to the amount the dealer really wants and step back. The bidder that crosses that line pays more than the dealer’s bottom line. And if there is no other bidder, the dealer pays the listing fee on the price his buddy “paid” and re-lists the item. This is how so many items can be sold without reserve. (A reserve is a minimum price the seller will accept. It costs more to list with a reserve and lots of buyers won’t bid on products that have reserve prices.)

The long and the short of it is that I’ll probably be ordering that RAM from an online retailer today. I can’t seem to get it on eBay any cheaper than I could get it from a retailer, so why risk a private seller on eBay?

I haven’t given up on the FireWire hard disk yet. And I’ve started looking into another iSight camera for a portable Webcam. And you know, I can really use a FireWire hub…

WebSTAR Technical Support

Posted on by
Comment

I have an experience that convinces me that it’s time for new Web server software.

Last week, I upgraded my office Internet connection from cable modem to DSL. The new connection has download speeds about 26 times faster than the old connection and it costs less than half the price. Upgrading was a no-brainer. The only thing I don’t understand is why it took me so long to realize that DSL was available in my area.

To upgrade to DSL, I had to lease or buy a DSL modem. Since it only cost $60 to buy, I bought it. I was very surprised to discover that it was also a wireless router. Within twenty minutes of the telephone man leaving, I had the wireless feature up and running and was connecting my network computers to it, thus cutting my Apple Airport Extreme Base Station out of the loop.

Things are never as easy as they seem — not that the configuration stuff seemed easy. It seemed hard. After all, I had to obtain a fixed IP address, then map it into the new router and use port forwarding configurations to point incoming traffic to my G4, which does server duty. If I talked about it in detail with a layman, his eyes would glaze over and he’d pass out. If I talked about it in detail with someone really knowledgeable, he’d know the truth: that I knew just enough about networking to make me dangerous.

I set everything up and, on Friday, had my DNS guy, Dave, make the changes to my DNS records. PGS Internet Services handles DNS for the 19 domain names I host in my office. In the past, I’ve handed over some of my more bothersome Web clients to them. PGS charges more than I do, but they have infinitely more patience. I think they feel like they owe me for the business, so they host my DNS for free. I try not to make changes, but this was a biggie and it had to be done.

By Saturday morning, the DNS had already propagated through to the Cable America DNS server. I access the Internet via wireless cable modem (how’s that for a contradiction in terms?) at home and I was able to connect to all of my Web sites except, for some reason, aneclecticmind.com. That came later in the day. Feedburner and Blogger still couldn’t see the sites, so I couldn’t update my podcasts or the ones I do for KBSZ. But I knew it was a matter of time.

By Sunday evening, everything was accessible from just about everywhere. Mission accomplished. Total downtime: less than the 48 hours I’d expected.

But, like I said, things weren’t as easy as they seemed. Because when I got to my office this morning, I quickly discovered that my production computer was unable to access my server for FTP, e-mail, or Web sites.

I had a lot of work to do — I’m still working on that QuickBooks book and I think I’m supposed to have it done by the end of the week. (Oops.) So I didn’t start troubleshooting right away. But it was driving me nuts that it wouldn’t work. And the fact that I could access it if I connected to the Internet via the Airport wireless network, which was still connected to the cable modem, was driving me nuts. So I went into full troubleshooting mode and spent about an hour banging away on it, trying all kinds of things, before I finally called the DSL modem company, Adaptec, convinced that it was a router configuration problem.

Now Adaptec has a technical support policy that basically says that they’ll help you with easy stuff for free but you have to pay $29 to get help with difficult stuff. Port forwarding for a shared static IP address fell into the difficult stuff category. But it was worth $29 to me to get it working right so I could stop thinking about it.

And that’s what I told the tech support guy I got on the toll-free phone number after about 10 minutes of waiting (their dime). But he said that he might not have to charge me. I should explain the problem.

So I did. And he knew immediately what the cause was. Here’s the simplified version. When you’re sitting at your computer and you type a domain name like www.aneclecticmind.com into your Web browser, your computer goes out to its DNS server on the Internet to find out the IP address for that domain name. In my case, it was learning that the IP address for the site I wanted to visit was the same IP address as the one I was trying to visit from. Adaptec routers don’t like that and they consider it an error so they don’t completely process the request. Apple Airport routers, on the other hand, are much more forgiving and let you visit yourself as often as you like. That’s why I didn’t get the error when I was using the Airport router and I started getting it when I began using the Adaptec router.

“How do I fix it?” I asked.

“You don’t,” he replied. “But there is a workaround. Just use the local IP address of the server computer.”

The local address is the address assigned by the DHCP services in the router, which I’ve manually set on the server computer. I typed that into my FTP software and it worked. Then I tried e-mail and it worked, too. Then I tried the Web browser and bzzzt. It didn’t work.

“It should,” he said. “There must be a configuration problem with your Web server software.”

Since I’d already taken up enough of his time and he’d solved most of my problem for free, I thanked him and hung up. The problem was sufficiently fixed to get my mind off it enough to work. I finished Chapter 6 of my book, then churned through 4 chapters of edits that had arrived that morning. I had to fiddle with my printer to get it to work on the network. I wasted about 30 minutes and 50 sheets of paper trying to get it to clear out a very old IP address so it would accept a new one from the router. No luck. But at least I could print.

Then I listened to my voicemail messages from the weekend, which I’d also put off until I was done working. By that time it was about 3:30, my normal quitting time. But instead of quitting, I dove into another troubleshooting session, this time with the folks at 4D.

4D, which started life as a database software company, bought StarNine, makers of WebSTAR Web server software, several years ago. I’d been using WebSTAR since version 3.0, when an evaluation copy of it had been given to me by Eric Zelenka, WebSTAR’s product manager. Back then I ran it under Mac OS 9 on an 8500/180 with an ISDN connection to the ‘Net. I believe Eric upgraded me to WebSTAR 4 and later I paid the big bucks to upgrade to WebSTAR 5. I’m currently running WebSTAR 5.3.3 on Mac OS X 10.3.9 on a 866MHz G4 with 384 MB of RAM.

Since upgrading to WebSTAR 5, all I’ve had is headaches with the software. The most bothersome thing is its spurious restarts: the software will shut down and restart itself about 100-200 times a day. For several months, I used 4D’s free technical support option — e-mail — to try to troubleshoot the problem. No luck. I gave up. I had to write an AppleScript that would automatically go into a specific folder where WebSTAR kept storing “backup” files it didn’t need every time it restarted itself. I discovered the buried files when I realized that something was eating up my disk space: by that time, there were over 12,000 of the damn files in the folder. Now the folder is cleared out every morning as part of the restart process.

So today, I wasn’t expecting much from 4D technical support. I knew whatever help I got was going to cost me. $40 was the going rate at 4D. But again, I thought it was worthwhile to get the problem resolved by talking to a real person.

I called and talked to a real person after being on hold (my dime) for about 15 minutes. To his credit, he really did try to help. But after going over the obvious — which I’d already done — he was out of suggestions. Time to “escalate” the case. That means time for me to break out my credit card.

He switched me to someone named David and he took my American Express card info. Then he tried to switch me back to the original guy. I was on hold for about 5 minutes when he got back on and told me the lines were busy and I’d have to wait in the queue. Duh. So I waited. My dime turned into a few bucks. On top of the $40 I’d already spent. At least the hold music was better than Adaptec’s.

Finally, a guy who sounded pretty French to me got on the phone. I groaned. Not because he was French, but because I knew I’d have to explain the problem all over again from scratch and he’d try all the things the first guy tried before getting down to real business. So I explained it. And he said, “I know exactly what the problem is.”

I laughed. “I bet you don’t. But I’m willing to listen.”

He spent the next 30 minutes crawling around inside my configuration files by accessing the server as an administrator. He made some small changes. He had me try accessing. It wouldn’t work. At one point, he had it set up so that I could use the local IP address to access one of my Web sites. But I wanted to be able to access all of them.

While he was fiddling around, I was thinking. Something he said gave me an idea.

“How about if we create a new Web site with a default folder that’s the same as the WebServer folder (the folder in which all of the other Web site folders reside). We can set that as the default that’s accessed with the local IP address. Then I can just type in a slash and the name of the folder containing the site I want. That should do it.”

“It won’t work,” he told me, dashing my hopes. He tried to explain why, but I didn’t really understand what he was saying.

I let him fiddle around for another five minutes. I was thinking hard. I couldn’t understand why my idea wouldn’t work. So I tried it. And it worked.

I told him and he had difficulty believing me. But it worked and although it wasn’t the perfect solution, it was a workaround I was willing to live with.

“So tell me something,” I said to him. “You didn’t fix the problem and I did. Do I get my $40 back?”

The answer, after a long story in which he explained that he was actually in charge of technical support, was no.

So I spent $40 plus about 90 minutes of long distance telephone time to come up with my own solution for the problem.

I’m still trying to decide whether I should call American Express and begin a chargeback for the $40. I didn’t, after all, get what I paid for. What do you think?

In the meantime, I’d spent a lot of that time on hold doing research. I discovered that Mac OS X 10.4 Server will indeed run on a G4. And it includes not only the well-respected and highly compatible Apache Web server, but e-mail, DNS, blogging software, streaming audio server, steaming video server, iChat server, and so many more things I don’t have. Of course, it is a bit pricey at $999.

But after my dismal technical support experiences with the 4D WebSTAR folks, I’m ready for a change.

I really AM a geek!

Posted on by
Comment

I discover enhanced podcasts and just have to try making one myself.

Yesterday, after getting my dose of news from Salon and Slate, I checked out the iTunes Music Store’s Podcast Directory. I found CockpitCast, “A podcast from the $16million airplane strapped to my ass.” It’s a mildly interesting podcast for people into aviation, full of control tower chatter and radio communications as a pair of jet pilots fly from LAX to other points. I noticed that some of the episodes were marked as “enhanced” and wondered what that meant. It all became clear when I played one in iTunes.

Now please do forgive me. I know I make a living writing about computer topics, but I’m in the middle of a revision of a QuickBooks book right now and I’m trying hard to keep my mind off things like podcasting. So enhanced podcasts made their debut and I missed them. It won’t be the first time I missed a computer innovation and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Well, the CockpitCast enhanced podcast included photos. And frankly, that kind of blew me away.

You see, I’ve been creating how-to podcasts on Maria Speaks — podcasts that teach people how to do things with their computer. One of the things the podcasts lacked was the ability to include screenshots, which can really help make an article understandable. I made up for that loss by including the transcript of each podcast on a Web site that I reference in the podcast. But with enhanced podcasts, I can now include the screenshots in the podcast itself.

I wasted no time locating and downloading a pair of software programs that would give me the ability to create these enhanced podcasts: Cast Easy and Podcast Maker. Although I first preferred Cast Easy, I soon realized that Podcast Maker was a much better product. And at only $30, it was quite affordable.

Podcast Maker enables you to take an audio file in MP3 or M4A format, insert chapters with pictures and link, and save it as a podcast. It’s very easy. (It’s also very disheartening, since I spent close to two days writing an eBook about how to create a podcast. Still my eBook explains how you can do it for free, so there’s some benefit there. Of course, that’s not an enhanced podcast. But it is a podcast with a customizable Web site. Oh, forget it.)

This afternoon, after finally finishing the 62-page Chapter 2 of my QuickBooks book revision, I came home and converted one of my Maria Speaks podcasts into an enhanced podcast. I used one that had a lot of screenshots. It explains how to send and receive faxes using Mac OS X Tiger. And it came out very nice, if I do say so myself. I just wish my voice wasn’t so nasal — I had a nasty cold when I recorded that episode.

Want to check it out? Visit http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariaspeaks/. Or better yet, just use that URL to subscribe to the podcast with iTunes 6.0 or later. You’ll see all the images in the iTunes window, or, if you have a new video iPod, you’ll see it on your iPod screen.

If anything was a motivator to get my QuickBooks book done quickly, this is it. I can’t wait to have a few spare hours to play around with this new technology. Stay tuned. I’m sure this isn’t the last enhanced podcast you’ll get from me.

On Blogging and Podcasting

Posted on by
Comment

Episode 7: On Blogging and Podcasting.

Everyone has a different idea of what blogging and podcasting is for. I thought I’d take a few bytes to explain my views. It’ll help readers and listeners understand what motivates me to share the information I share.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 7: On Blogging and Podcasting.

Everyone has a different idea of what blogging and podcasting is for. I thought I’d take a few bytes to explain my views. It’ll help readers and listeners understand what motivates me to share the information I share.

My blogs and podcasts are separate and, in most cases, do not overlap. This entry is one exception; it’ll appear in both.

My blog, which is called Maria’s WebLog, contains over 270 entries written since October 2003. These entries cover a wide range of topics dealing with my everyday life and opinions about what I see going on around me.

I consider Maria’s WebLog to be an online journal. My main purpose is to share my experiences and views with readers. Part of it is to journalize my life so I can remember events in the future. The other part is to let my friends and family members know what’s going on in my life. I’m surprised when I meet someone and they tell me they’ve read my bLog. They’re welcome to read it, but they need to understand that I’m not writing it for them. I’m writing it primarily for me.

I don’t know how many people actually read my blog because it’s hosted on my .

Mac account and there isn’t any stat software for me to track it. But it appears that it is widely read by people all over the world. (If you’re reading it now, you might want to take this opportunity to use the Comments link to check in with your name and location, just for kicks.)

Some people read my blog entries and are offended by them. I think that’s pretty funny. There are so many things in this world that are far more offensive than anything I could write. But these people focus on a comment or observation or opinion I made in these blogs and use it as evidence that I’m some kind of evil person. Whatever. I think people like that need to get a life.

I made an entry the other day that left people wondering whether my entries were truth or fiction. What do you think?

One more thing about the bLog. I maintain it using iBlog software, which is a Macintosh-based blogging client. iBlog is a really cool little software package because it runs on my Mac and does not require access to the Internet to use. Instead, it keeps a database of all my blog entries as I write them. When I’m ready to publish, I connect to the Internet and click a button. This was really useful when I took my laptop to my place on Howard Mesa, which is off the grid. I’d just hit the coffee shop in Williams a few times a week and use their wireless access to update my blog and check my e-mail.

Maria Speaks is my podcast. For the folks reading this transcript in my bLog, here’s a brief definition. A podcast is an audio recording saved in a format that can be listened to on a computer or MP3 player, like an iPod. I call my podcast Maria Speaks because it’s me talking and I couldn’t think of a better name.

My idea of a podcast is that is should share useful information with listeners. After all, that’s why I subscribe to and listen to podcasts.

For example, I’m a big fan of NPR and now that I’m not tuned in all day, I like to listen to NPR stories as podcasts when I’m driving or flying.

I’ve tried a bunch of podcasts that I thought were a waste of my time. I don’t listen to them anymore. If there’s no value in what I’m listening to — if I can’t learn something or be entertained by something I can’t hear elsewhere — then what’s the purpose? There are too many podcasts full of talking heads that aren’t saying anything worth listening to. I don’t want my podcast to be like that.

So when it came time for me to do my own podcast, I had a choice. I could either vocalize my existing bLog entries by reading them — like I’m doing here — or I could create new content of interest to listeners. Since I don’t think my bLog entries are informative enough to attract listeners, I decided to go with new content.

I make my living writing about computers and there’s always some tip or trick I could share. So I decided to focus on computer-related topics, including tips and tricks for being more productive. I’m primarily a Macintosh user, so most of my podcast entries are about Mac computing, although I did publish a cross-platform episode about Microsoft Word yesterday. And because I’m not comfortable recording without a script, each episode has a transcript available online, complete with screen shots if necessary.

Please don’t get the idea that Maria Speaks will only be about using computers. I hope to come up with other interesting topics to enlighten listeners. I also encourage all listeners to visit the Maria Speaks home page and leave comments about what they’ve heard. Was the episode helpful? Not helpful? Boring? Interesting? What do you want to hear? All I ask is that you be gentle with me. Harsh comments don’t get results.

You can find links to the home pages for Maria’s WebLog and Maria Speaks on my Web site, www.aneclecticmind.com. Those pages include links for subscribing to the RSS feeds for both.

Well, as usual, I hope you found this episode interesting. You can read its transcript on Maria’s WebLog. Thanks for listening. Bye!