June 2003 Archives

This little php script will display an iTunes play list on the fly. For example, this is our most Recently Played playlist.

Registered our home and my cell phone number with the National Do Not Call Registry. It is good for five years. How am I supposed to remember that? Someone call me on 6/30/2008 and remind me to reregister.

As I watch Kelly compose her blogs, going back and forth to a Web Monkey color reference chart, so that she can color her text, I decided I needed to introduce her to a blogging tool. We have Kung-Log on the Mac side, but she does most of her blogging and e-mail at the Compaq.

The first tool listed on MovableType.org's external resources list is w.bloggar. So I picked out that one.

Kelly is experimenting with Trackback. She picked up a Trackback URL from one of my postings and put it in the "URLs to Ping" field on her own posting. This caused my original posting to end up with a Trackback to her reply.

However, Trackback only puts a link from the original posting to the reply posting. It may be a good idea to put a link in the reply posting to the original. Like this. I did this by right-clicking on the Posted time at the bottom of her article and copying the link.

Takes practice.

I used this article, Keeping Time with Win2K, to get Yoda and Gandalf (Win2K servers) synching with the Navy's time servers, tick and tock.

I issued the command to use both Navy servers 4 ntp.org serveres (note space between them):
net time /setsntp:"tick.usno.navy.mil tock.usno.navy.mil"
net time /setsntp:"0.us.pool.ntp.org 1.us.pool.ntp.org 2.us.pool.ntp.org 3.us.pool.ntp.org"

I set the Windows Time service to automatic (which this article does not mention) so that it will launch on reboot.

To test, set the clock behind (not forward because there is a slow down scheme you won't notice), stop the service to test with net stop w32time, and use the the w32tm -once command mentioned in the article. After testing, start back up again using net start w32time.

This command can confirm the settings: net time /querysntp

I then set my own W2K laptop to use gandalf and yoda (so all are not hitting up the Navy) using:
net time /setsntp:"gandalf.netcentrix.net yoda.netcentrix.net"

Apple sure makes this a lot easier.

1. Admin Client
2. Admin Server
3. Hub Servers
4. Spoke Servers
5. Clients
6. Mail Templates

e-Pro Magazine

Once you start visiting more than a few blogs regularly, you'll want an RSS Feed Reader.

I'm experimenting with Feedreader on the Windows side. It is like a newsgroups reader for blogs that publish an RSS feed via XML. I get a ding-dong and little pop-up notice every time something new is posted on one of the sites I'm monitoring. Because SlashDot.org gets 10 or so postings per day, I'm getting a lot of ding-dongs.

I had a folder that would not let me (the administrator!) throw it away locally because it was owned by someone else. I think this was because it was created remotely on Jupiter or BlueMac. I could not change the permissions locally and was stumped until I found this article that said I would have to "take ownership", then change permissions, then toss it. Worked.

Ted put together a collection of great tunes and gave it to us for Christmas. He called it "Merry Christmas from Ted." In iTunes, you cannot see the track names because no CD has track names, and iTunes cannot identify this CD when talking to CDDB over the internet. (It is a unique CD.)

So you have to play Track 1, Track 2, etc. While playing them, I tried changing the track names and was surprised I could. So I editted the track names, artists, and album title. I then ejected the CD to see if iTunes would remember. It did. iTunes apparently is talking to the Finder, because the CD is now titled and all the track names are listed. Zoom in below to see the effect.

Another pleasant surprise from Apple. That's why the Mac is so much fun... it keeps surprising you by doing what you would want, but not necessarily expect.

Wallstreet caught wind of my exchange with Kodak's CEO. He should have fixed my camera.

Now listening to... Ain't No Sunshine - Unplugged by Sting

(Now listening to... Martha from the album "Closing Time" by Tom Waits)

Testing upload after MIME-BASE64 intall:

Test two with thumbnail option:

By he way, here's the XML-RPC CGI URL needed by Kung-Log http://mac.fiveforks.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi.

(Now listening to... Grapefruit Moon from the album "Closing Time" by Tom Waits)

Kung-Log wants MIME-BASE64 to be installed to support file uploads. Not knowing if I have it or not, I found these install steps and preformed them as root one at a time. Everything worked.

# MIME::Base64
curl -O http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/MIME/MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz
tar zxvf MIME-Base64-2.12.tar.gz
cd MIME-Base64-2.12
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install

Kung-Log has an iTunes button that will go get whatever is currently playing on iTunes and create a URL... like this one...

Now listening to... Which Will from the album "Pink Moon" by Nick Drake

Nicole should post more blogs using her iMac and Kung-Log. Ted should get an iMac and listen to tunes with iTunes.

Thanks to Nicole for a great CD (and VW who created a Nick Drake revival.)

Good refiinance calculator. It calculates the two key things you need to know: How much you save monthly, and how much interest you will pay from this point on with the new loan vs. the current loan.

Going to a 4.75% loan (no closing costs... it's built into the rate) we will save $180 per month and pay $16,000 less in interest. With Wells Fargo, it is all done by mail.

Now listening to... Simonize from the album "Music For The Morning After" by Pete Yorn

Ted's observation of two human beings reminds me of the caste system described in an article in National Geographic. In one photo, a man is climbing out of a sewer system, covered with human waste, wearing only a loin cloth and no protective gear. It was his job to crawl through the sewer line and manually unclog pipes. He was of the "Untouchables" caste.

I think we have a caste system in America, and while we are free to cross lines, in practice it is difficult to do.

I had a problem trying to get the "building" link to display correctly in the description. The banner has is an "id" style and the description is a "class". The style for the link kept being picked up from the banner and not the description style in the stylesheet. (Too big!)

I had to eliminate the "span" from all templates replacing it with its own "div", changing this:

<div id="banner">
<h1><a href="<$MTBlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$MTBlogName$></a></h1>
<span class="description"><$MTBlogDescription$></span>
</div>

to this:

<div id="banner">
<a href="<$MTBlogURL$>" accesskey="1"><$MTBlogName$></a>
</div>
<div class="description"><$MTBlogDescription$></div>

By removing the span tag, the link I created in the description (building) would adopt the correct style. Otherwise, it kept picking up the banner style. I don't understand the difference between "id=" and "class=".... something to study.

I used this software to scan all ports on our web servers to determine if the SSL port 443 was accessible: G-Lock's AATools.

See: Snapshot.