mysiteonline™ - iTechnology

LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:27:17 -0400

Libraries, and many other institutions, have a difficult time leveraging the ability to allow customers access to communicate with them easily, using one of the most popular online communication tools available: Instant Messaging.

There are many problems, such as:

Multiple Protocols (AIM, ICQ, YIM, GIM, Jabber, IRC, MSN, etc...)
Inability to transfer conversations to another staff member more capable of handling a question or issue
Software compatibility
Operating System compatibility
Web-based communication tools for these protocols

So what's left out there?
Continue reading "LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging"

Sharing an Internet Connection with a Cell Provider

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:29:58 -0400

An interesting question came up on the Web4Lib daily-digest today. I replied directly to the author (I think, never understand how listservs work) but I thought I'd share this anyhow as it's not a hugely sought-after solution. Note: there are probably other, better ways to do this. Comments and other solutions are welcome. I am under the assumption you are using Windows XP (if anyone wishes to make alterations for Vista or another OS, you're more than welcome in the comments - if Linux and not using the shell, please specify which distro).

The question:

Has anyone tried to network an internet connection that involves a Verizon PC card in a laptop. Ideally I would like to be able to have 2 or 3 laptops sharing that one connection, but I have no idea where to start!

Hopkins County - Madisonville Public Library

My response:

You would need 2 other components:
- 1 crossover cable (it's a CAT5 cable with slightly different wiring)
- 1 "splitter", so a hub, switch, or router.

If you use a wireless router, you'll only need the one cable. If you use a hub, switch, or regular router you'll need a standard CAT5 cable for the other computers to connect to.

Connect the crossover cable to the LAN port on the back of the laptop.

Connect the other end of the crossover cable either in to a single computer, or the "splitter"'s "INTERNET" port.

In Control Panel, go to "Network Connections".

CTRL+CLICK on the two network connections you want to be sharing (the Verizon, and the Local Area Connection).

Right click on one of the two, choose "Bridge Connections". (I can't verify what to do to finish the bridge as I only have one connection on my PC at the moment. A quick internet search could probably tell you.)

If the "splitter" you were using was powered on, you may have to wait a moment for it to get an IP address, otherwise you can always power cycle it to renew its IP. The same goes for the PCs if you don't know how to force it to get a new IP.

I *think* that should do it. If I missed something from memory of when I did internet sharing, you can just do an internet search for examples or tutorials on "network bridging winxp". Switch out "winxp" for whatever OS you might be using if otherwise.

I hope this can help someone looking for a solution - or at the very least, get them on the right track. I am assuming here that the cell provider is not using the LAN port (either a USB or PCMCIA port).

Update: I believe I've enforced some stricter SPAM filtering on my blog (i.e.: any at all). At the very least, I guess I'm now more popular? Sorry for any inconvenience. Comments are enabled once again.

Pingie: Free RSS to SMS Messaging Service

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:02:59 -0500

While using Mon.itor.us to monitor the uptime of my websites' uptime, their IM messaging has not worked for me for quite some time now. They offer SMS messages for a fee as an alternative, but that's no fun considering it costs me $0.15 per SMS as it is. I just came across Pingie, a FREE service that will send an SMS to your phone when it encounters new posts from any feed. Lo and behold, Mon.itor.us provides an alerts feed. Yay.

Pingie.com

OpenID going more mainstream?

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:02:22 -0500

OpenID, a way for website visitors to easily identify themselves without giving up personal information, has been adopted by Yahoo, and one of Yahoo's subdivisions in Flickr. If you own an account at any Yahoo or Flickr site (mail.yahoo.com, Geocities, Flickr, Yahoo! Stocks, etc...), you can now use these accounts as an OpenID server!

What's this mean, exactly? Well, I won't get in to the technical details (or the "cool" factor), but it means, to me, that most likely other competing companies (Microsoft, Google, and a few more) will be jumping in on the bandwagon to provide OpenID (and hopefully OpenAuth) functionality. Microsoft's Live database would be easily used for this, and we all know the think tank at Google will have this soon enough - I'm actually surprised Yahoo! beat Google to the punch.

Regardless, this is good news all around.

Source: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009856.html

Interesting Links from the Web

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:25:40 -0400

Yup, still doing design work - but I'm not dead to the world, especially the world wide web. Because of that, I have run across quite a few interesting links to share - some are web programming related, some are helpful day-to-day applications (written for the web), and some others are just interesting.

Vista GUI style (Web) Navigation with CSS
Tripoli: A Generic Standardized CSS "framework" (I use this loosely) to keep your CSS and markup clean, and cross-browser compatible
Deliverables That Work: Design Description Documents
LitmusApp - A new website app from Salted to check compatibility between browsers AND email clients
How to Price Your Web Application
Mint: Free Finance Tracking Tool

Notable links with similarities to those above:
Vista GUI with CSS
Paid-for Financial Tracking

Oh Boy! Someone defined Web 3.0!

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:59:15 -0400

I suppose it was only a matter of time. At least he did start off the definition stating that Web 2.0 was simply a marketing term and not an actual thing...

Check out the Video of Google CEO defining Web 3.0.

dp.SyntaxHighlighter Updated

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 14 May 2007 11:34:11 -0400

Many people use the syntax highlighting script, dp.SyntaxHighlighter. I use it for this blog, SitePoint uses a modified version in their articles and blogs, and Yahoo might even use something similar (not entirely sure). Either way, after a while with no updates (and he was updating quite a bit some time ago, so much that it was actually annoying keeping up with the releases). On Friday, May 11th, a new update was released. It's a pretty large update as it now supports both the PRE and TEXTAREA tags. I personally would prefer to use PRE, but the script historically used TEXTAREA as the enclosing HTML tag. The author also moved the code and homepage over to Google Code.

What are you waiting for? Check it out!

Google Analytics Revamped

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 09 May 2007 08:55:45 -0400

Google announced yesterday that their website analytical service is getting an overhaul to allow for easier use, better analysis, and a better overview. I think the new look is a big improvement over the current view that I now have (and have had).

To read more about it, read the Google Analytics' Blog or the entry on Mashable.com. The new version will be rolled out to all current customers within the next few weeks, so if you don't have it yet (myself included), please be patient.

Links for the Week

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:52:16 -0400

Print a selective portion of a web page with CSS and the DOM
A really old article, but a goodie: Typography: The trouble with EN n' EN (and other 'shady' characters)
Some interesting CSS tips/links
From the same source as above, but some AJAX tips and tricks
Linked to from the interesting CSS tips, Got API.com is a web-based developers reference to a VAST amount of documentation
Also linked from CSS links/tips -- CSS Positioning Lesson
Dynamically loading Charts (bar, graph, line, pie, etc...) using XML/PHP (or CFML, ASP(.NET), Perl, etc...) and Flash

Some interesting finds...

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:36:56 -0500

It's not that I've been enormously busy lately, I just haven't had much to talk about that I felt would be interesting. Today, I ran in to two neat things, and remembered another one.

1 - Ever wanted to allow collaboration within your department (teleconferences on-the-road, telecommute, etc...)? From a quick view of this project, it appears that (with difficulty, mind you), you can...for free* (cost of hardware and labor not included!)! Check out 1videoConference for more information. They have a project page on SourceForge.net (also linked to from their homepage).

2 - While recently trying to figure out if there's an easy way to implement syntax highlighting in an HTML textarea box that is cross-browser compatible, I found ECCO, a web-based text/programming editor. There are plugins to Firefox that do similar things, but this one looks more promising. I honestly don't see a whole lot of merit to this, but it's definitely a really cool proof of concept with some amazing coding (and/or JS hacking).

3 - phpMyBackupPro has recently released a new version after a very long hiatus. I was looking for a quick means to run backups on our MySQL server(s) and didn't want to have to use a GUI to do so...why would I want the troublesome bother of a win32.dll kernel panic error when a database backup was going to run, and getting data is rather simplistic anyway from the command line (and I was too lazy to write my own batch scripts). I found this... It's actually really handy. It allows you to dynamically select which databases/fields you want to backup from any number of different servers...it'll also do error checking to be sure that you're configuration files are properly set. I run a batch script to call the CLI version of this PHP script each Friday night after the library is closed (at slow usage times), and then another batch script to transfer those GZ compressed backups from off my machine to yet another server that gets backed up every few days (you could always let the script delete backups older than X days, and simply copy the backups to an external server, that way there are 3 unique points of failure instead of 2).

There you have it, some possibly useful, somewhat interesting things to report on. Have a great week!

Server Monitoring

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 14:58:33 -0500

While wandering around the web, I somehow accidentally came across a free service that allows people to monitor their servers for free. Free has always been a nice "selling" point for me... Anyhow, this service allows me to send HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, TCP, UDP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, PING, and DNS all for a specified IP or domain (and/or subdomain). I can create reports, allow more than one person to view the resulting information (I think), do some benchmarking, subscribe to feeds on my data...and it can contact me in various ways in the event of any failures:

Contact Options:

SMS (cellphone)
Email
ICQ
Yahoo
MSN
Google Chat

...sorry, no AIM (yet)...
Continue reading "Server Monitoring"

I had so much to talk about...

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:27 -0500

...but I (accidentally, and messily) tore down the blog earlier today after I realized my feed wasn't working properly due to "pretty urls" not being turned on after I did the clean install. I'm going to try to get this back to where it was before the move (again) and hopefully I won't kill it (again). Once again, I've no idea what happened, all of a sudden it just started getting 404 errors. I don't know if a setting was changed on my server or what, but my only fix for it was to force my domain to use PHP5 instead of PHP4 (which works for me since I prefer it anyhow). Unfortunately, I only guessed at that potential solution.
Continue reading "I had so much to talk about..."

The W3C Show Life!

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:30:28 -0500

I've been reading a lot about internal turmoil within the ranks of different departments within the W3C, but other than the infighting and argumentative discussions, not much has been seen (by me) in the way of actual progress with things. Today, I have seen the light! The validator has a revamped look and feel, and a new design as well. Not only that, but errors and warning messages have been reworded to sound clearer! It will actually let you know that if you used a background: transparent; setting, that you may have done so, and just make sure it's legible. Awesome!

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

WiFi controlled Wall Clock

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:55:38 -0500

I'm going to try to shorten my blog entries' initial lengths and place any extra content in the article's dedicated page from now on. This will allow me to keep more articles on the main page and have a cleaner looking site.

Our Director walked in to our office today and took note of my RF/GPS Atomic Clock that's sitting on the mantle. I had originally brought it in to test the temperature of the office to figure out the problem with the heating/cooling settings to prove that there's a problem, but that's not the point here... In our library, we have used RF/GPS Atomic clocks for a majority of our building's clocks. Unfortunately, anyone that's ever owned an Atomic clock knows that they are not the greatest at keeping time. In fact, they sometimes grab the wrong time.

Continue reading "WiFi controlled Wall Clock"

The Forgotten Ones

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 23:30:38 -0500

I've not posted much to my blog recently due to a few reasons. I have been taking time to myself, trying to understand the Zend Framework, MVC Authentication Design Patterns, Free MMO Asteroids-esque gaming (with Geometry-based eye-hand coordination and a new twist on multiplayer strategy fun mixed in), some beginning AJAX without any frameworks (that doesn't seem to work for me...), and a few other things...like sleep.

However, during the hiatus of non-posting, I've come across some interesting things:

Mike Cunningham, a scholar, gentleman, and fellow developer - though three times my senior (in terms of knowledge and experience)
An interesting way to complete a milestone with all involved stakeholders (I really like this simplicity)
"Veracon", the amazing 15 year old who has already made his mark on the internet society with his CSS Thesis site (a website dedicated to showcasing semantic, standards-based web designs) is going through a gradual see-it-as-it-happens website update. Somewhat fun to watch. Oh yes, and his blog is created with a completely home-spun Python based blogging system...and no, not Django (the [Ruby on] Rails of Python), straight Python.
MyMicroBalance, a free (donationware) application that can be used to track financial information has been released with an English language pack. When a fellow forum member showed this application in German, I had to ask if an English version was available. He requested it be made, and he updated me today with the news! Any other alternative programs (free or otherwise) have seemed to be either huge overkill, have a horrible interface, or just didn't seem to work.
Microformats and the interesting abilities they pose when coupled with things such as IBM's "Operator" Firefox extension to not only notify of found microformats, but use them and test/help create them!
Firefox Extension Sage for a small and lightweight feed reader (thanks, Mike).
Mozilla's Firefox Search Engine Plugin Code
Mozilla's use of OpenSearch for the new plugin code (which works for Firefox v2.x+ and IE7+) (as of this writing, there's nothing newer than FF v2.0.0.1 and IE7)
SearchPlugins.net - a repository for search plugins (and creating your own). Too bad I found it late...as of right now their upload function isn't working either.

Oh, by the way, I don't know what caused it, but an invalid character from within the database was causing the feed to be faulty. The RSS parser still should have (at least in my mind) removed it, but it didn't. It was easier just to modify the offending blog post and fix the corrupted character than to figure out why the script didn't remove it. I still need to edit the RSS parser to omit object/embed type tags and replace them with the URL instead (and be sure that multiple tags referencing the same URL are not duplicated). So, fret not fellow Serendipity users awaiting an update.