Better Installs!

Now there is a little utility to help… Ninite basically groups the installs together and installs everything at once (wow, that is totally awesome) you can get a little more details on it, at this link.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I don’t really get the whole twitter popularity thing. Its probably just cooler than I am, or maybe an early example how new technology and innovation is going to be passing me by in my old age.

I came across this video which is a humorous introduction (PG) of what twitter is and how people use it.

WinDirStat screenshot

While installing some software over the weekend, I noticed my computer was starting to run low on disk space.  In my current setup, I have a 116 GB drive and it was showing that I had only 10 GB free.  What in the world do I have on my computer that is taking up 100 GB, I asked.  You would think being an IT guy, I would have an answer to that… nope.  But where do I start to look?  Is it several large files, or old software I have installed taking up space? Windows does not really have a good utility for reporting disk space usage. I thought about writing a script to give me a basic report, but figured I would check the Internet via download.com first. What I found was WinDirStat, its free and does exactly what I want. I was able to remove over 40 GB of stuff I dont need/use anymore… problem solved!

Nice writeup from the folks @Lifehacker if you like to use screenshots (or portions thereof) to spice up stuff.

Since I recently start using Firefox 3 and even more recently using Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) as my primary email client, there has been one little annoyance I wanted to fix.

When coming across a mailto: link (a link you click on in a website to start a new email message) it would not bring up my proper email. There is a Gmail option in Firefox 3, but that is only for the public hosted @gmail.com addresses. I need something for GAFYD email, so I began searching.

I came across this blog article which solved my problem perfectly. I decided to reformat the instructions slightly and post below.

1. In the Firefox address bar type

   about:config

   and press enter.

2. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
3. In the “Filter: ” field type

   gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost

   and press enter.

4. Double click the found result to change the value from “false” to “true”.
5. In the address bar type

   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/a/example.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Google Apps")

6. Replace example.com with your Google Apps domain and hit enter.
7. A banner should appear below your address bar and tab bar, ask you if you want to Add Google Apps to as an application for your mailto links, Click “Add Application” on the right.
8. Double click the allowRegisterFromDifferentHost to change the value from “true” to “false” (restoring the default value and reversing the change made in step 4).
9. In Firefox, select Tools menu, then Options…
10. Click on Applications at top of Options window.
11. Ensure mailto says “Use Google Apps”.  If not click on the line and use arrow on right to select “Use Google Apps”

I have noticed a lot of stories and news about twitter recently.  A few of my Facebook friends are twitter diehards. Celebrities like Ashton Kutchner, some CNN hosts, members of Congress, and even Fast Money on CNBC (one of my favorite market info shows), are all using twitter.

I try to stay up and the latest technologies, but I must admit this is one I just don’t get. Normally I would hang my head in shame if members or Congress were progressively using a technology before myself… but in this case, I have tried to figure out how to make use of it, and it just doesn’t seem to fit for me and my very unexciting lifestyle.

Maybe I will grow to appreciate it more in the future, but as of right now, I have a hard enough time coming up with content for this blog, let alone micro-blogging. Quite honestly I dont think my friends and family are terribly interested in stuff I write about once a week or so, let alone a blow by blow account of how my day is going.

I don’t know what the future will hold, but I can say for sure right now, I just don’t get twitter.

Yesterday, I spent some time configuring permalinks in WordPress and setting up a custom 404 error page. The GoDaddy default 404 page is lame. I also wanted to add some JavaScript that Google provides to make some suggestions and ultimately provide a Google search of the site when the page you are looking for can not be found.

First, Google provided me with this code block to include in my custom 404.

<script type="text/javascript">
var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.flbelt.com/';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js"></script>

I was able to edit my theme 404.php file using WordPress Admin -> Appearance -> Editor, and selecting 404.php on the right. I added the JavaScript from Google and the php snippet below at the top to make the pages more search engine friendly (so they would return the proper 404 status code, rather than 200 OK when serving up the page)

<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
get_header(); ?>

Now came the tricky part, when I would go to the GoDaddy control panel choose 404 Error Behavior, select custom and input /index.php?error=404 or /?error=404 as required by WordPress, GoDaddy would return an error and say that my custom page could not contain a question mark!

After searching around a bit, I decided to try to add the error page to .htaccess since GoDaddy would not support the option I was looking for. So I created a .htaccess in the root of my website with the following.

ErrorDocument 404 /?error=404

But in spite of the information in the .htaccess GoDaddy still seemed to redirect to the old error page. Now I was stumped and turned to Google.

There I found this blog entry showed the way to disable GoDaddy’s 404 handling and allow requests to pass to your .htaccess was to select the “Use home page” option (not documented on GoDaddy’s help portal btw).

Then I found this blog entry which pointed out the GoDaddy’s servers only refresh the .htaccess every so often. Their advice, just wait a little bit (was about 15 minutes for me) after you update/add an .htaccess before testing.

Finally it was working! After all that I was even able to turn on more descriptive permalinks in WordPress (which rely on .htaccess working properly also) and that is working now too!

You can use this link to see our custom 404 page. Took a little more time than I had wanted, but im happy with the end result!

The last week or two I have been working on switching a number of our tech services.  This was primarily an exercise in cost reduction, but there have been some nice functional pickups, but those have been accompanied by minor losses also.

Email
We have been hosting our own email server (Microsoft Exchange) for a number of years.  The initial draw to Exchange was the ability to use it for email, contacts, and calendaring as well as its integration to our then Windows Mobile smart phones.  The smart phones have since been replaced with phones that do not sync directly with Exchange. I have been looking around (over the last 6 months or so) for a good hosted email service.  Since we are running Exchange 2003, I knew an upgrade to 2007 or a full hosted replacement was likely going to be something we needed to do in the next 6-12 months. I was never able to find something I thought was a good functional replacement at a reasonable (less than $100/year) cost.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled up Google Apps.  It offers email with a great web client to a custom domain name (like flbelt.com), calendaring, and contacts.  It also will allow you to connect via IMAP or POP3 from you favorite mail client (like Outlook), but the best part was the price… its free for family use! It also offers a functional replacement for email aliases (I like to register on sites with an alias instead of my real email address I use for friends and family) and groups or distribution lists that allow us to set up special email addresses that Loretta and I can share.

After a couple week evaluation with one of our test domains, we decided to make the switch.  We are now happily using email hosted by Google, and so far its working out great!

Domain Registrar
We have been hosting our Internet DNS and using the Domain Registrar services at No-IP.com for about 5 years.  Overall we have been happy with the service, and their Backup MX service came in very handy when we were hosting our own email server and had occasional unexpected or extended outages.

Since we no longer needed the backup MX services, I began looking around for a lower cost registrar.  What I found is that we could save a fair amount of money by switching to GoDaddy.com.  The fact that GoDaddy.com could also do our web hosting for a very reasonable cost just sweetened the deal, so we made the switch.

Web Hosting
We have been hosting our own web sites for the last 5 years.  From web mail, to blogs, to our small business site, to World of Warcraft Guild sites, to other miscellaneous experiments, we have taken advantage of the flexibility of hosting our own sites.  Now that we are with GoDaddy.com we were able to move the sites we wanted to keep (including refreshing this blog) for a minimal cost.

Internet Service
We have been a very happy Verizon FiOS customer for over 4 years.  We have been using their Small Business class service which costs a bit more than residential, but allowed us to host our own web sites and email server (no inbound port restrictions like there are with residential FiOS) with static IP addresses.  Without the need to host email and web sites any longer (see above), we thought this would be another great opportunity to reduce some costs.  While the techie in me sure does miss the 5 static IPs and wide open hosting opportunities, the additional $ per month just is not worth it for us.

TV Service
We have been DirecTV customers for the last 9 years. We have subscribed to a number of their sports offerings, but most recently were NFL Sunday Ticket and MLB Extra Innings customers. Since we switched to residential FiOS they have some pretty attractive bundles for Internet and TV service combined. Having already made the decision to forgo the sports packages to reduce costs, it seems like a good time to make the switch to FiOS TV. They have all the HD channels we care about and even one that DirecTV still does not (WGN America HD… GO CUBS!). The fact that we wont lose service during heavy rains (with our rainy season approaching) and the multiroom DVR where you can watch things recorded shows from any TV, was just icing on the cake.