Ok, just geeks left?  Good, here we go.

Last night I was trying to correct a syntax error and came across a helpful way to determine if all the parentheses in my if statement matched each other.  Basically how it works is like this.  Start counting each parenthesis in your statement. Each time you see an open parenthesis you increase your count by 1 and each time you see a close parenthesis you decrease your count by 1.  Let me illustrate:

// 12                 1    23   4           3      2    3      4                3210
if (($condition1 != $a) || ((len($condition2) == $b) && (!isset($_POST['submit'])))) {

Don’t know if that helps you or not, but as the editor i was using (online) didn’t have a syntax checker, it helped me a great deal.

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First, xhtmlpro.com, where I previously hosted my blog was my the home of my web development/design company.  Our company did some realignment this summer, and now exists at http://waldenwebdev.com.  Xhtmlpro was too unwieldy of a name for those not familiar with web design and coding and such, and since we primarily market ourselves to churches and other Christian ministries, most of which aren’t familiar with terms like xhtml, we (my brother and I) decided we needed to charge our name and branding.  It also gave us an opportunity to redesign our site which needed a facelift.  (Btw, xhtmlpro.com is for sale, if anyone is interested. It would be a great domain for, say, those that convert Photoshop layouts to web templates.) So all that is to explain why I’m not still at andy.xhtmlpro.com.

But why not at say, andy.waldenwebdev.com? Well, the main reason is i thought it would be good to go ahead and get my own exclusive domain.  Not that i’m really concerned someone else will snatch up andyanglea.com (afaik, i am the only one in the world), but I can do other geeky things with it too, like setting up Google Apps for your domain, email server, backup/storage, roll your own URL cruncher, etc.

Now if you’re wordpress savvy and read my previous post, you might be wondering why i had to get my old posts from google cache, as wordpress has an export function in the control panel.  Well, I would have loved to do that, but due to some shenanigans by our web hosting company, that was not an option.  (Short version, they took down xhtmlpro.com before they said they would.)  As you might guess, this site is not hosted by that company.  Depending on how the service goes, I’ll reveal who that is sometime down the road. If you’re really curious, you can look at my whois record. So far so good, and I technically have more than I did with my previous host (storage, bandwidth, etc) for about half the cost.  Next up, the semesterly (or yearly) life update…

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There were several things I wasn’t sure I was going to like about it, but either the aroma exuding from the package caused me to forget all of that or they weren’t as bad as i thought they would be.  For example, I was previously a ThinkPad user, and was in love with the little red eraser trackpoint and had never had much success with the trackpad. So I was afraid i would have difficulty adjusting to the MacBook Pro’s trackpad.  But i’ve been using it without a hitch pretty much from day one.  It’s much more “intelligent” than trackpad’s i’ve used in the past with only moving or clicking when i want it to.  I love the 2-finger scrolling, in fact it annoys me when it doesn’t work on the Dells in the Media Center

I obviously still use Windows at work, and I actually dual-boot Vista via BootCamp and VMWare Fusion (once Logos for Mac gets completed that may change…)  I’m still pretty much of an Apple n00b but i’m planning on delving into AppleScript and Objective-C this summer as time allows (XCode is sweet!).  I may also add a triple-boot option of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, we’ll see how it goes…

If anyone else out this is thinking about switching and you have any questions, fire away in the comments.

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Customizations i’ve made to the default install include (but are not limited too)…

• Firefox 2 (not in the dapper repositories yet)
• Automatix – nice installer for lots of common plugins (flash, quicktime), apps (gFTP, Gaim beta 3, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Bluefish and much more), codecs, etc. that make Ubuntu much more friendly to my everyday use.
• xorg.conf customization for Thinkpad scrolling
• Copy of file browser running as root
• Standard Firefox and Thunderbird icons (not the ubuntu versions)
• msttfcorefonts (Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Arial, Tahoma, ect [since almost every website we’ve created uses at least one of those)
• other tweaks such as theme, screensaver, fonts, wallpaper, etc, to give it “my” touch

Before i sign off, i suppose i should register at least one complaint, and others have mentioned it before… If linux is ever going to go mainstream, linux support is going to have to stop referring users to the terminal. I personally like using it, but my brother dislikes it a good deal. Eh, as a designer, he just wants a Mac, anyway.

Current System specs:
Thinkpad R40 2723
80GB Western Digital external USB hard drive
1.3 GHz Centrino processor
Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 (I’d upgrade to Edgy, but it seems to have been giving too many users problems)

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“Well,” I thought, “it’s windows, BSOD is pretty common.” I do a force power down (hold in button for 5 secs), reboot, and wait.

**Windows/System32/Config/System file missing or corrupt**

Great… A registry hive error. Pretty much irrepairable with an OEM XP installation. Oh well, I’ve been wanting to do a clean install of Windows anyway. Nevermind the fact that today is day we’re supposed to upload all the content for our client’s new site. Oh well, how long can this take? Probably not past lunch, No biggie.

So I attach my external hard drive, and boot into Ubuntu to recover my data in case I have to wipe the drive. (Unfortunately I forgot to get my 3+ years of email… too late now.) That done, I attempted Windows recovery console. No dice there either. Well, I’ve got my IBM recovery partition, let’s try that… Good, that’s working. Let that run for 30-40 odd minutes. During the process it asked me to set an administrator password, which I did. It finishes, reboots and presents me with the login screen, and the user name of Administrator. I enter the password I chose earlier and wait.

**Bong** Password incorrect. Please retype your password. Passwords must be typed in the correct case.

Oops, my bad, try again. **Bong** Stupid me.. **Bong** What! **Bong** Good grief **Bong** Try blank… **Bong** **Bong** **Freeze** **Bong** **Bong** (you get the idea…)

Not good, I must have mistyped it. How could I have made the same typo twice??? Wrong home keys? Oh well, it’s only 10 o’clock or so, I’ll reinstall again.

This time I set the password to something really easy: abc. How could I mistype that? Reboot, and login screen.

**abc** **Bong** Ai yi yi **Bong** Ok, the Admistrator account has a problem… Let me try some other things… **Bong** An old account name? **Bong**

I should probably explain that because I bought my laptop from the school, the recovery partion I’m using has a custom image on it with school software. So I thought, “It must have a custom Administrator account too.”

Well, I have another option. Because I was an IT minor last year, I was able to take advantage of Microsoft’s Academic Alliance program which allows computer science students to download free M$ software including Visual Studio, VPC, and XP. I downloaded an iso of the XP install CD complete with academic license and authentication code. This disk image was on my harddrive and part of the files I had recovered. So I used another computer to burn it to a CD, and as Nero, for some reason wouldn’t recognize the .img file type of the iso, I used a free program called Burn 4 Free. Once that was done, I put my new XP install CD in my laptop and waited. After another 40 mins or so, I was able to log in. Yea!! But I had absolutely nothing. No OEM drivers, no internet, zip, zero, nada. So I decided to try the IBM thing again, just to get that. I had an Administrator account now that worked, after all.

Same as before, installed, rebooted, login screen… **Bong** AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

How can i reset this Administrator password? So a googling we go. Oops, sorry! I mean, I did an internet search using google.com. Much info abounds on how to attempt, both legally and illegally to get around the Administrator password. But the article i found most useful was this one… I Forgot My Administrator Password!!. It informs the reader of a (may I say) scary access hole during the install process. At one point you can hit SHIFT+F10 and bring up the windows command line, from which you full access to the system. Simply call up nusrmgr.cpl and you get the familiar windows gui for changing passwords. You can wipe out the admin password, or create a new admin account. I assume you could use this access hole to retrieve data using notepad.exe “<file name>”, and who knows what else. And as this can be done during a XP repair install, it could give you full access to all the data on the computer as Administrator once the repair is done running.

As it turned out, there was no Administrator account, just one called dormsupport (still on my computer and with no idea as to the password for it). So I created one, saved, closed and exited the command line and continued the reinstall.

Finally, after 13 hours, I was back in. Next to install XP SP2, and 62 other critical updates, and I was back in business around midnight. Meanwhile, we got the content for EBC-EBCA’s site uploaded, and began the process of domain registration transfer and DNS propigation.

So that was my weekend. How was yours?

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“The person you are trying to reach is not available. Please leave a message after the ‘meep’… Meeep!”

Find out about the updates here: Google Talk

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Well, this birthday boy probably won’t be blowing out any candles, and definitely not eating any cake, but it’s still worth celebrating.  Happy Birthday to the personal computer (PC).  Or more accurately, happy birthday to the IBM 5150, the first computer model that really took off in the business world.  Sure the Apple II was out, as was Atari’s model, but as a business manager would you rather buy a machine from the International Business Machine company or the company named after a fruit?

IBM 5150

The IBM 5150 has much in common with the desktops today. Separate keyboard and monitor, for starters.  It ran what IBM called PC-DOS which it got from Microsoft (MS-DOS), who bought it from a Seattle based company (QDOS – Quick and Dirty Operating System).  Most computers still run it today, although hidden.  The first program made for this program, a spreadsheet called VisiCalc, can still be run on computers today.  (You can get it here.) And it had an Intel processor.  Using off-the-shelf components made by someone else’s was new for IBM, which made it possible for other companies to clone its machine.  Thus the sale of personal computers exploded.

Price?  $1265 + monitor, floppy disk drive (upgrade from cassette drive), and $40 for PC-DOS.  Other OS’s were available but they cost from $400-600 (M$ hasn’t always been the most expensive).  One other impressive note for the time, both upper and lowercase letters could be used (the Apple II only had uppercase).

IBM sold their first unit 25 years ago today.  So Happy Birthday to you personal computer, how would we function today without you?

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Boot XP from grub – check.
Had to add the following line to the /boot/grub/menu.lst under Windows XP before “chainloader +1″
map (hd1) (hd0)
I also changed root (hd1,0) to rootnoverify (hd1,0) but I’m not sure if that makes a difference or not…

Get programs from universe and multiverse – check.
Not too difficult, but had to enable the correct repositories and then set up the proxy. I was then able to get Mozilla Thunderbird installed, however I’ll probably manually install the newer version, 1.5 later.

Install fonts, particularly Verdana – check.
With the universe and multiverse enabled, I was then able to download msttfonts, which includes Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, etc. All the standard windows fonts that I’m used to. Getting this done was a bit more tricky though. I had to configure the proxy, not only in Synaptic Package Manager, but also in a the wget file. I also needed the cabinstall package to get the fonts to work.

So that’s all good for now, I’ll see what I learn next…

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First, I had a problem w/ my screen, which i mentioned before. Turns out it was just a loose connection between my screen and motherboard. So that's been fixed. (Free service is really nice.)

Now for problem two… Getting Linux (grub specifically) to play nice w/ a USB hard drive. Thankfully, these problems were easily resolved with a step-by-step guide at ubuntuforums.org. It took about an hour to get it installed. And then another hour to figure out few tweaks (get the middle button on my Thinkpad trackpoint to work, install Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5). And in the process of doing that I began learning about using the command line and Linux permissions. Good stuff. So everything is up and running just great.

There are still a few things on the Linux to-do list… Be able to boot Win XP from grub, get some programs from the universe and multiverse, add some fonts (I wonder if Verdana works in Linux…), and a few other miscellaneous things. But that gives me something fun to work on in between school. (Not that school's not fun, but you know…)

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