Can Not Access Site (Windows)

Writing articles isn't quite so easy when you have a two year old daughter pawing for you attention and a four month old son that needs to be checked on from time to time. But still I feel a since of embarrassment at a set of instructions like this taking two or three hours to write.

I was writing them to be emailed to a client but since I spent so much time on them I figure it wouldn't hurt to copy and paste them here with a little editing work done to them. Hope it helps others troubleshoot their connectivity problems as well.

Troubleshooting Steps (for Windows Users)

Step 0: Like with everything else, switch off the modem, restart the computer, and turn on the modem again. Also clear the Internet cookies and browser cache. ... Also try a different browser (firefox / google chrome) and attempt to access the site. Problem gone? No, proceed to the next step. 

Step 1: 

• Start Internet Explorer
• Choose Internet Options from the Tools menu
• Click the Connections tab
• Under Connections:
• Click LAN settings if you are on cable or ADSL connection
• Under Automatic configuration; make sure that Automatically detect settings is unchecked

Ok close your browser, reopen it, and try the feedmylostlambs site again.

Step 2: Temporarily disable your computer's firewall and close any anti-virus software that may be running in the background. If you are now able to access the websites that were previously not loading, your security program is causing the problem. As as workaround, you can add that site to the "trusted" zone in Internet Explorer and see if it works.

Step 3: Try starting your computer in Safemode with Networking. Attempt to access a couple of different sites when you are logged into your computer this way (including the problem site of course).

Step 4: Open your hosts file and see if there are any entries for sites that are currently unreachable from your computer. The hosts file is located in the following folder:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Step 5: Try a remote screen capture site like capture.heartrails (sorry for the Japanese). Just click here and if you see an image of feedmylostlambs.org that means it works and the site is up. This will help you make sure that the site you are trying to access is not down at the source.

Step 6: Clear your DNS cache and run the ping and traceroute commands against the problematic site to make sure that it is not an ISP specific issue.

ipconfig /flushdns 
tracert www.feedmylostlambs.org
ping www.feedmylostlambs.org

If the DNS server is an issue, you can easily switch to Google DNS or OpenDNS without having to call the ISP's support. However, if the ping and traceroute connections are successful but the sites remain unreachable, we'll have additional troubleshooting that we'll need to do.

Step 7: Cf you are feeling adventurous you might see if the site is stuck in the registry somewhere. Here is where we get even deeper. I always advise caution regarding registry solutions.

Editing Video on YouTube

There are always cool new things on the Internet. Some would say there are TOO many cool new things on the Internet. There never seems to be a shortage of them. You can check out CNET, YouTube, StumbleUpon, a thousand Tech Blogs, and if you still run out of something to do you could Google your way into a fit of sleep deprivation and have your mother knocking on your door at 7am telling you if you don't get up you'll be late for the board meeting.

Alrighty so what have I found this week?

YouTube is growing up! Not that it hasn't grown up several dozen times before, but it's growing up again. There are so many things and ways to do things on YouTube that I hear there's a new YouTube associate degree being offered at your local community college.

Now you don't have to a professional to come out with cool professional looking videos and put them up on your YouTube channel. You do have a YouTube channel don't you? Where have you been?

So what you do is go to your handy dandy YouTube.com website that we've all known and loved for many years now, logging in, putting in your credentials, and then you get to this dropdown menu on the upper right hand side. You click and like java magic the first three inches of this page are filled up with your playlists and about six other options on the right hand side which will of course change next time YouTube decides that you know too much and you must be bored so HEY let's move something.

Ok so you have; Channel, Videos, Subscriptions, Inbox, and Settings on this right hand side and we want to go for "Videos". And Wow check this out we've got all your uploaded videos filling up the page and about an inch from the top here you have; My Videos & Playlists, My Channel, Video Editor, Create Videos, Subscriptions, Insight, ... ok forget about the rest of it we want to go for the third one here which is "Create Videos".

We click on the "Create Videos" link and we get HERE! Wow what's all this new stuff. We've got Stupeflix Video Maker
Tell a story with your digital content. Mix pictures, videos, maps, text, music and watch Stupeflix produce a stunning video in blah blah blah.

Next we have Xtranormal Movie Maker. Xtranormal lets you to turn anything you type into a fully-animated CG movie. Set up your scene, type in your script, and animate it instantly.

Only two more to go here.

GoAnimate 'says' it is a fun app that lets you make animated videos, for free, in just 10 minutes, without having to draw. And then lastly we have One True Media (these aren't my words ha ha) but it goes on to say that it's a simple powerful video creation thingy. Robust, fast and easy video editing. Combine and clip video and photos.

Although I have a lot of fun making fun of all this stuff I find on the Internet you can really do a lot of cool stuff with these things. So get in here, make a mess, make a few pieces of artwork, laugh, make fun of your family and friends, upload it to YouTube, plug it into LCD projector and show it at your next party.

Using CiviCRM Book Review

Good afternoon everyone. I've been struggling with health issues lately so this book review is coming out a bit late. The name of the book is "Using CiviCRM" with a tagline of "Develop and implement a fully-functional, systematic CRM plan for your organization using CiviCRM"

As far as I know this is only the second book that has been written about CiviCRM. The first was is a FLOSS manual entitled "Understanding CiviCRM" (which I've read). Regarding the latter I am quite impressed with the Floss Manual project. In short they are "Free Manuals, for Free Software". You can go there as I have done, peruse around, download and print anything you want. But that is a subject that deserves it's own review.

Using CiviCRM is a great addition to the library of information anyone is collecting for their CiviCRM work. Whether that work is development or whether it is simply a user role, you'll want to add this one to your library. Joseph Murray and Brian Shaughnessy (the authors) have a solid background in everything from CiviCRM itself to Web Development and the kinds of things that Nonprofit Organizations face on a day to day basis.

I started reading this book two and a half months ago. But since I only had a pdf copy it was dependent on what time I could read it when I was behind a computer. It wasn't until I got my new cell phone a couple of weeks ago that I was able to use Calibre and get an ebook on my cellphone; that's when the real reading began :-)

I am 'so' grateful for CiviCRM. When I was Executive Director of an NGO fifteen years ago I would have probably eaten CiviCRM for breakfast, taken CiviCRM for a walk in the afternoon, and put a copy of this book under my pillow at night in hopes that I would get some of what I had missed through osmosis. CiviCRM, as an opensource database project, has ninety percent of the features that the really expensive databases have and that last ten percent is likely something your NGO doesn't need.

Ok now back to the Using CiviCRM book. It's 464 pages long, more than twice the size of the free book. Admittedly you'll have to skip over the usual introduction and background pages to get to the meet of the book (as you do with most commercial publications) but once you do you will certainly appreciate the ease of read. The aforementioned FLOSS manual that I had read is no where near as easy of a read. So, if you are a development person you'll want to give a copy of this book to your client to reinforce the time that you spend with your client to train them.

Donald Lobo, Michal Mach, David Greenberg, Alan Dixon, David Geilhufe, Mohamed M. Hagag, Rico Landman, and Eileen McNaughton. Any of these names mean anything to you? If not then you probably haven't spent any time on the CiviCRM forums. It's always a good point for a technical book if it is backed, supported, and reviewed by the heavy hitters of the product it's about. This book has that. One of the many things that I appreciate about this book is that it doesn't try to suggest that CiviCRM is the best fit for everyone. As Joseph and Brian write in the Using CiviCRM, it's true that CiviCRM is not the best choice for everyone. My thoughts on this are trying to implement CiviCRM is something that you'll want to do if you have at least one really technically oriented person on staff who is already familiar with Drupal, and PHP. That person will also need to dedicate 90% of their time to this. Outside of that you'll want to hire someone to do it for you. And please note this paragraph is 'really' oversimplifying the matter. CiviCRM is a powerful tool that can meet just about every constituent management requirement that an NGO would need. As such it will require many resources as well but the return on investment will be substantial.

Here I'm struggling with how much information to include in this review. There is so much to cover in this book and perhaps the best advice I can give you is click here and download a free chapter of the book. Take a look at it, and if you think it will fit both your goals and your budget then go with the hard copy/ecopy bundle.

Ubuntu Source File

Some of you might remember source-o-matic from a few years ago. Well, it went away and there were no plans on bringing it back.

Enter the newest solution to create your source list.
http://repogen.simplylinux.ch/index.php
Be sure to backup your current one before you try it :-)

Combining Over a Hundred Text Files into One Text File

Or you could alternately title this entry:
What He Sed :-)

The kinds of things that I typically want to do aren't what most people would call normal. How many people that you know would ever come upon a situation where they would have three different directories which had more than sixty individual text files in each directory. And their end objective was to merge all of these text files into three different full text collections?

Copy/Paste you say?; or not for me. I just know enough to know that I can do it another way. A way that 'would' be easier and save time if I knew it off the top of my head. But 'no' I don't know it off the top of my head so I have to research it for five hours until I can get the right combination to get it done ... Would I have gone through with this if I had known it was going to take five hours? ... 'no' probably not.

But when you are in the midst of the problem, one hour into it, you think you are close enough to get it finished in another half hour. But then after ninety minutes you think "Well I already have an hour and a half into it and I'm so close so I might as well finish it.". And after three hours you say "I'm going to figure this out dag blame it!" :-)

Now the aforementioned merging of all of the text files in the same directory would have been easy enough. I was given a little help by a new facebook friend in the Philippines. And after a couple of tries we were able to conclude that cat * >> alltext.txt would do it for me.

However a few of the text files were crowded up a bit at the beginning and the end of them and I just need to add three or four blank lines to the bottom of each of the text files before merging them. Ok sound easy enough right? But really this is the part that took me most of that five hours ... So after several hours (excluding a couple of food breaks and a few breaks to give attention to my children) I searched a few dozen pages and read dozens of paragraphs.

I abandoned echo for a little while (a solution that had worked on a single file), went to sed (which I didn't know much about), went back to echo when sed looked too difficult, went back to sed after trying several things with echo that didn't work. Then looked over awk for a little while but thought that it was a whole different animal and went back to sed.

Does that sound convoluted enough? :-)

After several more tries I finally came up with the following line that I executed on my test directory and worked on three random files which I tested and have all turned out correctly.

sed -i '$ s/$/ \n\n\n\n\n\n/' *

whew !

Adware and Malware Blocking Tip

Are you a windows use? ... Well then you'll want to pay attention to this.

There are a lot of adware and malicious programs that are out there which the average windows user just doesn't have the time to learn about. And although lots of tech people are always telling you ways of conducting yourself on the Internet that will save you grief, I'm sure you've admitted to yourself that you just don't have the time to think about all of this.

Ok, so here is the answer that you don't have to do but one time and it gives you a layer of protection you don't have to think about. Best of all it costs you nothing because it's built into windows.

Click here, to download a host file to replace your current one. However if you don't know what a host file is and need some more help, just make a comment on this article and I'll talk you through it in a way that will help you and other readers as well. There is also a link here that is probably a LOT more detailed than most people want to get through; but useful if you can get through it.

Well, I haven't tried this on Linux yet but then again I haven't had any need to. I have a windows computer on our little network at home so it crossed my mind to block a few unwanted things that might come in on that computer. And on an additional tip, you 'can' use this with Mac (if needed).

Help My Roommate Uses All of My Bandwidth!

I could have titled this little gem with "Brother", "Cousin", "Son", or any number of family members but I thought that Roommate would be shorter than trying to include every family member in the title of this ... I haven't had to do this before but I've gotten really close on a couple of occasions. I started to write this as a comment on a friend's blog but it got too involved.

He, like many people, have run into the situation where one person on their home network (usually not so tech savvy) is doing something like gaming, watching movies online, or file sharing, that is sucking up lots of bandwidth and said person doesn't realize how inconsiderate that is for those of us trying to get some real work done.

There is a solution but it's not for the non-techy because this 'could' mess up (called bricking) your router. But I've flashed everything from old external modems to pentium computers. So, if you have any related body of experience to pull from you should be able to do this as well.

If you'd like to have the option of either beefing up your bandwidth or segmenting only a certain portion of your bandwidth you could buy the Linksys WRT54GL and then setup QOS where you can Prioritize the bandwidth by MAC Address. Once you flash your router there really is a LOT more that you can do with this than I could easily cover in a quicky article like this. But this is one sort of home network traffic shaping that would be an option.

There is also more than one option for the WRT54GL firmware. I've read the most about Tomato firmware and DD-WRT. You'd have to go through the features and functionality of those two to see what you'd want ... If you've never done anything like this before, it sounds harder than it is. It's just "a bit different" from what many people are used to. But if you've flashed a BIOS before you should be able to handle this without a problem.