TomTom One XL

A couple of weeks ago, some dirtball stole my trusty old handheld GPS right out of my truck in our driveway.

I ended purchasing a TomTom One XL. Shortly after that, (totally unrelated) the hard drive on my HP crashed which wiped out my install of TomTom Home. Once I got the new laptop running, I thought I would simply download the software and install it rather than hunt for the CD. The problem was it took a good half hour to locate the download on the TomTom site.

I finally found it and downloaded it. For the life of me I don't understand why the website designers don't have a download link on the product page. Oh well, that would make too much sense.

Overall the unit is pretty good. The software is essential for backing up your destinations and routes.

There are a couple of things I like about the unit

• You can get a cool English Female voice that says things like "Take the Motorway".
• It is pretty easy to operate for local destinations.
• The routes it picks are usually OK. However I did have one occasion where it took me through a really, really bad neighborhood. I should have realized that cannot be programmed in.
• If you deviate from the suggested route (ie make a turn a little early or late) it will quickly recalculate the route to your destination.
• It can show you local hotels and restaurants along with a whole lot of other locations.

There are a few things I don't really like

• If you want to plan intermediate waypoints (ie to avoid bad neighborhoods as listed above) that part is a little cumbersome. One problem I have is that if you want to go via a certain intersection, you need to know the town or the zip code where that intersection is located. That info isn't always readily available.
• When I first got the unit, I found it difficult to tell which favorite I was navigating to. We were heading to a wedding and I ended up accidentally choosing the location of the reception instead of the location of the ceremony. I was wondering why it seemed to be taking longer than I thought it would. That really wasn't the fault of the unit but rather my inexperience and a bit of sloppiness.
• I wish there was a way to do the itineraries on my laptop and download them so you don't have to mess with the little touchpad

All in all, it was well worth the price.

Lodgenet disconnects me causing a loss of a shopping cart

AAAAArrrrggghhhh



I'm staying at Congress Hall in Cape May, New Jersey for a couple of days. I wanted to configure a dell system for one of my clients while they can still get XP. It took me about 45 minutes to get the configuration exactly the way I wanted it. At 11:59 PM I hit "Save cart" and...... Nothing happened.



I got the 'sign in with your password prompt' which wiped out my cart page causing me to lose the cart (The back button would not work)



I had tried the password the hotel gave me earlier but apparently it changed. I'm not sure if it changes every night or just on Sunday Nights.



Anyway, the way it works really ticked me off. I realize they have to provide a measure of security but it's rather rude in the way it works.





I called Lodgenet and apparently the hotel where we are staying is set to require a new password every seven days so I just hit the "your luck sucks today" scenario.



I would normally use my sprint aircard but it keeps going to roam mode and sprint is a little fuzzy about how much, if any, additional charges would occur.



Anyway, back to trying to remember exactly how I just configured the system.

Outlook XP (2002) and Vista Home Premium won't play nicely

Let's file this one under Vista and Rants.

I'm on the road and I'm trying ot get Outlook XP to run under Vista Home Premium. So far, I have succeeded in connecting where it deleted the messages from the server but never downloaded them. Cute - 100+ messages up in smoke. The good news was that at least 90 of the messages were spam.

The reason I want outlook to work is that when I am on the road I like to have access to all of my contacts, tasks, calendars and old emails. During the summer, I don't like to leave the desktop running due to the heat. (I'm not going to air condition an entire house for one computer). What I did with my old laptop was to simply copy my current PST file to the laptop and then connect outlook to that PST file. Viola - I had everything that I needed.

One of the problems is that it seems that Outlook will not store your password due to the fact that the method of storing passwords used by outlook XP is not supported under Vista. That should mean that you have to enter the password every you open outlook.

The problem that is annoying though, is that every time I use outlook to connect to my pop3 server it creates a poplock and will not process the messages. I have to call the hosting company to remove the lockfile. I'm going to have to install Putty if I do it myself since the lockfile is hidden and most ftp apps won't see it.. They said it appears that outlook is somehow creating multiple pop3 logins and causing the lock.

It looks like I have a couple of possible paths to take.

• Keep screwing around trying to get outlook XP to work under Vista Home Premium. I can do that or I can do billable hours.
• Look into a hosted exchange solution. That runs into a few bucks each year but may be worth it.
• Upgrade to Outlook 2007. First of all, I don't like the interface. Also, I'm not sure if I will end up running into other issues with this.
• One other alternative is to try to use my gmail account for outgoing emails in outlook. The one drawback is that some people might reply to the gmail account athough the reply-to setting in the email account setup should take care of this.

Switched to Verizon Fios - Initial report -AAAARRRgggghhh

Since we were in a neighborhood with some really old copper, we finally decided to abandon Speakeasy's DSL after about 8 years of excellent service and uptime.

Verizon has been pushing their FIOS at just about every turn. We signed up and they started the install process. I have to say that the cable crew did an excellent job laying the fiber in our yard. It was a 75 yard run and it was hard to see where they had laid it when they were done. Everything was cleaned up completly.

The installer was great also. He was extremely polite and neat.

So, What's the beef.. The first thing is that the router they provided seemed to be dying on arrival. I'd lose connectivity about twice a day necessitating a reboot. In some cases just port 80 traffic died, not email on port 25. In other cases, everything went down. I called support and during the troubleshooting process, the router was responding. They could not replace it until I had further problems. Wonderful. I was back to the 'run to the basement and reboot the router' twice a day routine. This is ok when you are in the house but a pain when you are out and trying to remote in with go2mypc.

The kicker was when I was getting ready to go on the road. Due to having to rebuild my laptop due to a failed hard drive, I was under a lot of pressure. The router decided to die almost completely. I called tech support and took the callback option. The problem was I didn't respond to the callback voice prompt quickly enough and they hung up. During the second call they finally agreed to ship a new modem. If I wasn't on the road, I would have lost connectivity from Friday through Monday. Stellar service wot? The source of the problem definitely pointed to the router when you consider that I am using the same internal network I had used without problems for the past 7 years. I started shutting equipment down to isolate the problem and everything pointed to the router.

I was going to just network my desktop and laptop via a switch but decided to just shut the router off and try in the morning. I got connectivity in the morning and was able to finish transferring the files and doing some last minute downloads. Most likely there is some type of heat related issue with the router and letting it acheive room temperature overnight got it running.

Now, here is the next problem. I had installed Outlook on my laptop and was running into all kinds of problems. One of them was a test message I sent to myself that came back saying the IP I was using to send was on a spam blacklist. Great. Due to the dynamic IP, I got the IP that was used by some idiot in a way that got the IP blacklisted The company that hosts my email server confirmed the blacklist status and submitted a bl removal. The fear I have is that some portion of my outgoing email will, from time to time, be rejected because my current IP will be on a blacklist.

I'm going to have to see if there is any software that will allow me to monitor the ip currently assigned to see if it is on any blacklists.

Too many lawyers in this world. Yahoo Terms of Service

Check out Yahoo's new Terms of Service at http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/advertising/masterterms/masterterms-322.html The Optimization paragraph is currently number 3.

OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.

Whoa there Bessie... If I am reading this correctly, Yahoo can change your ads and do all sorts of other things with your account and then bill you for it. Huh?? I'm not sure but I kind of think this could possibly be a bad thing... Nahh, letting a company tweak your account and hold you responsible financially for the changes can't entail any risks now can it??

Disaster Recovery for Oscommerce Sites

We had a client who wants some database changes and associated programming. He sells fairly big ticket items but isn't doing a lot of volume at this point. On the other hand, he really could not afford to be down for any length of time.

We decided to purchase another domain and shared hosting account. If the stuff hits the fan with his primary host, we should be able to switch the dns pointers for his main domain name and reload the latest data from the daily backups he is supposed to be doing (that is another story for a later time kids...)

So, we purchased a domain name. No big deal. The next step was to get an economy hosting package from Westhost.com We've had a lot of luck with their hosting and especially their support.

The steps to get things set up on the new host were

1. Do an FTP download of the oscommerce code since it is heavily customized.
2. Set up PHP in the new hosting panel
3. PUT A robots.txt file in the root of the new hosting. You do NOT want the search engines to see duplicate content.
4. Go into Cpanel for the old host and download the databases. (Note we downloaded everything from the SQL backup, not the oscommerce database backup)
5. The old site was set up with a subdomain. I had to re-create this on the new site.
6. I uploaded all of the oscommerce code to the appropriate folders
7. I then used phpmyadmin to import the sql database.
8. Now things started to get a little hairy. There are a couple of config.php files where the sql connect data is stored in oscommerce. The problem was that on the old site, a user we created would work. On the new site, we had to connect as root. I'm not happy about that but it was the only way to get it to work. Connecting via Putty and ssh confirmed that root was the only user that would connect.
9. I made sure that the admin folder AND the store was behind an ID and password. We do NOT want people looking at this site. it is only for development at this point.
10. I had to go into the php.ini file in etc and set global variables on.
11. Once things were running I got a zend optimizer error. The folks at westhost went way above and beyond in trying to find a solution. It turned out that there we had to find all of the php.ini files and set them to the right version of zend. We were still getting an error.
12. The thing that finally wrapped it up was that I installed ecellerator (It think that is the right spelling). That seemed to resolve all the issues with zend.

Now, we have a fully working store and admin section where we can try out code. The robots.txt should prevent dupe content issues. Also, the password protection should keep the spiders out and also prevent customers from purchasing from the dummy store.

Now, the disaster recovery plan is this

1. We need to keep a current copy of the database and catalog. This means that we need to run the backup tool in oscommerce and also should be backing up AND downloading the sql database from the old site. Just to repeat, backing up is not enough, you need to be religious in downloading the backups to a local machine.
2. In the event of a failure, we would (1) remove the robots.txt from the alternate host, (2) Upload the database backups (3) Point the DNS for the main domain from the old host to the alternate host. (4) Say a LOT of prayers or sacrifice many small animals at midnight.

The moral here is that, had the hosting company crashed, we would have been down for at least a week or more. Having a development site that is set up as an emergency host is probably worth the effort for a lot of small oscommerce sites.

Open Source Alternatives to Exchange

As I mentioned in a previous post, we had a situation where we were looking at open source alternatives to MS Exchange. One thing to keep in mind is, that in this case, open source does not mean free. The client qualified for academic pricing which actually put the cost for 10 users on MS Exchange below the competition.

The first issue was a machine to run any linux based system. We had tried setting up VMWare on our new server which was running Server 2003. One installation of Ubuntu kept hanging up apparently because of issues with the US mirror servers.

We tried a copy of OpenExchange Express. That looked like a pretty decent product. It comes bundled with its own copy of ubuntu. It installed OK inside VMWare except that we could not see the exchange server on the network. It was probably just some minor tweaking.

We also looked at a trial from Zimbra. The platform looks good but we could not get ubuntu to install inside VMware as we mentioned above.

After all of that, we found out that the client's legacy programmers were using Exchange 2003 API hooks which clinched it. We had to go with MS Exchange 2003.

OpenExchange does have a higher end version that would support APIs but we felt that it would entail a little more risk.

The bottom line:

Microsoft is pretty generous with their licensing for Exchange for academic institutions. That pretty much negates any price advantage of open source software in this situation.

The open source solutions are worth looking at, especially for commercial use.

For more info

• Zimbra
• Open Exchange

Exchange 2007 requires a 64 bit Server OS

Aaaarrggghhhh.....

Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 requires a 64 bit Server OS.

I was a bit reluctant to go 64 bit with one of our clients mainly because they are running some legacy stuff. (I know, Foxpro's gotta go)..

They were running MS Exchange 2003 on an old Acer server. The CPU fan on the server locked up. Right now, we are trying to locate a replacement and have opened up the system and have a regular desk fan blowing on the CPU.

The only trial version for Exchange is Exchange 2007 which is a 64 bit version. I'm not sure I really want to rebuild the server from the 32 bit version. I did try some of the open source, linux based alternatives but none of them worked out. We found out that the legacy system was using some API hooks into exchange which most of the Linux work alikes don't support.

The licensing on the OEM version of Exchange won't allow us to transfer it to the new server.

The good news is that you can still go back one version with the licensing. We are working with the folks at CDW to get an expedited purchase of MS Exchange 2003 and the necessary CALs. That approach will probably be the least risk and will allow the folks who programmed the legacy system to keep using the Exchange APIs.