Tom’s Blog

Greetings and Happy New Year!

Today I launched a new site: New Day Web Design.  I am deepening my Web development techniques and want to have a more focused Web site for new developments.  In the last months of 2009 I started working with the Drupal Content Management System and now am ready to start building sites using this system.  It offers complex control of content delivery through modules which can be added to the system as needed. More about Drupal on my new site in the near future.

Of course I’ll continue Web development with Web 2.0 technology (html and css), along with WordPress for bloggers.

Wishing you all a very blessed 2010!

Yesterday I downloaded and upgraded Vista to Windows 7 (Home Premium) on my laptop in about 3 hours.  It was literally a flawless process.  And now that I’m using Windows 7, it really is the best operating system produced by Microsoft - it’s fast, clean, and very intuitive.  And I also noticed improved battery life.

The new task bar is sweet, too.

So without any hesitation, I would recommend upgrading as soon as you possibly can.

I recently downloaded Internet Explorer 8 and discovered that many Web sites do not render properly because IE8 is now more standards compliant.

What does this mean?

It basically means that sites that rendered (were viewed) properly in IE7 may not view properly in IE8.  Consequently, the user will need to change the compatibility settings for that site so that IE8 views it as though it was IE7.

And for Web designers, it means that we need to build sites that are more standards compliant, or we can add a Meta Tag to the head of our pages to render them in IE8 as though it was IE7.

Here’s the Meta Tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

I’d suggest putting it right under the Title Tag.

For more detailed information, go here.

Last week I had the challenge of networking a MAC (OS 10.5) with a PC (XP).  It wasn’t too difficult except for the fact that the MAC had a firewall setting that had to be changed for everything to actually work.  That detail wasn’t listed anywhere!  Once that was configured, everything came to life: printer sharing and file sharing all worked perfectly.  Or so I thought…

Now we’ve discovered another issue: Unable to Connect to CIFS…on the MAC.

So I Googled it and sure enough, this is a known issue with MAC OS 10.5 (Leopard).  So now it’s back to the networking set-up to ‘tweak’ the settings.

The important thing to remember in setting up a network like this: use ‘Workgroup’ as the network name.  It is the default name for both OS and for once, I really think the Apple World and the PC World are trying to communicate.

UPDATE: The known issue mentioned above was resolved by adding the printer IP addresses directly to the MAC printer set-up (rather than finding them on the network).  The exact details of the process are:

1. Open your system preferences > Open Print & Fax
2. Click + to add a printer.
3. Right-click on the Toolbar at the top and select “Customize Toolbar…”
4. Drag the “Advanced” icon to the toolbar & select “Done”
5. Click the “Advanced” icon
6. Select “Windows” from the “Type:” drop down menu
7. In the “URL:” textbox type the location of your windows printer in the format below (use the format depending on whether your Windows PC sharing the Printer has a password or not):
smb://username:password@ipaddress/printersharename <- Print Server does have a password
smb://username@ipaddress/printersharename <- Print Server does NOT have a password
(eg. smb://barney@125.254.95.101/ip4300)
8. Enter a Name and Location. (Human Friendly Names with Spaces are allowed)
9. Now select the appropriate driver and then click “Add”
10. Try printing something and then it will ask for a username and password of your windows server. Type and username and then the password and then add this to your keychain and click OK.

I missed it completely!  It was my hope to eventually plug my iPod into my computer with a firewire rather than my USB cable, but alas, the firewire I was hoping to buy doesn’t even exist any longer.  And besides, it would be slower then the USB anyway.

But don’t try to tell the people at Best Buy…I went from the iPod department to the computer department, then I was sent to a guy with an actual Apple logo on the back of his shirt, then back to the computer department.

Eventually I left the store with a new external hard drive!  Forget the firewire, I need more space!

Recently I purchased the new Microsoft Office 2007, as well as Expression Web for Web design.  Now that Microsoft is no longer supporting FrontPage, I thought I’d better upgrade to Expression Web.  The great benefit for me is using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  The code is clean and easy to understand and works well with most browsers.

So I’m having fun working on a set of new Web sites for a church community in South Minneapolis, St. John’s Lutheran Church located at 49th and Nicollet.  Be sure to check out their Web site to see how this all develops!

Click here to view their site.

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Tom

I’ve been taking my laptop to various coffee shops throughout the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) and working on the assignments for online classes I’m enrolled in.  I settled on the University of Phoenix and have discovered a wonderful community of students from around the globe who are all contributing to my education.  The degree program is in Information Technology (IT), and it will include Networking and Web Design, too.

In visiting so many coffee shops I’ve discovered the best skim-latte in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) - it is rich and foamy and perfect with my afternoon course work.  If you’re ever in Saint Louis Park - it’s the Dunn Bros. Coffee on Excelsior.  The staff are always upbeat and the service is excellent.

Back to class!

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So I took my laptop into the shop to add more RAM…it took 2 hours!  Usually we just open up the back and snap in the RAM, close it up and away we go - 10 minutes at the most.

But on this day, when we booted it up to confirm the RAM install, the control panel, and other stuff didn’t work.  So we thought it was the additional RAM - so we tried this and that, still the same results.

Eventually, I decided it wasn’t the additional RAM, so I had them install it and I did some research at home.  After a quick google search, I discovered that SP1 for Vista is deadly!  That lead to a very long day of reformatting the HD and reinstalling - so now I’m tracking the updates with great care, creating lots of restore points along the way.

Life is good!

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