Don't Back Down

So it seems that everything works pretty well - except for the comments. I think the process in general is okay, but the actual posting takes forever (okay, 10 seconds or so). The problem is that this causes timeouts, and errors messages, and duplicate postings, and all sorts of nonsense that I'd rather do without. I've traced this problem to the build of the archive page. For the time being, I've turned off the rebuild of this page, and it drastically sped up the rebuild time, so the commenting process works quite well. Now I just need to rework some things on that page so that it can be up-to-date as well...

Update: It looks like the archive page is updated, and building dynamically as desired. I'll work on the code and make it available on the company site soon. Keep your eyes open.

I've recently finished reading several books by Larry Burkett, including Debt-Free Living: How to Get Out of Debt (And Stay Out), Investing for the Future and The Coming Economic Earthquake. Each of the books, as I'm sure you may surmise, has to do with economics and (personal) finances.

Most are relatively dated, not only because he died a couple of years ago, but because many of the books I found were at the thrift store, meaning they've been on someone's shelf for a while, until someone - perhaps the same person, perhaps not - decided to pass them along to someone else, which is where I come into the story.

Read "Larry Burkett Financial Reading" »

I've just completed the installation of Movable Type 3.17, released earlier by Six Apart. The installation went well. Anyone looking for assistance in upgrading, let me know. We do Movable Type Consulting, you know.

Read "Movable Type 3.17 On Tap" »

I find it interesting in our world that so many people still don't include the area code on their signage. I'm driving through a strange town and see a number - 555-1212. How am I supposed to know the area code in order to dial them, either then or later?

In Charlotte, we have two area codes - 704 and 980. I think 980 is used pretty much exclusively by Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Microsoft (it's also on a growing number of cell phones, including my wife's) beause they needed large contiguous blocks of numbers. So it's perhaps understandable that people still use seven-digit numbers on their signs - though apparently they don't care about the "drive by" traffic.

Read "Area Code Shenanigans" »

Not long ago, I noticed that one of my inbound Vonage lines was down. Then the other. Then I noticed on their site that 704 and 601 area codes were having problems with inbound calls. Then they added 504. A few minutes later it became 16 area codes, which is where it stands now. It will be interesting to see how long it takes them to get things going again.

Read "Incoming Vonage Lines Hosed" »

It seems that Alan Greenspan thinks that the situation where short-term yields are higher than long-term yields is simply an anomaly. This, despite the fact that this has happened before, and when it has, it has indicated what we shall call an "economic slowdown". Naturally, we all want to be optimists, especially when our job is involved. You think perhaps Mr. Greenspan is just viewing the world through some rose-colored glasses? Only time will tell.

So I'm in the process of moving some mailboxes from an SBS 2003 server to Exchange 2003 on a Windows 2003 Server installation (need more than the 75 licenses that SBS offers). All went really well, except I couldn't get RPC over HTTP to work on the new install. I was up all night Sunday trying it, and it just wouldn't take. Worst yet is that I then had to switch everything back because it was getting close to the time people would start using the system.

I've since managed to get things working again, but it was a multi-step process.

Read "Exchange 2003 and RPC over HTTP" »

It seems that the folks at Six Apart have released a new plugin for tags on your entries, which seems to replace and/or to complement categories. I've talked about tagging before. I think it's a phenomenal technology. The problem with this, and with categories in general, is that those are my tags. This has been covered here before, by me and by others.

Read "Playing a Little Tag" »

So it looks like the rumors are finally true. Apple is moving to Intel processors, beginning in 2006. Cringely thinks this is an attempt to dethrone Microsoft. Tim Beyers at The Motley Fool thinks Intel is not the target, but Dell is in the crosshairs.

While I think Cringely is a good read, I might have to take the other side of this argument. Why? Because I recall something I read a while back that made loads of sense. I'd say that it was Cringely that said it, but I couldn't find it when I looked. And that is that Apple makes a load more money from selling the iPod than they do from selling tunes, and probably with a whole lot less effort. Sure, the music is what makes the iPod useful. But that's not where the money is in this equation.

And it won't be any different in the future - the thing Apple has going for them at this point is their incredible line of devices. Sure, the media (and by extension, the software that makes the media possible) is nice, but let's face it - much of that is almost given away, and only a few cents per song make it to Apple's pockets. I doubt that the media moguls will want to change that - Apple is a middleman in that market and nothing more. The profits are for someone else.

Meanwhile, their hardware generates much more profit than iTunes ever could. So it makes sense for Apple to continue in that direction - this brings them closer to the Dell model than Microsoft. But it's a model with the Apple brand behind it - a commodity with style, and that's the difference.

Either way, it could be a compelling story to watch. We'll just have to see how it turns out.

I recently ran across a spate of the dreaded errors in the event log saying that my time synchronization wasn't happening. What a nuisance. Luckily, I found my way to a page that tells you how to fix time synchronization issues. It's geared towards Small Business Server, but it works on Windows 2003 Server as well.

Read "Fixing Windows Time Issues" »

I ran into another issue where I was trying to use the management console for the Trend Micro OfficeScan software. But as soon as I logged in, it told me that I had timed out and made me log in again. That's just insane - even the fast-talking Micro Machine guy couldn't get anything done that quickly!

So I went browsing around and finally found my way to this page that addresses the issue. This is for the dialog that says Your OfficeScan session has timed out. Please log in again. Obviously, there is a timeout built in (by default it is 30 minutes). If this is your problem, just log in again.

But in this case, it was immediate. It turns out that the problem was that the IUSR_computername user, that is used to run the IIS process, didn't have authority to the TEMP directory, found in the PCCSRV directory under your OfficeScan installation directory. By default, this is found at:

      C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\OfficeScan\PCCSRV\TEMP

Once I added the user to the permissions, the console fired right up.

Last night we went to see The (New) Amityville Horror. While my expectations weren't especially high (in fact, they were pretty low), I was impressed. Well, perhaps not impressed. But I wasn't entirely disappointed.

The mood of the movie was very dark, but also very believable - and the spooky moments really jump out at you. All too often a turn of the corner or a certain situation will nearly tell you that something is about to happen. In this go-round, it was different, and there were truly some jumpy moments.

Read "Suitably Spooky" »