Category: Software

Computer tools

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Windows bug causes problems with FileZilla

I have this bizarre problem trying to connect to my client’s ftp server from my workstation. I can’t! But I can shell into my linux server and ftp to the client server just fine. I wonder if it has anything to do with this bug:

Operating system problem detected!

Warning!

A bug in Windows causes problems with FileZilla

The bug occurs if you have
-Windows Server 2003 or XP 64
-Windows Firewall enabled
-Application Layer Gateway service enabled
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931130 for background information.

Unless you either disable Windows Firewall or the Application Gateway service, Filezilla will timeout on big transfers.

Update: See also http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912949

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Thinking about hosting your own blog?

I am a huge advocate of getting your blog away from 3rd party solutions like blogger.com. If you have blogspot in your blog’s address then you need to consider getting some hosting and using a solution like WordPress.org (note: wordpress.com is a 3rd party solution just like blogger.com and while I advocate every wordpress user having an account at wordpress.com for statistics and askimet key, you really need to use the open source software found at http://wordpress.org) WordPress is not the only content management system out there which is great for blogging. You have a ton of choices! If you have trouble setting up a WordPress blog, just contact me and I will help.

One negative in hosting your own blog is that you have to pay a host for server space. That is akin to renting a building to run your business. In the Internet business, like so many businesses, you get what you pay for. Free hosting will likely have problems but it is available. I have personally found 1&1 hosting to be very reliable with great customer service despite its low cost. I highly recommend 1&1!

The postive of paying for hosting is that you get full control over your content. If Blogger’s robots determined that your blog suddenly appeared like a spam blog, they could take you offline instantly and lock you out of your account. You could find yourself unable to access your posts and drafts. If Blogger suddenly went out of business or just quit, you’d be out of luck. Does this happen? Ask anyone that hosted their photos at Yahoo. Yahoo bought Flickr and did away with their photo hosting. Anyone that failed to move their photos by the deadline lost their pictures. All links to those pictures are now 404 pages. We personally came within minutes of failing to get our pictures moved. By paying for hosting, you get backups of your data, control of your site, and the ability to handle exceptions (like 404s) in a way that can benefit your audience rather than drive them away. Plus with your own domain name, you can virally market your blog by using the address in your emails. You can’t send an email from blogmaster@someblogname.blogspot.com but you can send an email from blogmaster@myowndomain.com and everyone who gets that email has the chance to say, "I wonder what myowndomain.com is?" Each email sent becomes a subtle advertisement for your site.

Banner1&1 has a great deal right now! Since Uncle Danny is testing the limits of my webspace and monthly transfer volume, I thought I should review the limits on my account. When I did, I discovered that 1&1 is offering their Business shared hosting at only $5.82 per month! (normally $9.99) This is for the first year only with a 1 year commitment. It’s worth it! Their standard packages are still month-to-month (no contracts; no commitments) if I am not mistaken. They are $3.99, $4.99, $9.99, and $19.99 for shared hosting with increasing benefit respective to price.

Full disclosure: The 1&1 links in this post are associated with an affiliate id. If you purchase hosting from them by using one of those links I do get a payment but the affiliate link does not influence my decision to recommend 1&1. I genuinely like their service! This is also not pay-to-post. I just did this of my own inspiration.

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Anyone want to do a group project?

I’ve never done an open source project before. Here’s my proposal. We write a WordPress plugin that helps create a blacklist of known content thieving IPs. When an IP from the blacklist requests the RSS feed or direct link from the WordPress blog, we deliver an anti-theft of content notice instead of the actual content. The plugin will have the ability to deliver a custom message allowing people the personal choice of making the payload as obscene or marketable as they like. I have some thoughts on implementation since the splog delivering the content might have a different IP than the scavenger. For instance, the plug could alter the comment interface to include a check to mark a comment or trackback as potential content theft. The plugin would then have to examine the server logs to try to draw a correlation between when the real content was posted, the IPs that requested the RSS or post, and the time the stolen content was posted. With large samplings to a single database I think we could be very effective at blocking the thieves. Now, what’s the abuse potential here?

After getting this working on WordPress, I think we could extend it to other platforms.

Update: Looks like Owen Winkler (Antileech) has already written this! Kudos! Lorelle gives an overview and also recommends Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin.

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Today’s Computer Utility Recommendation

Have you ever unexpectedly been unable to move, delete or rename a file because of a "file sharing violation?" Perhaps you have been frustrated by one of these messages:

Cannot delete file: Access is denied
There has been a sharing violation.
The source or destination file may be in use.
The file is in use by another program or user.
Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Cedrick ‘Nitch’ Collomb has written a fantastic program to deal with these annoying situations without even having to reboot the computer! It is called Unlocker 1.8.5 and I highly recommend adding this to your toolkit! I also encourage giving Cedrick Collomb a paypal donation. It’s worth it!

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Moan your IP address

Yesterday I mentioned a service that geographically tries to put your location on a map based on your IP address. An IP address uniquely identifies you (in some cases your network) on the Internet. If you are using a cable company or phone company for your Internet service, your IP address may periodically change. For privacy purposes or other reason you may want to know what the current address representing you.

As a side note, often the public IP address is simply that of the modem at your house. If you have a network behind that modem (which would be connected to the modem by a router), then the world will see all computers in your house as having the same IP address. Technically, the world thinks you have only one computer.

When I wanted to know my ip, I used to jump over to http://www.whatismyip.com/. But never again! From now on, I want a sexy girl to moan my ip! When you go to http://www.moanmyip.com/ your speakers need to be on. Although the voice might get you some looks, the site should be considered worksafe. If you are concerned, http://www.hearmyip.com/ is absolutely worksafe.

Make sure your toolkit of bookmarks includes http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and http://dnsreport.com/.

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Today’s Technical Challenge

As a web application developer, I am often asked to put a WYSIWYG editor into the application so that the end-user can use the application without having to learn HTML and CSS. There are plenty of free and commercial wysiwyg editors available. (Note to developers: bookmark that link!)

These editors are designed to be customized for your application. You can typically control what buttons appear, what the interface looks like, and so forth. My challenge is to not only change the appearance of the editor, but when the end-user begins typing I need to have that type appear in a default font family (Arial), font size (12pt), and justified to the left. That means if they cut and paste content the defaults need to be applied.

The editor I chose for this project was TinyMCE. I find it far easier to implement than the ever popular FCKeditor (and no..those are the developer’s initials). My editor of choice is typically Xinha.

I have found numerous references to setting content_css : "defaultcontent.css" in the tinyMCE.init and this does change the text as the end-user is typing but the font family select and the font size select menus remain at their default values. When you save, the font family and font size are not saved. Very frustrating.

Interesting!

May 3, 2007 – Adobe, to embed FCKeditor in ColdFusion 8

Adobe has chosen FCKeditor as one of the great new features of its next major release of ColdFusion, code-named Scorpio. Some reviews of it can be found on the web.

For ColdFusion programmers, it will be as easy as defining a tag to see FCKeditor displaying all its power on their pages, right out of the box.
[Source]

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Drupal – Not bad

I just finished a Drupal theming project. I rode a steep learning curve but I can dig Drupal now. Styling with css. Custom PHP. Custom nodes and blocks. Pretty cool! I do not think Drupal will steal me away from WordPress for blogging but it may steer me toward using it as a CMS platform for business website applications for businesses that want to have regular updates (ala blogging) and more interaction with their customers (ala forums).