This last week we had a client running a server on Windows 2000 that began expiriencing hardware issues.  Don’t everybody gasp at once.  I know that it is quite shocking that a Windows 2k machine could possibly be getting a little old and have hardware issues.

The motherboard was well on her way to giving up the ghost and one of the first symptoms was data coruption.  After a test using quicktec, we discovered that one of the RAM banks had failed and was no longer functioning.  Our initial thought which is actually laughable now was to try and find a replacement board that matched the existing motherboard. That of course was fruitless considering in computer years the hardware in this machine is easily 800 years old.

We opted then to go the upgrade route.  We weren’t too certain how Windows would react to a shiny new Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a new board and ram.  Not too much to our surprise the first attempt at booting after the new hardware was installed resulted in the infamous Blue Screen of Death.  It did manage to get a couple of devices installed before the BSOD.  At this point we opted for Safe Mode.

Safe Mode gave us much better results.  The remaining hardware that could be detected (IDE bus, SATA devices, USB, and other generic drivers) installed well but we couldn’t get the mother board driver disk utility to run.  We ended up having to install the Radeon video card drivers manually and then boot into normal mode and the rest of the drivers were able to be installed.

I almost forgot to mention that we couldn’t get the mother board driver disk to run because we didn’t notice the tiny DVD logo on the disk and of course this dinosoar of a machine didn’t have a DVD drive.  External USB drive to the rescue.  Which again worked remarkably well considering the OS.  At least this machine was running SP4.

So the moral of the story is if you have  a few hours to kill and a lot of patience, you can successfully upgrade the hardware of  a Win2K machine. Of course don’t forget to backup your data first.

I find it interesting that apple who as of late has had a terrible reputation with it’s batteries has opted to create  a notebook with a non-removable battery.  During MacWorld today it was touted that the new battery is able to run up to eight hours on a single charge and has the ability recharge up to 1000 times before degrading.  What is ironic to me is that I am creating this post with my current 17″ MacBook Pro laptop which I have had to replace the battery on due to the battery growing in size.  It wouldn’t have surprised me if the battery would have spilled it’s guts had I not detected the problem early on and removed the battery so as not to cause additional damage to my machine.  At least I was able to remove the battery and keep working while I waited to get it replaced after the hassle of dealing with apple care because my warranty was expired and had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a replacement.  It may have been easier if I lived closer to the coveted Apple Stores but the closet store is in Las Vegas, 3 hours away.  I hope that they’ve resolved the expanding battery issue as it’d be  a real pain to have to ship your entire laptop to Apple for repair.  I could at least keep working.

One thing that I will give to Mac, they know how to make a pretty machine.  Here’s a few pictures of the latest.

And here’s the link: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

Views 2 combined with CCK is by far if not the best drupal modules out there.  Gone are the days of tedious query writing and pagination coding.

The only issue that I’ve had trouble with using Views 2 is that even though Views does offer several options displaying all that wonderful content, you can’t always get it to show just how you want it to using CSS.

Enter the wonderfull world of the Drupal override system.  After Googling around for a bit I found out that it’s actually remarkably easy to override those default views templates.  All that you need to do is find the views-view-style.tpl.php file under /sites/all/modules/views/themes/*.

Copy that file to your theme folder and rename it to views-view-style–your-view-name.tpl.php.

Note the two dashes before your view name.  That’s about it.  I’d recommend doing a print_r($variable) in there to see what you have available.  From what I understand you can override just about every file in the views/theme folder.  Have fun making freaking awesome views!

I spent a few days looking around for an easy method to email all users in Drupal 6.  There are a few options available for Drupal 5 but I came into the drupal world late in the game and don’t really know my way around Druapl 5 and who could live without Views 2 module is beyond me.

The module name is Mass Contact and it worked for what I needed.

Find the module here: http://drupal.org/project/mass_contact

Microsoft has launched a new advertising campaign trying to promote Windows Vista by secretly rebranding Vista to Windows Mojave.  While Vista does have an attractive new look and some cool new features, there are tons of “features” that are not as appealing.  I’m yet to see an upgrade to Vista from XP that has gone smoothly and although Vista touts enhanced networking capabilities, it is actually quite difficult to integrate with other operating systems.  Let’s not even start with the UAC (User Access Control) that is so far over bearing that it’s almost comical.

At the end of the day, anyone can take a group of people, put them in a controlled environment, tell them exactly what to click on and have them be impressed.  Now take that new operating system and put it in a real environment with hundreds of computers and several operating systems and see how it performs.  Or perhaps the lack there of.  Hopefully in the next few service packs they’ll work most of the issues out and turn out a stable operating system.

We’ve been working for about 4 months now on increasing the search engine rank of one of our real estate clients which has proven to be very difficult.  You wouldn’t expect that there would be so much competition for rank but it does make sense when you consider that the phrase cedar city real estate has 5 sponsored listings at 11:30 PM and about a dozen at noon on Google with about 400,000 results.

So how do you compete with that? First it helps to have a descriptive domain name. Also make sure that you site doesn’t do the common taboos. Some taboos are keyword spamming (more than 10% keyword to content ratio), having duplicate title tags on pages, duplicate meta content (title, keywords, description), duplicate content, entry pages that don’t have unique content or only point to your main domain.

Some good things to do once you take care of the bad are new unique revolving content, rss feeds, a sitemap.xml file, signup for web master tools on Google, Yahoo, Live (MSN) Search.  In addition you need to increase your sites popularity. Spread the word on popular forums that relate to your site.

Some software that is available that will help you avoid the taboos and help you create the good stuff are Drupal and WordPress. Both of these programs have modules and plugins to help you spread the word and make your site search engine friendly.  Drupal is a content management system (CMS) and WordPress is blogging software.  You’ll notice that our site uses both. You’ll also notice that we have page 1 rank for “Southern Utah Computer Consultants”.

Obviously I haven’t told you all of our tips and tricks but if your site is in need of some SEO give us a call at 435-572-4849 and we can work out a plan to get you to the top or at least on page 1.

[EDIT]

So it’s now Oct 2008 and would you believe that Qwest is still to resolve this problem or contact me.  My client ended up just sending the information to a different email address.  Oh well.

[/EDIT]

[EDIT]

Well instead of 2 days I’ve given it 2 weeks and guess what?  That’s right, not even a peep from Qwest in the form of a response to my emails.  So now I’m just really frustrated with the incredibly poor customer service of the Utah telephone monopoly.

[/EDIT]

So one of our customers was having issues sending email to a qwest.net email account.

Here’s the error that she received:

SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<*******@qwest.net>: host mx2.qwest.net [207.109.18.197]: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [**.**.***.***](My IP Address) blocked using bl.qwest.net; IP **.**.***.*** (My IP Again) is locally blacklisted

So I first tried calling Qwest’s general support number. That was my first mistake. The incompetence level of tier 1 is astounding. If it doesn’t show up on their screen and there buddy on chat can’t figure it out their pretty much useless and instead of escalating you, try to blame the problem on somebody else.

Eventually they came to the conclusion that this was not their problem and told me that I needed to contact the people over at Qwest Office support. So I made the mistake of believing them and contact Qwest Office support. Per their instructions at http://www.qwestoffice.com I first tried sending an email to support@qwestoffice.com to which I of course received no reply. At least the message didn’t bounce though. Then I tried calling 866-881-3689 their 24 hour support number. I explained the problem to them and they told me that mx1.qwest.net is maintained by the DSL department and I would have to contact them with the problem. I was then transferred to DSL Support.

At this point I’m really getting frustrated. Nobody like to be bounced around.

After some time reexplaining the problem again to the people over at Qwest DSL they respond that “That problem is because that address has been ported over to Qwest Office and that’s what’s causing the error and that if I contacted the Qwest.net customer and had them place a support request that the problem could then be resolved.”

Great finally at least an answer albeit a terrible one. Why should I have to contact my client and have them contact their client just to have the qwest.net customer have to spend 2 hours on the phone trying to troubleshoot with qwest a qwest problem?

Well the story doesn’t end here. Being the astute administrator that I am, I think that answer that they gave me makes no sense. I wasn’t getting an address not found error. I was getting your server has been blacklisted error. So I get smart and send the qwest.net customer an email from my Gmail account. Would you believe that the message went through. OH MY GOODNESS, TIER 1 WAS WRONG AGAIN!!!! What a surprise that one was.

This post is really getting long. But I think that’s the point that I’m trying to make. Why doesn’t qwest have a page that google can spider so I can actually find a way to contact the qwest internal blacklist adminstrator. Hopefully that’s what this page turns into.

So now I call up my trusty Qwest Sales Rep. He of course doesn’t handle the support side but told me to try the live chat help line on http://www.qwest.net site. So that’s what I’m doing now while I’m writing this post. Here’s how that went.

User Jon Heaton has entered room

Qwest Analyst Donny has entered room

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 12:56:07 MDT 2008)>

Thank you for contacting Qwest QuickAssist – DSL Technical Support. My name is Donny and my tech ID is DH1. I apologize for the issue you are having. That is something I can help you with and I’ll attempt to get this resolved for you as quickly as possible.

Can you please provide me the following pieces of information so that I can begin a ticket as well as gather network information on your issue:

Your DSL phone number and email address.

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 11:58:12 MDT 2008)>

I don’t have a DSL phone number. I am a Web Hosting Server administrator and my customers are having difficulty trying to send emails to qwest.net customers. Your server is bouncing my emails back saying that my server has been locally blacklisted.

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 11:58:23 MDT 2008)>

This is more than likely a Tier 3 support problem.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 12:58:36 MDT 2008)>

I would be happy to try to contact Tier 3 if you believe it’s a Tier 3 issue, however it may be some time before I can do that for you. Here in chat we work with several customers all at the same time and making calls to Tier 3 often takes time. If you would like to wait, I would be happy to work on that for you. Otherwise, I may suggest calling into us directly and have a tech work directly with you.

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 12:00:16 MDT 2008)>

I would be happy to wait. I’ve already spent 2 hours on the phone today with Tier 1 support and I’m tired of dealing with them

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 12:00:27 MDT 2008)>

At least this way my ear won’t get sore.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 12:59:28 MDT 2008)>

I’m in Tier 1 sir.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 12:59:35 MDT 2008)>

I see.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 12:59:42 MDT 2008)>

I’ll be with you as soon as I can.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 13:14:49 MDT 2008)>

Here is the response from Tier 3 regarding your issue: Analyst David(Mon Jun 23 13:07:17 MDT 2008)>He can send an email to postmaster@qwest.net with examples — the headers will be helpful as well & our postmaster group will remove him from the blacklist if apporpriate & reply to let him know

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 12:17:17 MDT 2008)>

ok just a minute I’m sending the message.

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 12:19:37 MDT 2008)>

The message appears to have been delivered. Do you know approximately how long it should take for them to process the emai from me? Or to respond to me?

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 13:18:51 MDT 2008)>

It can take up to 48 hours.

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 12:21:17 MDT 2008)>

Ok. I’ll let my client know that it is Qwest’s fault that they cannot sending their advertising proofs to their client for up to 48 hours from now while we wait to have this request processed. I’m sure they won’t be happy with this but I guess there is nothing more I can do about this.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 13:20:29 MDT 2008)>

Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Jon Heaton(Mon Jun 23 12:21:46 MDT 2008)>

That’s it thank you.

Analyst Donny(Mon Jun 23 13:20:48 MDT 2008)>

It has been a pleasure working with you today. Please bookmark the High-Speed Internet site at http://www.qwhelp.com You can also download the QuickCare program from there.

Order all of your new services such as DirecTV, Cellular Service, VoIP, or Telephone Services at http://www.qwest.com/residential/refer/index.html Use the REFERENCE CODE of ‘dxhans5′ and you will be offered the best deals and promotions running right now on all of our services.

Again, my name is Donny and my tech ID is DH1. Thank you for contacting Qwest QuickAssist and have a good day.

I really liked the sales pitch there at the end. So I’ve sent the email to postmaster and am now patiently awaiting 48 hours for the reply. What do you bet I won’t ever see a reply just like the support request to Qwest Office? Oh well. I hope I get this figured out and this is at least useful to somebody else later.

So blog posts are turning into more of a monthly than weekly thing. I think that’s a good sign that business is moving along.

Now on to the topic. With computer security and online identity theft such a concern today, Dominik Reichl has come up with a really handy Open Source (FREE) utility to help you keep all of your vital passwords safe. It’s called Keepass. Keepass (according to their web site http://keepass.info) is “a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. So you only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).”

I use it in my company and in my home and I recommend that you do too.

Here is the download page: http://keepass.info/download.html

Is Your Web Site Handicap-Accessible?

Making online access easy use for blind and other disabled users is gaining attention because of class actions against companies like Target

by Karen E. Klein

Amber Grant, 18, eats, sleeps, and breathes the Internet, according to her father, Garry Grant, CEO of Carlsbad (Calif.)-based technology outfit SEO Inc.. The company, which has 65 employees, often calls on Amber to use her prodigious Web skills to help with a vexing problem: checking to see whether its clients’ Web sites are accessible to the blind.

“I give her tasks to go onto clients’ Web sites, find a particular product, select it, purchase it, and get through checkout securely. If it takes way too long, or it’s difficult or impossible, I know we need to do some work,” says Garry Grant, whose daughter has been blind since birth. Amber is able to navigate the Internet using a “screen reader.” This is software designed for individuals who are blind, dyslexic, or have low vision. The software resides on the user’s PC and reads the text on the screen out loud, using braille-enabled keyboard commands rather than a mouse.

Read the Entire Story at: BusinessWeek

Additional Resources

World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative

The International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet

Cynthia Says (free online evaluation tool)

By Phil Brisk
Phil Brisk is an advertising writer and creative director with over 20 years experience in broadcast, print and online media.

When you’re designing a web page, it’s easy to get sucked into the detail.

With your ‘design’ head on, concentrating on crafting and perfecting style elements, it’s easy to forget to step back and see things through the eyes of your users.

Your users aren’t interested in giving your design work marks out of 10. They just care about getting all the relevant information, in as little time as possible, and then moving on.

So how do you give your readers the stuff they need in the way that they want?

For a start, you can draw on the experience of traditional print designers.

After all, they’ve been tackling the same challenge for decades – in press ads, in brochures, in leaflets, in mailings. And over that time, they’ve established some pretty sound guiding principles.

1. Remember how brains work

There’s nothing our brains like so much as order and meaning. It’s what they search for from the moment they encounter anything new – and that includes your web page. If brains can’t find the sense and order they need, they soon grow exasperated and give up.

The best print designers know this. They’ve also learned that, the more elaborate the design, the greater the risk of confusion. That’s why they usually steer clear of fussy and showy designs.

Instead, their layouts have a ‘quieter’ feel, with all the individual elements directed at letting the page information unfold as easily as possible. Headlines, subheads, body copy point size, pictures, colours – all are used to ‘signpost’ the route the good designer wants the reader to take through the material placed before him. A route that’s guaranteed to leave him feeling better informed, and better served, at journey’s end.

Does this approach make a difference? You bet it does!

In over 20 years, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen a more restrained, reader-focused design for an ad or brochure outperform a flashier, supposedly more eye-catching alternative. In most cases, the content has remained the same. It’s just the way the content is laid out that’s different.

2. Remember how eyes move

In our culture, we’re trained from the moment we start reading to scan from left to right, starting from the top left of the page and working down to bottom right. We develop a natural rhythm as we do it, with our eyes moving swiftly to the end of each line, then skipping back to the start of the next.

Oh, and by the way, our eyes don’t like to have to constantly readjust their focus. It just leads to strain.

So far, so obvious. But it’s the obvious that’s often overlooked, particularly by designers who want to ‘create an impression’ by doing something radical, such as running the main headline around the page margin, or by making interesting shapes with the body copy.

I could go on, of course. I could talk about startling use of contrasting colours. Or reversing out large chunks of text. Or running it over a picture. Or experimenting with lots of different typefaces and point sizes. Or dotting illustrations all over the page.

All these stylistic touches may look really cool. And result in something you’d love to hang on your wall. But that’s not the goal, is it? Your aim is to make life easier for your reader. Yet, too often, the kind of visual tricks listed here do exactly the reverse. They disrupt natural eye movement. They strain the eyes by asking them to jump around the page, from element to element, with the need for lots of re-focusing along the way. They frustrate the brain in its instinctive quest for logical order and meaning.

I’ve seen many over-excitable, over-designed print layouts fail miserably when they leave the rarefied atmosphere of the design studio and enter the real world where the readers live. And, equally, I’ve seen genuine commercial wonders worked when those same layouts are placed in wiser hands.

In one case, for instance, a loss-making full-page press ad featuring a large slab of reversed-out body copy was transformed by the simple act of running the text in conventional black on white. The freshened-up ad – with nothing else changed – then brought in over a quarter million pounds-worth of orders on its very first outing.

On another occasion, I saw a product brochure achieve a 543% – yes, 543% – increase in response after a design ‘re-vamp’. The main changes were to switch from a sans serif to serif typeface (easier to read) and to remove a number of small pictures from the right margins of the pages (on the grounds that, in this position, they might be distracting the reader’s attention at the wrong moment and preventing his eye from returning back left to start reading the next line).

“Fine,” you may think. “But that’s print. What’s it got to do with designing for the web?”

Actually, everything. Because what’s been happening design-wise in print – the successes and the failures – is being repeated right now on-line. Just take a look at a dozen or so web pages, selected at random, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

3. Above all – remember you’re here to communicate, not decorate

If you only want one guideline, make this it. Because, frankly, for all the reasons already given, there really is nothing more irritating to readers than design for design’s sake.

This isn’t to say your web page shouldn’t use all the design elements and special touches that create style, pace, flair, excitement, intrigue, emotion. Of course it should! But these elements must always be relevant and appropriate, and not distract from a clear, coherent whole effect.

Remember this, and you’ll vastly increase your chances of creating effective online design – a design that draws attention to the message, not to itself – a design that will serve your web site visitors rather than dazzle them.

In my experience, this is good business sense. Especially if you want to turn those visitors into customers. Because they can’t give you money while they’re rubbing their eyes or scratching their heads.

Originally published under a Creative Commons License.