New online backup?

Going through spiceworks the other day, and came across an online backup solution called egnyte. In the little advertisement, it stated unlimited backup. There is one caveat though, which is that there needs to be a minimum of 3 power users added to get it for free. It brings the price up to $45 a month. One other option is to use only one power user and add the unlimited storage for a total of $35 a month. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and as long as your data is encrypted, it should be safe.

There is a nice little calculator too.

Some resources for those looking to learn php

There was a new "tutorial" posted on the nettuts website. It isn't a real tutorial but a link to 25 other resources to help you get started if you are learning to program php for the first time. You may want to take a look at that site for more resources too. They also have some nice vids.

Progressing as an Individual Involved with Business

There was a new post on the business pundit blog that talks about a PMBA or Personal MBA. What I think is good about this program is that it gets people to start thinking about their network and working at making connections with people. It also helps to get the "lingo" down in a more natural way. That is great for all people.

What the program lacks though, is an officialness. There is no degree. There is no accredited program.

So if you are looking for that MBA, by all means get that MBA. If you just want a way to improve your interactions and knowledge in business and maybe work towards that MBA later, by all means, work for that PMBA.

My Wife's New Site

What kind of a husband would I be if I didn't post a link to my wife's new site. Okay, this post isn't totally altruistic as I worked on the layout and getting it all up and running. So there is a little bit of self promotion there.

The site all started when Lisa, that's my wife's name, got interested in coupons. She found lots of sites that made couponing (i don't know if that's a real word) exciting. So to spread the joy to other people she wanted to make a site that had information about abbreviations and tips to let beginner couponers get in on the fun without being outcast by more experienced ones. She also wanted to give away coupons to spread the fun for free. Out of that was born The Coupon Lottery.

Anyway if anyone wants to check out a site and get more information about coupon uses, the site is up and free to use. There are forums as well.

Service Businesses: Do You Ask Your Clients the Right Questions?

Well today must just be a day for insightful posts or I am just feeling really inspired. But here is a post from the small business trends blog about asking the right questions from clients. This puts more focus on what the client wants and less about what you think is right. And when it all comes down to it, the CLIENT is always right. Right?

Interviewing Programmers

I found this article going through the PHPDevelopers blog. It is one of their better articles that they chose to comment on. I just want to put it here so I can remember it and let other people find it if that is something they are looking for. The starting idea is:

I personally find that asking a coding test of junior programmers is a GREAT tool for helping to evaluate them. Typically just a very simple test, a basic CRUD application. Looking at what they create not only gives you insight into how they think and code (did they do MVC? a simple single .php file? handle web security? etc). It also gives you a great starting point to begin discussions with them in person, asking them about why they did (or didn’t) do certain things.

Those are things that a basic PHP programmer should at least know of.

How Far Spiceworks Has Come

I tried out Spiceworks when it first came out and was disappointed with its very very very long scan and response times, its inability to correctly categorize machines and software, and to top it all off, I had to endure the ads.

Well Spiceworks has come a long way since that first beta edition I tried out and now seems to be coming together to form a great products.

First of all, it was able to find everything on my network within 10 minutes and correctly identify every piece of hardware except for a couple of switches with web interfaces and a PBX. I was blown away by that. In fact, in my first use of the program (way back when) I don't remember it categorizing anything for me. There was one hiccup in my most recent use though, and that was having to reboot a couple computers because WMI wasn't able to get stats. After that everything went perfect.

The new help desk is so useful and easy to read. I stopped using OTRS because I found Spiceworks easier to use and read, and the emails it generates are a lot easier for my users to understand as well. The categories were a not the easiest thing to edit, but one quick search through the Spiceworks community forums revealed the answer.

There are still ads which are one thing that can be annoying, but Spiceworks is a free product. And interestingly enough, it seems to do a pretty good job at targeting the ads. I always seem to find useful ads when I am doing other things.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that Spiceworks is a fine product now and something that I would, and do, use in a production environment. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a simple free way to manage their network resources or who needs a simple help desk tool to help them keep track of their to-dos.

Review: 10 Advanced Tips to Improve your Programming

While reading through one of the feeds on PHP programming, I came across an article on advanced tips to improve my programming. I though, it might be a good read with some useful information, so I proceeded to read.

The first comment was great and provided a link to a good article with a SQL injection cheat sheet. With the first tip being very good, I though I was in for a good read.

That is where everything changed. There are some very bad style issues concerning this article. Sure its great if you want to cut down on the amount of code you want to use and make it run a little faster. But realistically you should always use brackets and proper spacing and indentation, as well as comments.

What I got out of this article for good tips:

1. Use an SQL Injection Cheat Sheet
2. Know the Difference Between Comparison Operators
3. Use str_replace instead of ereg_replace and preg_replace
4. Use isset instead of strlen (who uses strlen?)

It might also be good to use a framework and memcached but that all depends on how big of a project you are working on.

Jquery and google analytics team up to track downloads

While searching for a way to track downloads from my websites I came across this post on how to do it with jquery. Since I use jquery for a few things already I thought it'd be a good match.

I’ve quickly modified gaTracker to utilise the new API and call it’s _trackPageview() method rather than using urchinTracker(). The code is available below:

jquery.gatracker.js (Tracking API version)

It works in exactly the same way as the gaTracker 1.0.1 release, and can be dropped in it’s place, but utilises the new tracking API. Feel free to grab a copy until support gets built into the official release.

The great thing about this plugin is that it loads the ga tracker before adding the onclick events. Apparently this is a requirement by the google analytics api.

How to hack an MSI to install on an older version of Windows

I sometimes use Windows 2000 and some installers will only install on a higher version of windows. This method isn't an exact science but will sometimes allow you to install MSI's on older versions of Windows.

First of all I use a tool from Microsoft called Orca. It allows you to edit the database information contained inside of an MSI. You should probably generate transforms and use those to install instead of altering the original MSI file.



The first thing you should do is try and install the file using the MSI itself. If it does install, then great, you don't have to do anything. If it gives you an error message such as "This program will only install on Windows XP SP2 or higher", then you should try and edit the MSI file. I'll briefly go through the process of editing the installer for Crystal Reports 2008.

I opened up Orca and did a search for the error message I was getting. I found the error under the "Launch Condition" section of the installer. All I had to do was delete that line then it passed that area of the installer perfectly.

I ended up getting a second error message "PIDKEY passed to installer is invalid. Quit Setup.". All I had to do was search for that message and found that under the "Action" column was "KeycodePassedIsInvalidMsg". So that meant that this was the action applied from some condition. Doing another search for "KeycodePassedIsInvalidMsg" revealed the condition. Turning that condition into an expression that is always false such as "1=2" fixed that error right away.

After fixing that, I was able to install the program on Windows 2000 and it seems to work perfectly. No guarantees though.