place of nathan.

This week, I’ve been working on bring back to life a couple of older office computer to turn into day care ‘play’ computers.
I had three old computers, purchased in 2001 (I actually have one computer identical to these still in use), before Windows XP was released, so they all came with Windows 98se installed on them. I had since upgraded them to Windows XP, and so this week, I’m combing three crappy computers into two killer 98se machines.
One of them had no sound card (which renders it useless as a day care gaming computer), one bad a bum hard drive, and another had a bad hard drive fan and cd-rom drive. So I parted out the one unit, split its ram between the other two machines, and am working on getting the 98se machines back up and running.
I have one going strong, and working on the second one. It’s actually much harder than I remembered, because I don’t remember much about 98se. So today, I am re-learning the 11-year technology! I’d much rather be working on a mac!

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In keeping with last week’s question of the week (which Operating System is better-built), we continue this polling this week with:

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Given what you know, which do you believe is the better-built Operating System, Windows Vista or Mac OSX (Leopard)?

Is there a particular reason you feel that way? (No bashing please, just honest opinions wanted).

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I recently upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. It’s been about six months since the previous release, 2.3, and 2.5 does not disappoint.

Although you likely don’t see any change on the front end (Actually, there is one change–the Popular Posts sidebar isn’t yet functioning with 2.5, so it’s gone at this point.), the back-end administration panel has gotten a major overhaul. The admin panel has been updated and streamlined. I LOVE IT! It is so much better, so much more simple and compact.

Want to know why I love it so much? Because they found a better way to do it. I love WordPress and the guys (and gals) at Automattic. Keep up the fantastic work. I look forward to the future of WordPress in version 2.6!

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Here’s a quick snapshot of New Hope’s new nursery pagers, which we’ll be rolling out in two or three weeks.
It’s the same technology as what they use at restaurants when you’re waiting for a table. But notice the cool little ‘paddles’ on the side of it? We can use it to advertise upcoming events at New Hope.
Pretty Sweet!

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This afternoon I spent some time testing my MacBook Pro on the New Hope network. With the whole Vista thing (resource hog), I’ve been debating for months if I should:
1. Migrate to Vista
2. Stock up on XP and stick with XP until Vista SP3 comes out.
3. Switch to Ubuntu/Linux.
4. Slow (3-4 year) migration to Mac.

Option 3 is out, because our membership database, Roll Call, does not run on a Ubuntu version (yeah, I am well aware there are workarounds for this), and also a big lack of drivers and native software.
Option 2 is probably not the best, because this would require a significant investment in antiquated software technology. And I don’t believe investing in antiquated technology is a wise investment of our limited church funds.

Which leaves me with two viable options:
Migrate to Vista.
Migrate to Mac.

As I explore what I need to migrate to Mac, it seems to look more and more tempting all the time. The biggest issue I may likely face is buy-in. Literally 0% of my users here (myself excluded) use a mac on a regular basis, and I think it would generally scare the majority of my users–which is why I would do a slow migration.

Oh, what to do, what to do…

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I have installed a new anti-content theft plugin on this blog. Please let me know if you notice anything not working.
Darn plagiarizing auto-bots!

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As I mentioned yesterday, more on Joomla! today.

As you may recall, I’ve mentioned Joomla! a few times here. Today, you get to see the fruits of my labors. I am the official Joomla! forum’s February Member of the Month! I got this cool Joomla! t-shirt, which I’m wearing today (with a blazer on top of it, of course).

This week (and the next several), I am undertaking the task of converting our website from the Joomla! 1.0.x codebase to 1.5, which is a significant migration. My first task if to test it (done), and then create a new template–yeah–www.NewHope.in is getting a major overhaul in the next few months, then more testing, more tweaking, more testing, and then the real migration.

This is a big project, lots of testing before the real migration happens. It will be fun! I’ll let you know when the new site is live.

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Today I was upgrading a test site on our server, and I accidentally sent the files to New Hope’s live site instead.

The result?
I crashed our website for about 20 minutes until I wised up and was able to restore the files via backup.
O Crap.

So, I have the website back up and running, and now I am working on restoring the rest of what I screwed up so badly…
O, the joy of upgrading.

On the test site, I am working on upgrading our website from the Joomla! 1.0.x codebase to the 1.5.x codebase. This is a considerable upgrade, and it isn’t fully compatible–you actually cannot ‘upgrade,’ but you have to ‘migrate.’ 1.5 is pretty nice and fixes a lot of the limiting errors we’ve faced in the 1.0.x codebase for some time.

More Joomla! news tomorrow…

UPDATE: 20 minutes after posting this, I literally did the exact same thing again.

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This week I’ve been slowly working on implementing some upgrades to our network. This includes a couple new pieces of software I’m pretty proud of, including a new 24-port Gigabit switch and a new 1.5 TB Network Attached Storage Device. I’ve included a couple photos here for your enjoyment.

I am in the process of converting from a mixed ethernet/fast ethernet network to full gigabit ethernet. Just a couple of our machines currently even have a gigabit ethernet card in them, so I need to install some new cards in the coming weeks.

The NAS device, which provides 1.5 TB (that’s 1,500 GB) of redundant storage plus automatic backups of all our client machines. I am excited about this device because we will never have to worry about loosing a bunch of data ever again (this has happened before–what a nightmare!)
This 1.5 TB should be enough for our network for the next 24 months or so. At that time, I plan on buying an additional NAS device to run alongside the existing. Of course, by that time it should be hundreds of TB, if not petabytes (PB)

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I have a 5-port 10-BaseT Ethernet hub lying around here, from a recent upgrade.
Anybody want it? It’s free (you pay shipping, or you can pick it up).

NOTE: 10-BaseT is pretty old technology, but still, it is a hub and it is free. First come, first serve!

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