AW Designs Blog

I keep forgetting the command, so here it is for the world to see:

msconfig

Start -> In the search box type msconfig

You’re not a newbie–you know you have all your email settings configured properly in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc). In fact, you can send and receive email just fine from one ISP. But when you connect your laptop at a different location which uses a different ISP, all of a sudden you can’t send outgoing email. You get an error message like this one:

Send Message Error in Thunderbird

The issue:
In an effort to stop spam, many ISPs (Comcast, Cox, many others) block all traffic to port 25 on anything except their own SMTP servers.

The fix:
Replace the default SMTP Port 25 with 587. RFC 2476 explains why this works for newer SMTP servers. (For sbcglobal.net, the fix is to change port to 26.)

Alternate fix:
You will have to use your ISP’s default SMTP servers. Here is a tentative list that has not been checked for accuracy:

• Earthlink: smtpauth.earthlink.net (To verify, visit http://www.earthlink.net)
• Comcast: smtp.comcast.net (To verify, visit http://www.comcast.com)
• Sympatico: smtp1.sympatico.ca or smtp8.sympatico.ca (To verify, visit http://www.sympatico.ca)
• AT&T: mailhost.att.net (To verify, visit http://www.att.net)
• Netzero: smtp.netzero.com (To verify, visit http://www.netzero.net)
• Charter Communications: smtp.charter.net (To verify, visit http://www.charter.com)
• MSN: smtp.email.msn.com (To verify, please check with your MSN provider)
• RCNL: smtp.rcn.com (To verify, visit http://www.rcn.com)
• BellSouth.net: mail.bellsouth.net (To verify, visit http://www.bellsouth.net)
• Cox.net: smtp.east.cox.net (CT, FL, GA, LA, NC, OH, RI, VA); smtp.central.cox.net (KS, NE, OK, UT, West TX); smtp.west.cox.net (AZ, CA, NV); smtp.cox-internet.com (for @cox-internet.com customers
  in AR, ID, LA, MI, East TX, Tyler). Port 587 may also be required for SMTP. To verify, visit http://www.cox.net
• Rogers: May require port 587 for smtp. To verify, visit http://www.rogers.com
• AOL: May require port 587 for smtp. To verify, visit http://www.aol.com.

http://www.launchsplash.com

What’s in a splash page? Normally just a blank white page with the words “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon”.  And if you’re a domain registrar, chances are your splash pages are loaded with hundreds of advertisements, links, and useless clutter.  GoDaddy comes to mind…

Although we as designers and developers could create fancy, beautiful, and dynamic splash pages complete with lights and sounds, it may not always be necessary or cost-efficient for our clients–especially if the page is going to be very temporary.  That’s when I stumbled upon LaunchSplash.  I was pleasantly surprised with its capabilities.

It’s completely web-based, so you don’t even have to fire up an editor and FTP client, or worry about hosting.  You really just do what the site says – enter your domain name and hit Create.  It offers a number of useful features including:

• Sign-up form so users can receive announcements of the upcoming website
• RSS feed to again keep users updated on the website status
• Integration of Feedburner & Google Analytics to already begin tracking your client base
• Domain mapping so you can point your domain to the splash page without using the default URL which is already pretty short (mydomain.launchsplash.com)
• 2 free launch pages

I’m not overly fond of the freebie design, but it’s adequate for a very temporary splash page.  Of course, you can upgrade for $5/month to use the premium designs.  Here is their demo.

I’ve created one splash page through them and was satisified with the results.  I would definitely use them again for another quick ‘n easy page.

Export Windows folder filenames to a text file using Command Line

Scenario: You have a Windows folder containing a large amount of files that you need to have exported into one text file listing all the filenames.  For instance, you might need to copy & paste those filenames into an Excel spreadsheet.

Here’s a quick and easy way to do it:

1. Open a Command Window (Start > Run > cmd)

Open the command line

2. Navigate to the folder by using the cd command.   If you need to move up a level, use cd .. If your folder name contains spaces, surround it with quotations.

Commands to type

3. Type the command dir /b>filelist.txt

4.  This will create the text file inside that folder.  If you want the file output elsewhere, use a fully qualified name.  Remember that Windows uses \ as the directory delimiter, not /

The “pretty” alternative:  Simply drag and drop the folder into a Mozilla (Firefox) browser.  The directory structure will be output in a pretty HTML document.

Directory contents listed in an HTML page

An Opinion

The article “Alcatel integrating network layers for efficiency” by Stephen Lawson of NetworkWorld discusses how the company Alcatel-Lucent plans to more closely align the optical infrastructure with the IP infrastructure.  The integration of these two main components of long-haul service-provider networks will increase speed and efficiency for the carriers.  Traditionally, the two domains have remained, for the most part, separate.  Internet and private IP traffic is generally transported over electronic packet routers.  At times, it is handed off to an optical infrastructure for transport over long distances.  There is very little interaction between the two elements, as they are typically managed by different teams.

Alcatel, a company with expertise in both technologies, plans to offer the ability to send traffic from multiple ports or VLANs into a single wavelength.  As a result, carriers can take full advantage of each wavelength, reducing the need to deploy additional wavelengths.  Furthermore, the company will allow IP routers to send traffic straight across the optical network, thus eliminating unnecessary IP routing along the way.  Finally, because Alcatel supplies both network layers, the two systems have knowledge of each other’s resources, and will be able to communicate fault management alarms.  The ultimate goal will be for the IP and optical network elements to reroute traffic if there is a failure in either layer.  These features are known as the Converged Backbone Transformation Solution and will roll out over time.

Alcatel’s Converged Backbone Transformation Solution will have a large impact on the carriers. Financially, the integration will save carriers at least 30% in capital expenditures if they build a network from the ground up utilizing Alcatel’s technology.  For carrier networks with existing infrastructure, cost savings will be more incremental in nature.  In addition, the technology will provide faster provisioning for enterprises that rely on the carriers to interconnect their offices.  This will increase business processes and customer service, and will ultimately have a positive impact on revenue.  Similarly, the technology will help boost the revenue of the carriers who are currently dealing with the problem of data traffic growing faster than the revenue they can collect for it.  Finally, the introduction of this technology will enable Alactel-Lucent to become an even more significant player in the networking world.  Companies such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks will have a new competitor in the field.  This competition will help stimulate a lagging economy, and ideally produce new ideas and growth in the networking community.

Although not recommended, sometimes it is necessary to turn auto-generation of ID numbers off in your database. For instance, I was in a situation where I was completely redesigning a database (deleting tables, renaming tables, purging data, entering new data, ec.). However, the client was insistent on maintaining the ID numbers that were associated with specific items that they wanted to keep.

This is how I turned off the auto-generation of ID numbers in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Studio:

1. Right-click on the table name and hit Design
2. In the Column Properties tab, find Identity Specification and expand the section
3. For (Is Identity) change the dropdown to No
4. Hit Save

If you encounter the following error message, you will need to perform an additional step:

Go to Tools > Options and click “Designers”.

Uncheck the “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation” and hit OK.

Try the above steps again.

When you are done, make sure to turn auto-generation back on!!!

This is the second time I have installed the 2532|Gigs app for a band website.

Unfortunately, it has not been updated since 1/28/08, and for all intents and purposes, seems to have been discontinued. However, I like the simplicity of the app, especially the “drop-in” PHP code that displays the gigs anywhere on your website. I’m a huge fan of not having to modify or create new theme templates. However, the app is lacking in several fundamental areas, so I had to modify 4 files and create 1 new file. Instead of listing each individual update that I made, which are numerous, I have created a zip file with the modified files that you may download.

Here are the changes I made to 2532|Gigs v1.2.2:

In the Admin > Manage Gigs page:

• The checkboxes next to each artist are checked off by default. This helps when adding a new gig, especially if you only have 1 artist.
• I have converted the INPUT field for Details to a text area. This will enlarge the Detail field so you can see more text on the screen.

On the front-end (show_gigs.php):

• I created a separate column for Time.
• I have removed the empty space preceding each field.
• In the Details cell, I have colored the background beige, and made the font color black. This will make the Details cell stand out a bit more.
• I created a new page called past_gigs.php and uploaded it to the same directory that show_gigs.php is in. This will allow a user to display past gigs in descending order. To display it, just use the same PHP drop-in code for the upcoming shows, except you replace the path to show_gigs.php with the path to past_gigs.php.

This is the listing of gigs that I created.

I just installed the Plogger application for one of my clients, and, as with most apps, had to make a few tweaks in order to get it working.  Plogger is a very basic open source PHP photo gallery.  If you need something with more functionality, I would suggest checking out the slew of other PHP Photo Galleries out there such as Gallery.  The reason I chose Plogger was its sheer simplicity for integrating the photo gallery into your website.  It is truly a “drop-in” app that requires only 3 PHP statements on your page.  The thumbnails, bread crumb nav, search bar, etc flows to fill any container width you have set.  No editing of PHP include files or complicated themes. However, I did struggle with 2 issues:

Issue #1: Clicking the image to bring up the actual enlarged image resulted in a 404 error.  The directory path was messed up.  Here’s how I fixed it:

Open ‘plog-functions.php’ and find the following code:

and change it to read:

Issue #2: This is not really an issue, but a tweak.  By default, the Plogger will display your Collection first, and then force the user to drill-down to see the albums contained in that Collection.  This is fine if you have many collections, but if you only have 1 collection, then it doesn’t make sense to force the user to drill-down to the album level.  To show the albums for a specific collection, make the following change:

Open ‘index.php’ or whichever page you are calling the Plogger from, and replace the third PHP “drop-in” statement with the following code. The Plogger-ID is the ID of the Collection you want to show the albums from.

Final note: The instructions do not explicitly state this, but the 3 PHP drop-in statements need to be added to a page with the .php extension.

Here is the Plogger Gallery that I made in action.

Edit all rows in MS SQL Server Management Studio 2008

After I upgraded from Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to 2008, one of the first changes that I noticed was the menu that appears when you right-click on a table was missing my beloved ‘Open Table’ option.  In the 2005 version, I was able to click this option and my table would open up all the rows in it.  This option was replaced by an “Edit top 200 rows” in the 2008 version.

While this is all well and good, why go through the trouble of clicking the “Edit top 200 rows”, and then have to modify the query to have it return all rows?  To get rid of the “Edit Top 200 Rows”, go to Tools > Options > SQL Server Object Explorer and in the “Table and View Options“, change the following:

• Value for Edit Top <n> Rows command = 0
• Value for Select Top <n> Rows command = 0

Hit OK.

And there you have it.  When you right-click a table, you will see the option for “Edit All Rows”.