I finally finished rebuilding my son's computer. We agreed to bid farewell to W98SE and upgrade the operating system to W2K. The computer I had been using W2K on finally bit the dust. The only software he wanted installed on W2K was the Age of Conquerors software. I re-wrote the data on the partitions using KillDisk from www.killdisk.com. Then I deleted the partitions when I installed W2K. While I was working on the computer I switched out the video card and added some more memory. It took me a long time to update the software since I had to download W2KSP4, IE6.1, and Windows Media 9b. After I finished installing the software I installed the Fedora distribution of Linux. The X-server crashed the first time I tried it. The second time it worked but it had a funny mixed screen for about five seconds during the boot and did not like the VNC program on the third install disk. It looks like there are still some bugs in the installation process. Otherwise the desktop and openoffice look really nice. I will play with it some on Tuesday. My schedule for Monday is full.

I have been kicking the tires of various anti-virus packages for my SBS computer. The folks at Trend-Micro are a favorite among the SBS consultants while I have a lot of experience using McAfee and Symantec on workstations. All the virus checkers appear to be good. In my opinion the primary entry point for viruses on my systems appears to be email. Since my spam checking software has identified all email containing viruses and deleted the email on the ISP, Symantec has not identified a virus in a long time. The email I receive into Exchange is virus checked at AT&T Worldnet. The email I receive off of Yahoo is virus checked by Symantec on my workstation. It may be checked at Yahoo, too. They haven't told me but I think it is part of some recent changes to their email system. So you are probably wondering why I am evaluating AVG if I am already covered. The reason is AVG is inexpensive($120 for two year license) and I needed a fileserver anti-virus checker. The comparable product from Trend-Micro would cost about $300 for two years. The cost of renewing my two existing Symantec licenses is about $15 year. I think there is a small advantage being covered by two different anti-virus checkers.

Yesterday I learned an important lesson about array formulas. I saw a nice tip from PCMag on trimmed averages in Excel but I could not get it to work until I learned how to correctly enter an array formula with ctrl+shift+enter. Powerful  stuff but easy to screw up. It makes me wonder how people audit spreadsheets for inadvertant changes. When you edit the formula and press enter the formula continues to generate an answer. The problem is that the answer is wrong.

Sourceforge has released two new updates, tortoisecvs and ultravnc, and my buddies at firetrust have updated mailwasher. I updated my system with latest version of tortoisecvs and mailwasher. I am a regular user of Mailwasher and it has some small bugs I would like to see go away. I have only played with Tortoisecvs but I to integrate it into my work. I cannot get to sourceforge.net at the moment to get ultravnc. Seems they are having an unplanned outage.

I ran into a problem installing QuickBooks a few days ago. I kept getting a popup message ending with “Interface not installed” whenever I tried to uninstall QuickBooks 2003 or 2004 Beta. Thinking it was a QuickBooks problem, I called QuickBooks support but they generally were not helpful except to say that I would have to re-install WinXP.  That was not an acceptable solution so I started hunting around to see what I may have done to cause this. After a little more checking I noticed that IE was not opening a new window when I clicked on a link and NAV was not updating the virus files.. This was in addition to the problem I found with uninstalling QB. After a little bit of sleuthing I noticed that I uninstalled a free program called CDBurner Pro XP just prior to the upgrade. I used the system restore feature of WinXP to take me back to just prior to the uninstall and now everything works. I have upgraded to the production version of QuickBooks Pro 2004. Someday I will go back and fix this problem.

It has been snowing all day. Yesterday's forecast was for the snow to stop by early afternoon. This is not the weather I like to schedule farm chores but I have waited too long and not they need to get done. The manure pile needs to be dressed up so I can get more in. This stuff gets more compact as it composts. The composting process is more efficient if you stir up the pile every week. If you let it go too long, it is a real mess to clean up because you do not have any room for the tractor to maneuver. I spent a few minutes trying to un-install QuickBooks 2004 beta and failed with an error message, “An installation support file could not be installed”. I will call the support line on Monday.

We saw Lord of the Rings after my son got out of school. This made for a challenging trip home from the movies. The roads were sloppy and lanes were hard to see. I am glad we did not go to Va. Tech today. I imagine West Virginia/Southwest Virginia roads can get real hazardous with weather like this.

I ordered my free copy of disk 3 for SBS2K3 today. The form is available. Our trip to Va. Tech to donate a mare was cancelled due to snow. Hauling a horse trailer through West Virginia in the snow is just not fun. Instead we are going to see the Return of the King tommorrow. That is how I like start the Christmas holidays.

Don't get me wrong, I like Dell. Last week I went to a local TS2 meeting and the presenter talked about the cost of servers has gone down and gave Dell as an example with a server starting at $299. Two days ago I decided to find out. I went to Dell website and priced out the Dell server. I started out with the $299 barebones server and loaded it up with a typical selection of components for a small SBS server. I ended up with $2852. The 2GB of ram was the big ticket item af about $1000 but most of the components were much higher than retail. $1800 for the rest of the server is still too high for an entry level server. Hmm…

phpWebSite 0.9.3-2 Stable released. The phpWebSite development team has released version 0.9.3-2 of its content management system. This release is mainly a performance enhancement upgrade from previous versions. The memory requirements have been dropped below the 8MB php default and the execution time has been cut in half. Many of the interfaces have been cleaned up and made more consistent. Also a new category view has been implemented for announcements, links, and documents. Other updates include: improved SSL support, a new document manager module, and lots of bug fixes. Two third party modules will ship with this version and all future versions. They are phpwsbb and phpwsrssfeeds. Both of these projects can be found on SourceForge.net. Developed by the Web Technology Group at Appalachian State University, phpWebSite provides a complete web site content management system. All client output is XHTML 1.0 and meets the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative requirements. By [email protected] (Steven Levin). [SourceForge.net: Front page news]

This is an open source product I have been watching for about six months and one of the reasons I built the Linux box. I probably won't get started on this project until I finish the Habitat accounting conversion.

If your installation of Windows Small Business Server 2003 is affected, you will experience the following symptoms.

During the Intranet component portion of Windows Small Business Server 2003 Setup, the following error message may appear: “An error occurred while installing Windows SharePoint Services and creating your intranet site.”

Additionally, the following error message appears when you browse to the internal Web site at http://companyweb/: “You are not authorized to view this page. You might not have permission to view this directory or page using the credential you supplied.”

It goes on to say that you can order a free #3 replacement disk after December 17th and that the fix is required for installations completed before November 24th even though you do not see any symptoms right now. My guess is that M$ has this one figured out and I can start planning my upgrade to SBS2K3.

I went to the TS2 meeting in Cincy to learn more about SBS2003. I was sent two NFR copies of SBS2003 Premium but I have been holding off upgrading my SBS2K even though I would like to upgrade. Today I watched a sales demo of the hightlights, remote workplace, secure Outlook Web Access, and Sharepoint. Unlike a lot of M$ upgrades I find value in these improvements. The management reports are an improvement, too. IMHO, I agree with Microsoft sponsored study that showed SBS is an easier package to install and configure than Linux. I have installed both. I think that Linux has its place but I believe you have to match it up with the right client more than SBS. The presenter said M$ will announce some sort of fix tommorrow for Sharepoint dll problem that forces installers to set the date back to 11/24/2003.