I spent a couple of hours reading various Habitat for Humanity documents from their partnernet site and composing emails. I am somewhat involved in purchasing and I found some updated order forms for national partnership contributions. I am also somewhat involved in a project to convert from Peachtree to Quickbooks. I have a particular interest in Quickbooks for Non-Profits. The customized version has custom reports and highly encourages you to use their account codes since they feed directly into the annual tax report, Form 990.  Since we probably want to load some historical data it would be best if we matched up the existing chart of accounts to the version used in Quickbooks for Non-Profits. So I ordered a trial copy of the Non-Profit version. This should be interesting.

Today I created scripts to backup the SBS server. This task is a relatively low priority for me because the lack of backups affect only one person, me! Tape drives and tapes are relatively expensive. IMHO I think tape backups will soon be obsolete. Since the announcements that SBS2003 would automatically setup backup for new server installs I decided to get myself familar with NTBACKUP. I looked at several alternatives but decided to use the procedure described by Mariëtte Knap in her article, How to backup your SBS 2000 server. I had two problems, the parameters for the Ntbackup and the smtp pickup location used by Exchange. The parameters in the downloaded file were for tape backups and I was performing disk backups. The vbs I downloaded had the correct pickup directory for smtp mail but the comments implied I needed to change it. I expect my mirrored disks will save me from disk failures. I expect the daily backup will used as the last resort  to save me from my installation errors.

I have previously described how I manage spam. Today I finally got around to updating the filters in Mailwasher Pro. My old filters did not transfer when I upgraded from the shareware to the commercial version. The Mailwasher website had new instructions for importing filters and a new filters file. I am now getting a much higher spam identification rate. This is important for my yahoo mail id since I have had it for so long and I do not want to give it up because I am getting so much spam.

I continue to use Jedit for various tasks. It is okay for most of the tasks without the licensing headache. Today I decided to improve the RSS for Legacy Farm using XSLT. It was really nice that Jedit support both XSLT, XML, and HTMLTidy. I cannot say I started this mini-project with a firm objective. I just wanted to make the News page easier to keep current and I thought RSS should be able to do it. I was not interested in rebuilding the site using blogger software. I just wanted to modify one or two pages in the site. I prefer copy&paste over fancy and frequently buggy automation.

My choice of Jedit was partly out of curiosity. It said it had XSLT working so I decided to give it a try. I found a XSL stylesheet that should transform a RSS file into html.  I ran into a variety of problems. The XSLT part barfed when I asked it to disable-output-escaping on the desciption section. The plugin was smart! It told me it was old and needed to be updated. It also told me that I needed to update my old verions of xerces/xalan.  After some fiddling I got it to work. With a little more work on the xsl file, I got it to generate valid XHTML. Another annoyance was inputing dates. So I played with Beanshell macros until I created a macro that would insert the current date in the format I wanted. I created another macro to convert the html in the description into valid “escaped html” that RSS v2 likes and another that creat a new item in the RSS file.

So here is how it works right now. Its not pretty or efficient but it is interesting. A little tweaking will probably make it quite usable.

1. Create news item web page in Dreamweaver. This just happens to be wyswing html editor I like. Any web editor should do.
2. Copy the Html in the body over to a new buffer in jedit run Htmtidy on it to clean it up for xhtml. Copy&paste the cleaned up code back to Dreamweaver and into the description of a new item in the rss file.
3. Update the pubdate field in both Dreamweaver and the RSS.
4. Run the escape_html macro to fix the description field.
5. Use XSL to create a new news summary web page from the RSS. Copy the html over to the news index page.
6. We have now changed three files, rss.xml, news index, and the item news pages. We can use Dreamweaver to upload the files and your favorite validators to validate the html and rss.
7. Fix the problems.

Sjoerd Visscher explains the diffs betw Echo and RSS. [Scripting News]

An interesting discussion of the evolution of RSS technology. The problem is broken feeds. The central question in the debate is whether RSS 2.0 is a better path forward than a completely new and clean spec, Echo. Proponents of Echo believe that we should make a clean break with RSS 0.91 and 1.0.

Yesterday my son decided he wanted to run Win98 again. He has Age of Empires installed on it. So we rebooted his desktop. His machine is dual boot with Win98 and WinXP. The default boot is for WinXP so we have not been in Win98 for quite some time. Guess what? It said I had the wrong password for the network login. I tried several times and locked out the account. It took me a couple of times of locking out the account before I realized that maybe one of my security changes to the Group Policy my have affected the login. This morning I focused my attention on the LAN Manager Authentication Level. I researched the problem  and found that Dsclient can use either Lan Manager or NTLM. It uses Lan Manger by default. If you want to use NTLM  2 as recommended by CIS you must change the registry to enable NTLM Authentification as shown in Q239869 – How to Enable NTLM 2 Authenication.

The sourceforge newsletter mentioned something called tortoisecvs. I will probably download it when it releases the next stable version which looks like it will be soon. I would like to use it locally so I also looked at the new version of CVSNT. This version uses the active directory. Since I have committed my time next week to SOS I will not look at these products for another week.

History of RSS date formats. I want to talk about prior art. But I can't do that yet, because first I need to give my opinion about this “funky RSS” business. (1142 words) [dive into mark]

As long as I have worked with computers date formats have been an issue and that is a long time. Its kind of sad that date formats are the source of this “funky RSS” business. The good news is that Mark wrote a nice essay on the history of dates in RSS.

new macro. I found the most wonderful script on the workbench. One macro and voila! All my posts on one page. Sweet! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

This is something I wondered about but it was a low priority. Sweet, yes!