That Blair Guy's Stuff

As nearly as I can tell, I’m about the only person in North America who isn’t on Facebook. (Evidently all three of my brothers have joined – though apparently none of them are fully aware of the others’ presence yet.) But I have gone and joined a different cult — I now have a Google Android-based telephone (the T-Mobile G-1).

For me, one of the most appealing parts of the Android phone is the way it integrates your phone book and calendar with Google’s contact manager (built into GMail) and calendar. That’s a fairly killer application for me in that it makes everything a whole lot more portable. The only problem is, GMail isn’t my primary means of contact. I’ve had my email address on a personal domain for more than eight years and prefer to use that one.

GMail offers a partial solution to this in that you can set it up to send messages from another address. The down side to this is that messages go out saying they’re from the GMail address on behalf of the other one. So when other people see it (primarily folks who are using GMail as their main address), they tend to capture the GMail address in their contact lists. If they then write to me at GMail, it could be a while before I see it.

Being forced to move to GMail as my primary email address would have been a deal-breaker for me. A lot of people know to contact me through my existing address and I really don’t want to deal with managing two addresses. (It’s been more than four years since I got rid of my landline phone, but I still occasionally hear about people calling the old number.)

So I went looking to see if there was a way to get an Android to work with non GMail address. One of the free services Google makes available is “Google Apps for Your Domain“; essentially, they provide a version of GMail, Calendar and their online Documents and Spreadsheet tools that work with a domain name you own. (For example, thatblairguy.com!) I figured that would be my best bet.

The first stop in my investigation was a thread on the Android Community Forums where someone was asking the exact same question I was: Does Android work with Google Apps for Your Domain?

And the answer is a resounding yes. Brilliant! (Apparently Google didn’t plan to do this, but later changed their minds.)

The first thing you have to do is setup your email to go to Google’s mail server. The instructions for that show up in the administration panel when you activate the email system. It’s mildly tedious, but fairly straightforward. You do need to have the ability to set custom records in your domain’s DNS server. (Pair makes this fairly simple.)

When I’m at home, I prefer to use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email rather than Google’s web interface. Setting up a desktop email client is also fairly simple, though given the number of them in existence, it’s not possible to document the step-by-step for every system out there. Google’s instructions provide the basic information for server settings, plus a double-handful of the most common clients.

Throw in the Lightning calendar addon for Thunderbird (as well as the provider for Google calendar), and at this point you have something equivalent to Microsoft Outlook, except that along with Windows, you can also run on Mac, Linux and a few other platforms.

Bringing the Android phone into the mix requires that you dig into it’s settings a little (Home Screen | Menu | SD card & phone storage | Factory data reset) and click the button for “Factory data reset.” (Yeah, that step’s a little scary.) When the phone starts up again, when it asks for your Google account, you instead enter an email address and password for your newly Google-hosted email system.

The phone synchronizes its contact list, calendar and email with what’s on Google’s servers and voilà! The Android is now ready to do your bidding.

using System;
using System.Reflection;

namespace GeekHumor
{
    public class MyMadness
    {
        public bool There()
        {
           return true;
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Type t = typeof(MyMadness);

            MemberInfo mi = t.GetMethod("There");
            if(mi != null)
               Console.WriteLine("There is a method to MyMadness.");
            else
               Console.WriteLine("There is no method to MyMadness.");
        }
    }
}

Build that, run it, and you’ll at long last have a solid demonstration that There is indeed a method to MyMadness.

A discussion at work today turned to how my most recent project (currently in testing) may be the first one moved to dotNet v3.5 as a pilot for the 2008 versions of Visual Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server. Once we find out what it takes to move a simple project to the new platform, we’ll start looking at moving the more complex systems over.

One of the new technologies being considered is LINQ. None of us have any hands-on experience with it yet, but this conversation led us to realize there are three distinct phases all projects go through when adopting a new technology:

1. Refactor the entire system to heavily overuse the new technology, especially in manners where it was never intended to be used and/or is completely ill-suited.
2. Refactor the system again in attempt to remedy the problems caused by the previous refactoring.
3. Refactor the system with the next hot technology.

The planning to assure that this will be the time you finally break out of that cycle is spread across all three phases.

Two weeks after the new computer (A Dell XPS 420) arrived, life has finally settled down enough for me to start moving all my stuff. Moving the data files was easy enough (I figured out years ago that a LAN is the easiest way to do that), but getting Apache up and running so I could work on some of my web sites turned out to be “painful.”

I’d been running v2.0.50 of the Apache HTTP server on my XP machine for the past five or six years, so my first attempt was to just rerun that install and be done with it. No such luck. The install ended with a message stating that the service hadn’t been installed and nothing further.

My first thought was that Vista’s tightened security was probably responsible, so I logged back in as an admininistrator and ran the install a second time. Still no dice.

Hoping to find some tips for installing under Vista, I headed over to the Apache Project’s web site and discovered that the current version of the HTTP Server was 2.2.8. Aha! Perhaps the new version has some adaptations to handle Vista? (Reading the site later, I discovered that the newest version of Windows mentioned in the online install tips is Windows Server 2003, so perhaps not. Then again, nobody likes to write documentation – myself included – so I don’t really know.)

A quick visit to Google however, searching for the terms Apache, Vista and Install led to a suggestion that perhaps User Account Control (UAC) was to blame and suggested turning it off during the install. Voila!

So, here’s the steps that worked for me:

1. Login as an administrator.
2. Go to Control Panel, Go to the “User Accounts and Family Safety” applet, Click on “User Accounts” and then select the option to turn User Account Control off. (You’ll have to reboot at this point.)
3. Run the Apache 2.2.8 installer, using the recommended settings. (In particular, make the server visible to everyone on port 80.)
4. Point a web browser to http://localhost/ At this point, you should see the message, “It works.”
5. Go to c:Program FilesApache Software FoundationApache2.2conf and make whatever changes you need to the http.conf file. (Make a copy first, and forget about simply copying the entire file from an earlier version, though you may be able to copy sections. At a minimum, you’ll probably want to change the DocumentRoot to something outside the Program Files tree. You’ll also likely need to change the permissions in the <Directory /> section a few lines further down. )
6. Once you’ve changed the http.conf file to your satisfaction, log out from the administrator account and log in again as a regular user to make sure the server is still accessible.
7. Optionally, login again as the administrator, repeat step 2, and re-enable the User Account Control.

I still need to go back and set up PHP, but this was sufficient for me to get back to some more pressing web site work.

I don’t really know why I waited until so late in the day – or early in the morning – to do it (at least in part it was because I was meeting a friend for late dinner at 8:00), but about a year after installing Xandros on an old Compaq box and never getting back to it, I decided to dump Xandros and install Ubuntu in it’s place.

Getting the WET54G wireless bridge set up last weekend was a three-hour process, and also a subject for another day. For now, the most important tip is that the machine you’re using to set it up needs to be set to an address on the 192.168.1.0 network. If you want to set the bridge up by hand instead of using the “Quick Setup” disk, you need to use your browser to connect to 192.168.1.226. UserId and Password are both “Admin” (they’re CaSe seNsitIVe by the way).

I don’t have any great amount of experience with any Linux distribution (or with Linux at all really), but I’ve been wanting to add Linux to my pool of knowledge for a while. There wasn’t any one powerful reason to switch distributions, except that a year ago I couldn’t get an updated version of Firefox to install on Xandros (in fact, I even managed to wipe out the old version) and when I used the Xandros management software to do an update this evening, the most recent version was 1.5. (Current version for Windows is 2.0.0.11.)

For all I know, installing the most recent of Xandros would have given me the current Firefox and maybe the ability to run SETI@Home too, but Ubuntu’s been getting a lot of buzz recently and since I’m a newbie, I’m going to want to be find help easily. If I’m going to install a new distribution, I may as well go with the crowd for now. (Please don’t leave me a zillion comments saying, “Oh, you should have used distro-X instead, it’s much easier. I’m sure each distribution has its own particular charms. I’m happy enough for now.)

My first ever boot from a live CD was an interesting experience. I’d already set the machine to boot from CD, so after switching it on, all I had to do was reboot and let it go. My CD drive is a bit noisy and for a while it sounded like there was a cow mooing in the spare bedroom.

Once the system came up, I was presented with about seven different menu choices. After a few dubious experiments with the memory test and such, I finally chose the default Setup/Install option and let it fly.

When the system stopped mooing again (I may need to rename that machine to “Bossy”; too bad it’s not a Gateway. ) my screen was divided into vertical sections divided by flashing/jumping/irritating lines. After playing with the menu bar at the top of the page, I found the “Resolution” tool under preferences and dropped both the resolution and the refresh rate by one notch each, this made the CRT much happier and no doubt saved me from a migraine.

The screen I was presented with turned out to be a functional Linux desktop. A working email client, Firefox 2.0.something, Open Office, and even a few games. (It has Suduko — Dad will enjoy discovering that.) Along with the menu at the top (all the basic system utilities), there were two icons on the desktop. I’m not really sure what to make of the “Examples” folder, though the musical clips were nice enough. After poking around for a bit, I double-clicked the “Install” icon.

The installation program seems simple enough. Seven prompts for things like your time zone, how much of the hard drive to use for Linux, and information for the main user account and then the system starts whirring away, writing stuff to the hard drive so it will run faster. (The Live CD is a nice idea, but aside from the mooing, it’s slow.)

The install is still running, probably due to the age of the hardware as much as anything else (PIII with 256 MB of RAM and a 120 GB drive) so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out how it all went. I’m a little concerned that the main user account created during the install is going to turn out to be running with administrative privileges, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it (At least I know enough to be concerned about that sort of stuff).

In the meantime, I’m going to let Bossy keep mooing while I go and get some sleep.