Aaron's blog

2019-10-26 - Using TT-RSS on my server now.

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I used to use Outlook for my RSS feed reading, and before that IE7.  Outlook was definitely a step up from IE7 as I could group feeds into folders (Microsoft, Tech News, Other, etc.) and then just read all the articles in that folder one-by-one.  However, it was annoying to have to change the location it saved the feed every time that I added a new feed; it would otherwise create a separate folder for every feed.

I re-did my Outlook setup a couple weeks ago due to losing Exchange connectivity, and figured out an easier way to set that up.  I just let each feed create its own folder, and then set up a rule to move all RSS articles into a new "RSS" folder outside of the "RSS Feeds" folder that Outlook uses by default.

However, I just re-installed Windows Vista and found myself setting up Outlook again, but this time the Rules menu is not there.  I think this is because I have no mail account setup.  I can't get Outlook Anywhere to connect through 95% of the NAT routers that I connect from behind, including the one here at home.  Outlook won't connect over Hamachi, and I didn't want to fiddle around with OpenVPN for the seemingly endless hours which that will eat up.  So no Exchange setup in Outlook for now (believe me, I want to get this working so badly but can't figure out anything simple to do it).

Since I couldn't get my rules setup, I figured it might be time to explore a new feed reader.  I have been playing with Drupal quite a bit at work lately and saw that it has a feed aggregator, but that did not meet my needs as it was simply a feed aggregator.  By that I mean there was no way to mark feeds as read or delete them; it just took multiple RSS feeds and combined them into one.

After a few minutes of surfing the RSS feed reader list on Wikipedia, I kind of randomly decided to check out RSS Bandit.  I went and checked out the RSS Bandit site and saw two things that immediately drew me in: it was written in .NET and it supported syncing to Google Reader.

So a quick download and install and it's up and running, and we get to the meat of what this article was really supposed to be: my initial thoughts on RSS Bandit.

The initial folder structure on the left is fairly straightforward.  I promptly deleted all of the existing categories which was tedious.  I added a Microsoft category and started adding feeds.  The wizard for that is 5 or 6 screens long, which gets pretty annoying, but there are a lot of features that it packs in there so I can handle cruising through it with some quick mouse clicks.

Reading feeds is quite similar to Outlook: viewing a category (basically equivalent to an Outlook folder) will show all the articles in a message list/reading pane format.  Read them and they are marked as read, and I also delete them.  An annoyance is that when I need to scroll down in the reading pane the message loses focus so it needs to be re-selected before hitting delete.  There are also some special folders (Special Feeds) setup for things like all unread items which come in handy.

The Google Reader syncing left me disappointed though.  I had been really excited to have the ability to read feeds when online or offline, from both of my computers, and still have everything synced.  I tried to set it up, but it created a whole new list of feeds and I didn't see any easy way to transfer over the feeds and categories that I had already setup on my local computer.  The blame for not getting this working probably lies with me for not putting enough time into figuring it out.

But I quickly found that there is the option to store feed data on a network share.  This would be almost ideal for me, as it is rare that I don't have my tablet PC with me and want to read some feeds, and I could sync my desktop with the share which I would have on my tablet.  I have turned this on, but it has yet to put any data into the folder so I'm not sure what's going on.

A couple last sweet things:

• For some feeds it will show the comments as sub-members of articles.  Pretty neat.
• There is a built-in web browser.  No longer does clicking a link in an article open a separate browser window, it just opens a new tab in RSS Bandit.  I have mine set to open in the background so I can keep burning through the feeds and then go back and read the web site later.  When I used Outlook, it would open IE7 and then I would have to Alt+Tab back to Outlook to keep reading.
• The program stores its data in AppData in the user's profile folder.  As a tech support person that has spent a lot of time getting application to work for users which do not have administrative rights to a computer, it is nice to see a program observing best practices and storing data in the proper place.  Stuffing things in Program Files is not cool.

I built a little shelf for my laptop right near my bed, and set my laptop up there.  Then the network cable wasn't long enough (I don't believe in wireless that much) and I couldn't pull it longer because it was pinched between two pieces of wood.  So I pounded upwards on the shelf with a hammer, and made the cable reach.

Yeah, I pounded on it while the laptop was still sitting up there (and running).  Now it doesn't boot up.

It all works out in the end though...I just ordered a 32GB solid state drive.  Merry Christmas to me!

I am probably going to start complaining a lot about Linux.  I'm trying to learn once again because that is what my senior design project will be developed in.

Anyways, I feel some rage right now because I was trying to use the package manager Aptitude and could not figure out how to use the menu staring at me from the top of the screen.

I'm sorry, but your software REALLY sucks if I have to use Google for 10 minutes to figure out how to use the menu.

P.S. You press F10 to access the menu.

A while back I posted an idea of mine.  Specifically, I suggested that it would be nice to have an easy way to upload photos to Facebook from Windows Photo Gallery.

Well I just found out that there has been a plug-in developed for Windows Live Photo Gallery for exactly this.  It even covers the most important of the features I had laid out.  Nice to see.

2019-10-26 - This new blog is set up on Drupal!

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I started playing around with Drupal at work this morning, and this particular package just has me bouncing off the walls with joy.  It's the most excited I've been about a piece of software for quite a while.  Some of this elation is no doubt due to the fact that I've been able to set it up to do almost exactly what I want to do, which is something I had not expected to find a product capable of.  (Sorry for the vagueness of this post, with all the non-specific module mentioning and such, but I don't want to be responsible for damage from leaked business plans.)

The interface is clean, and the administration is smart.  I've added a couple modules, and the installation is really easy.  One of the things that I hadn't seen before in a system of this type was the quite well done system of dependencies.  When you want to turn on a module, it tells you which other modules are required.  You can check the boxes for those, and then you will be able to check the box for the module you wanted to turn on.  Easy.

Then I went to configure the module I installed and it had some things that needed to be setup in another module before I could use the one I had installed.  It actually told me, in the admin pages, what the exact problems were, one at a time, until I had gone and fixed all of them.  No silly searching online for solutions to error messages or for walk-throughs that barely match my configuration.

So, I am now in love with this pretty little content management system.  I literally can't wait to show my boss what I rigged up for him! :)

When I ran the installer for SQL Server 2008 Books Online (download here) I got an error.

This installation package cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service.  You must install a Windows service pack that contains a newer version of the Windows Installer service.

How Vista is not auto-updated with the latest installer is beyond me, but here's what you have to do.

1. Download the new installer package.
2. That page says you need to use wusa.exe to install the package, but if you just double-click on what you downloaded it will do that automatically.
3. Restart.  (Yes, I tried not restarting, but it doesn't work until you restart).
4. Bask in brand-new installer glory.

Sure Outlook has great spam-filtering, but what if you are relying on Outlook Web Access instead?  You will waste a lot of time moving messages to the Junk folder.  Or even consider the amount of bandwidth saved by having the server do filtering rather than the client.  Thankfully it is quite easy to setup a spam filter based on the ZEN IP blocklist provided by http://www.spamhaus.org.

1. Install the Anti-spam components following these directions if they already aren't.
2. Open "Exchange Management Console".
3. Expand "Organization Configuration".
4. Left-click "Hub Transport".
5. Select the "Anti-spam" tab.
6. Right-click "IP Block List Providers" and select enable.
7. Double-click "IP Block List Providers".
8. Go to the "Providers" tab.
9. Click "Add".
10. Enter your choice in the "Provider name" box (I recommended "Spamhaus Zen").
11. Put "zen.spamhaus.org" in the "Lookup domain" box.
12. Leave "Match any return code" checked.

The following screenshot shows pretty much all these steps:

<lost>

Doing this cut me to about 17 spams per day, rather than the ~170 I was getting. 

Vista seems to have an annoying habit of creating several "Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* ##" entries in my ipconfig results, which means I have to scroll up to see the actual entries I want to.  That is a pain to do on a laptop with a touch pad, but also I think it was contributing to connectivity problems when switching between wireless and wired connections.

If you want to remove them, there is a method that seems to be harmless:

• Right-click My Computer, go to Manage.
• Go to Device Manager
• Click View on the top of the window, and check Show hidden devices.
• Now expand the Network adapters tree, and you should see several entries that start with isatap.(something).
• Disable (right-click, Disable) several of them, and verify that all your networking things still work.
• If that didn't cause any problems, you should be able to safely delete them (right-click, Uninstall).

Now your ipconfig readout should be a little more sane.  This problems seems to be caused by IPv4 and IPv6 tunneling of some sort, which you can read about here.

As I had feared would happen for a long time, my kick pedal (well actually my cousin's kick pedal) broke.  So I made a new pedal out of 1/2" plywood.

First step was disassemble the broken unit, trace the foot part, and cut it out:

<lost>

Then I drilled holes for the hinges (which were essentially the only deviation from the design of the original), holes for the orange piece, and a hole for the magnet.  It was accurate enough to just eye-ball all the locations from various angles instead of measuring things. Which got me to this stage:

<lost>

And the final assembled product (which works just as well as the original):

Last night we upped the RAM count to 6GB (from 2GB).  I'm pretty sure that was completely unnecessary, but it is still sweet.  There are some weird things you notice when you get that much RAM: the pagefile is reported by Task Manager to be over 12GB, and the hibernate file takes up over 6GB.  Hopefully it doesn't actually think it's going to be using that hiberfile anytime soon--it would be tough to check my e-mail.  :)

It's also now running a Radeon HD 3850 512MB graphics card, but the purpose of that is to test how good of an output we can get on a TV through component outputs, and it will soon be replaced with a lower end Radeon HD 3450 that is passively cooled.  Then our poor little server will have yet another job: HTPC.