William E. Huber Jr.: Projects

Habitat for Humanity Peachtree to QuickBooks Conversion

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 22:53:32 GMT

I spent a couple of hours yesterday reading and researching a pending project to convert from Peachtree to QuickBooks Pro. The Habitat for Humanity affiliate I have been volunteering for has been using Peachtree for many years but really doesn't have much accumulated knowlege on using it. I have been recommeding that they convert because:

They do not have much accumulated knowlege in Peachtree so they aren't losing much if they convert.
QuickBooks Pro is the accounting package HFHI recommends and has published several documents to help affiliates use it correctly and efficiently.
I have been using QuickBooks Pro for about five years and am very familar with it. I believe I can convert their files with a minimum of fuss.

After reviewing the present chart of accounts and the recommended HFHI financial policies, I suspect that this affiliate is not using Peachtree effectively to collect the information needed for the annual tax return(Form 990) and the various managerial reports. I suspect they use Excel and hand calculations to work around this problem. They will probably get a lot of administrative and some managerial relief by moving to the recommended chart of accounts and letting QuickBooks extract and organize the information.

Mozilla 1.4, mc on cygwin

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 18:27:04 GMT

I finally got Mozilla 1.4 to work for all users on the Linux box yesterday. I think the problem was the shell script I was running for the final setup wasn't working correctly. I didn't find out until I tried to debug the script and noticed it was evaluting a function incorrectly. I hardcoded the answer and ran the script again. I had to kill the vncserver session for it to take effect.

Since I was using mc on the redhat box I decided to install mc on my cygwin installations. To get it to display correctly I had to add codepage:oem on the cygwin environmental variable. To fix the annoying cannot create temporary directory ... problem I had to change the read-write privileges on the tmp directory in the cygwin folder.

Linux...a couple minor irritations

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 03:34:04 GMT

I have continued updating the redhat box to fix some minor problems.

The first problem was with Nautilus not appearing in VNC. I found that some people had already experienced the problem and recommended going to gnome2. Instead I updated gnome1 to the most current version. I get nautilus now but with some error messages about some windows.

The second problem was the lack of java support. So I downloaded the latest JRE.

The third problem was an old flashplayer. I updated to a new flashplayer and it crashes anytime it finds a page with flash on it. Wow! So I downloaded a newer Mozilla.

O'Reilly Network: Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher [Oct. 29, 2003]

Mon, 03 Nov 2003 13:32:34 GMT

"I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I'm Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech."

This story actually occurred although the parody of the "Switcher" commericial did not. Its a pretty impressive story of how product delivery times alter the path of research. Mr. Varadarajan wanted to build a supercomputer this year and Apple could deliver. He made the adjustments and he has a G5 cluster pushing 9.8 teraflops. By the end of year he believes he can another 10%. Hey, did I mention I graduated from Virginia Tech.

VNC Server works!

Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:00:00 GMT

I decided I needed some time away from the problem. I knew I needed to get vncserver working locally but I thought the firewall rules were getting in the way. I could not tell from the error message who was refusing the connection since it looked like the same message I got when I was using ssh. After playing with vncserver on my xp box I decided to try and start the vncserver manually on the linux box. First I setup a password using vncpasswd. Then I started vncserver with the command, vncserver :1. I was surprised to see a message saying it had created my profile in .vnc. I ran the vncviewer locally and it worked. I ran the vncviewer remotely through the ssh tunnel and it worked. The only problem was the twm display manager. I have a fondness for gnome.

About LIDS

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 13:57:24 GMT

What is LIDS?

A kernel patch and admin tool to enhance the linux kernel security
Implementation of reference monitor in kernel
Mandatory Access Control in the kernel
An active project with many helpful hackers.

I ended up researching security on Linux and I ended up here. I also looked at SELinux(NSA) and Owl(Openwall). Since I have a somewhat old copy of Redhat 7.2 I have been planning on installing, LIDS sounds the most interesting from a server fixup standpoint. Now if I can ever get started with the Linux install!

Allowing Outbound PING and PPTP Connections.

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 13:19:31 GMT

I have been trying to debug an error I noticed in the eventlog for Radio, "Can't read stream because TCP/IP error code 10060 - Connection timed out." I thought I would use Ping and Tracert but they both timed out. The problem was that IP Routing was not enabled on the firewall.

Radio Category not rendering

Wed, 15 Oct 2003 00:24:33 GMT

I have spent way too much time over the last two days trying to change the theme templates on two categories. I ended up changing two categories since I think I have a more severe problem with one category. It hasn't updated since 8 October. I found some nice resources that imply that this should all work but I haven't quite figured out when things get updated.

Along the way I figured out how to add and modify my blogroll. Some of the stuff is cool. Some of the stuff took way too much work!

Radio Category not rendering

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 15:41:55 GMT

Still Testing again

Revisiting XHTML

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 03:30:11 GMT

Revisiting XHTML. Ever since XHTML was introduced in January of 2000, arguments as to its use and rationale have been flung about... [Web Standards Project BUZZ]

I spent some reading about this today. It was interesting but not important. It sounded too much like whining to me. Writing valid XHTML is not that hard for what I do so I write code that validates. My general feeling is I like the web pages I develop to work in most browsers and have the nice features that make web browsing fun. As an example I recently modified the design for Legacy Farm to:

Simplify the navigation menu.
Make it compatible with Netscape 4.75 and the other non-CSS browsers like it.
Make the pages XHTML 1.0 compliant.

Simplifying the navigation menu and fixing the CSS to work with non-CSS browsers were my major issues. I was afraid of losing potential customers. XHTML was a minor issue for me since customers cannot tell the difference and HTML Tidy did most of the work. I get this warm, fuzzy feeling that by writing valid XHTML code my web pages will be usable in most browsers and I will already be on the most likely path for future standards.

Dsclient and Norton Anti-Virus Fix on Windows 98

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 01:08:38 GMT

The latest verion of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on a W98 box is incompatible with DSCLIENT and the Web Proxy provided by M$ ISA. When I first installed NAV it was partially incompatible. I kept getting a page fault in Negotiat.dll but I could minimize the problem by disabling Liveupdate. NAV ran but I had to perform a manual Liveupdate. After the latest update it is completely incompatible. NAV did not run at all. So I went searching for a real fix. I found it in a knowlegebase article on M$ which recommended not using Web Proxy. It said the problem is with trying to use DSCLIENT to authenticate your http access. Instead it recommended coding the browser for firewall access which is non-authenticated. To make this work I had to remove the Web Proxy.

Habitat for Humanity

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 03:04:03 GMT

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.

NT Backup for SBS

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 03:35:28 GMT

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.

Jedit - Revisited

Fri, 04 Jul 2003 02:53:12 GMT

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.

Create news item web page in Dreamweaver. This just happens to be wyswing html editor I like. Any web editor should do.
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.
Update the pubdate field in both Dreamweaver and the RSS.
Run the escape_html macro to fix the description field.
Use XSL to create a new news summary web page from the RSS. Copy the html over to the news index page.
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.
Fix the problems.

Center for Internet Security Benchmark for SBS2K - Gotcha #2

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 16:30:09 GMT

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.

Workbench Macro

Sat, 21 Jun 2003 14:52:27 GMT

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!

Changing the administrator userid gotcha #2

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 02:02:30 GMT

I found another place to update for the new administrator userid. I wasn't getting my daily reports.

Center for Internet Security Benchmark for SBS2K

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:13:31 GMT

I am not quite sure how I started this mini-project but I think it came out of a newsletter I read. It talked about CIS benchmarks. I had downloaded the software previously but never implemented any of the changes. Today I installed the software and started changing the group policy to raise my "score". So far I have:

Run winupdate to get the server current.
Implemented group policy changes to Auditing and Accounting Policies.
Implemented group policy changes to Security Settings.
Fixed the problem with SQL Server caused by renaming the Administrator Account. I had to change the userid it uses to logon.
Re-installed the modem. I don't know why but it disappeared.
Implemented the three patches not convered by Winupdate. I used HFNetChkLT to find and deploy the patches.

This raised my score from 4.0 to 7.25. I can probably run the score up to 10 without breaking anything more. At least that's my hope.

CSS improvements!

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 23:34:09 GMT

I continue to try and fix the CSS for this template. The info from Zeldman's book gave me some nice ideas for cleaning up some existing problems. One point he made about defining a image as display:block sounded neat but did not work for me. It screwed up my footer and did not help me. In the end I cleaned up font sizes and line heights. Much ado about nothing but still progress!

Jedit

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 21:01:33 GMT

I have been doing some more playing with Jedit. Jedit is the open source editor available at sourceforge. With so many free or almost free editors available you might wonder why I am I playing with another editor. I think I started out looking at the HTML Tidy plug-in. Then I added the XML/XLST support and Visual Diff. It is not as good for my work as Topstyle but it is not that far off. The most recent plugin I downloaded is CSS2 support. It is color codes the correct entries (or incorrect entries in my case). It's pretty handy.

Cleaning up the blog category pages

Thu, 29 May 2003 03:28:13 GMT

Today I worked on cleaning up the blog category pages. Radio is very inconsistent in the way it updates category pages. I set the theme and unset the theme to make sure no files were left on the community server. I changed the navigation items so that they referenced index.html. I seemed to get newer and more consistent results when I used specified index.html rather letting it default. Then I cleaned up some html 4.01 validation errors when I inserted links in the post. I did a lot of research into renaming categories. I got it looking better but I am not sure when the data will be truly consistent with my actions. The local server and the community server are still not in-sync.

Styling Block Quotes

Tue, 27 May 2003 16:47:25 GMT

I finally implemented the Block Quotes styling Simon discussed in his continuing series on CSS. You can see it demonstrated below. For some unknown reason Simon used png files for the quote characters and the resulting file size was a little over 1 Kbytes each. I created my quotes images using the Century Gothic font and saved as a gif. They are a svelte 199 bytes.

Undelete

Mon, 26 May 2003 22:45:32 GMT

I decided to buy a server and workstation copy of Undelete from Executive Software. I think most of the functionality of this undelete software was included in Netware. That was one feature I missed when I installed my W2K network. I was surprised that M$ did not offer it but they never offered one of the best features of WordPerfect, Reveal Codes, either.

SpamBayes for Outlook

Sun, 18 May 2003 13:15:02 GMT

While I was doing a little research on RSS I ran into the SpamBayes port for Outlook by Mark Hammond. You can find more info on SpamBayes at spambayes.sourceforge.net/. Mark's installer is at starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/spambayes/. I am running it with ActiveState Python and Outlook 2002.

Roll your own RSS

Sun, 18 May 2003 13:06:16 GMT

On Friday I decided to go ahead and code up an RSS manually for legacy farm. While I was at it I coded up both a 1.0 and 2.0 version. I started out with the RSS from the Legacy Farm category and stripped out the Userland specific stuff. I verified the feeds with the RSS Validator. I added the feed to subscriptions to check out. I will probably look briefly at using Python to generate the RSS and xhtml snippets.