unwelcome Welcome to Comcast (click image)

This concludes the saga of “BIOS Won’t Boot“, a most unfortunate sequence of events occurring on April 1 (yes). The story was posted here April 8.

On April 11, Sunday afternoon, the second day of my return from Phoenix, you couldn’t tell there had ever been any issue(s) on my Castro Valley machines, and I didn’t have to spend a nickel to replace any hardware, either. It’s always nice to have the spare 3V CR2032 BIOS battery I bought for this occasion in Phoenix, wouldn’t you think? But I didn’t need to use it.

(1) PC Issues

I disconnected all the PC peripherals and the BIOS booted right up. I went into Windows Safe Mode, then regular startup, and could find no problems except for internet connectivity.

Gradually adding back all the peripherals, I indeed did find a problem with the external USB “Backup” drive, but it wasn’t a showstopper. I let Windows scan the drive and repair any bad files. This USB drive is now back in use.

(2) Internet connectivity

This was, by far, the more time-consuming problem. I spend over two hours on the phone with the Comcast cable internet providers yesterday. This was in addition to the three hours already spent at the beginning of the month.  I had FTP and email internet access, but every browser session would become infested with multiple-tab copies of a dread Welcome to Comcast screen (image at top of this post), inviting me to set up my account and begin browsing. I’ve had an account since 2003.   Tech Support was friendly, patient and seemingly knowledgeable. He  found and fixed a host of problems on their side related to registration of my new Motorola SB6120 cable modem.

Every time we thought everything was fixed and I was back in business, one last test would have the problem back with a vengeance. It was obvious I had connectivity, but I couldn’t browse.  Finally he scheduled a service call for 8AM this morning – Sunday!

The senior tech arrived and he quickly reproduced the problem. He had more settings changes made to the Comcast account configuration. That didn’t make the problem go away either.

Finally his laptop diagnostics determined the problem. The new Motorola supports a new DOCSIS 3.0 broadband standard, which, he explained, is essentially three streams bundled into one high-speed cable signal. The Motorola is backwards-compatible with the older 2.0 standard. The problem seems to be that the Comcast configuration is not fully compatible with the newer modems; their system kept trying to push the 3.0 service onto an account set up for (and only paying for) 2.0 speeds, so the set-up would fail. Comcast is still setting up their 3.0 service and, it appears, hasn’t worked out all the compatibility issues.

I had the senior tech swap out modems and put in a generic 2.0 modem, and the problem went away. It hasn’t been back since.

In Phoenix, Cox Communications is already on 3.0, but I didn’t want to go into all that with them. I will just take the new Motorola modem down south, call Cox, and look into the cost of 3.0 there.

The Moral of the Story?

(1) USB shutdown problems: if a tech support person asks you to reboot your computer, and Windows hangs on shutdown, don’t use the power button to do a forced shutdown. “Just say no.” I more recently had a similar problem while in Phoenix: a USB drive was attached to a cheap USB hub. Disconnecting the hub allowed Windows to complete the shutdown.

(2) Buying a new modem? Though an incredible affront to common sense, I would suggest calling your broadband provider before purchasing a new cable modem, especially if it supports DOCSIS 3.0. Make sure it is on their “approved” list. and is compatible with the level of service you are paying for.

I’ll be packing the car tonight for the drive north. In addition to the usual travel stuff,  I’m packing (1) a CR2032 3V Lithium CMOS battery, and (2) this PC. I just lugged this PC down here to Phoenix last month. Since I’m moving here soon anyway, lugging the PC back north with me just seems counter-intuitive.

Yes, I also have a fast Mac Pro up north, but all my tax stuff is on the PC.

Usually, when I post one of these “this happened to me” articles, there’s a moral to the story. In this case, I don’t know what it is yet. The PC failed just when I had to get a night’s rest for an early morning drive south. If I had to guess what the moral of the story will turn out to be, NOT forcing Windows shutdown with the Power Button would be high on my list!

Here’s the story (or what I know of it so far), excerpted from a letter to a friend. There’ll be a follow-up post once I do the diagnostics and fix the problem with whatever it takes.

I have a new Windows7-64 up north too, and I love it, but I may have to do all that over again too, if not very lucky, as soon as I get back next Friday.

Less than 12 hours before I had to leave for Phoenix, I was on the phone with Comcast cable/internet to get them to reset my new modem again. Some browser intercept feature of theirs was hijacking my browser on all 3 CA machines – a Mac and two PC’s.

Their tech guy reset the modem, got customer service to update something or other that should make the “hijack” screen go away, and he had me shut down and reboot the machines. This fixed the problem in the Mac and the old XP machine. The Win-7 machine refused to shut down. After several minutes, I forced it off with the 5-second Power Button trick. I don’t like to do that, and normally don’t.

Well, this time it wouldn’t even boot into BIOS. The tech guy loved that – he admitted he “hates” PC’s. I had to point out the Mac had the problem too until he fixed things on his end.

So what I think is the machine was having problems that day to begin with. I suspect the CMOS battery or a bad USB drive. If disconnecting all the peripherals doesn’t make the problem go away, I’ll reset the CMOS. If that doesn’t work, I’ll buy a new battery and try again. If that doesn’t work, I’ll unplug all the internal hard drives. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try to load a new BIOS from flash drive or floppy.

Failing in all that, new motherboard, and you know how that game works. Any of the current generation of boards won’t support the old CPU socket (AM2), the old memory (DDR2) or most old graphics cards. My old board has been through two previous rebuilds and should be near end of life even if it didn’t fail. I have new ones picked out, but lord knows I don’t need the expense and setup time right now, especially with less than two weeks before taxes are due!

So hopefully it’s just a corrupted BIOS, USB or internal drive that went south, or a bad CMOS battery (also old, but cheap). I’ll know in a week!

… our state-of-the-art technology too often fails to work as it should. That’s why I have to reboot my Wi-Fi router at least once a week; why my fingerprint-recognition pad periodically forgets what my thumb looks like; and why my smartphone keeps dropping calls without provocation.

Mostly, I think the answer likes in our neglected software development process. In darker moments, many of us probably suspect that our software vendors hire besotted programmers to code their operating systems and mission-critical software in bars and back alleys. In truth, a coding project like a modern Mac-OS-X or Windows 7 may rival the Manhattan Project in resources and organizational complexity. When things go south, where did we go wrong?

Funny, I read the Steve Fox article while rewriting a coding project of my own. I’m re-engineering a web app I had working perfectly about 10 years ago. Over the years, I added features which didn’t always play nicely with the existing code. With patches and add-ons, tracing the code execution became an exercise in frustration.

I also discovered that code I “locked down” years ago no longer works as originally designed and tested. In recent re-testing of old code, I found that some features I added in 2006 couldn’t possibly have ever worked. Yet such wasn’t actually the case. Software environments change over the years, and the code must change with them.

With 17 years in the software QA industry, I often recognized this kind of code in my own project. We called it “spaghetti code.” When you’re committed to preserving as much of the old code as possible, you’re wedded to old designs that may not be appropriate for the enhanced project. Why hadn’t I designed a more modular web app?

Well, I know more now. I have years of professional experience testing software, but as an amateur programmer, I’m still learning basic techniques and standards that were part and parcel of  industry standards decades ago. Standards aren’t the problem with the major developers in the world that revolves around Silicon Valley.

So, what exactly IS the problem? Marketing deadlines and budget constraints certainly are major bugaboos for developers. Established standards are ignored or marginalized. In truth, every code change is a calculated exercise in risk-taking. “It should work” isn’t acceptable in aeronautical engineering. It shouldn’t be in software development either.

As I fix hidden defects in my own program, it seems like every fix opens the door for two new bugs. That tells me about where I am in the “development cycle” – not quite over the hill yet!

QA Development Cycle

QA Development Cycle - click image for full-size graphic

My scratch-pad doodle shows life cycle of a software product, in terms of bugs found and fixed, on its path from programmer’s desk to client or end-user. This discussion talks in terms of a software enhancement. When we think about it, the same principles apply to routers, smartphones and even microwave ovens, autos and airplanes.

• if you recognize this graph as the classic “Bell Curve”, go to the head of the class.
• vertical axis: bug “Severity”. Major bugs are “showstoppers”; minor bugs are annoying but don’t render the product unusable.
• “Showstoppers” render the entire application unusable (such as a crash), or a major feature is inoperable, or produces a wrong result. There is no workaround for a showstopper, hence its highest severity.
• Cosmetic bugs are appearance issues. They reflect badly on the product and annoy the user. Lower severity.
• Functional bugs with lower severity have a workaround, or we can get past them without incorrect data or data  corruption.
• horizontal axis: point in time in the development cycle.

Unit testing is mostly done by the programmer before the QA, QC or testing department ever sees it. Smaller modules of code are tested in a static setup against a spec sheet or checklist. Once all of the expected results can be created for all planned test conditions, the module is ready for “system testing”.

System testing requires that the module talk to the existing application as a whole. It should produce the expected results of the enhancement without breaking anything. This is where the bulk of testing should take place.

Beta and Acceptance testing is conducted by designated users in the client community to see if the product is ready for upgrade or replacement of an existing “production” product.

Understanding The Curve

You don’t need Statistics 101 to follow most of what the curve is telling us.

Programmer testing only suggests that the enhancement is ready for system testing. Getting early coding to run at all is just a part of the programmer’s job and doesn’t count in the bell curve. Just as pilots have to have a fundamental conviction that airplanes will fly, programmers are constitutionally constructed to believe the design is sound and can be made to produce the expected results.

Software testers are constitutionally built to believe that every product has serious latent flaws, and that they are capable of setting up the test conditions to expose them. Some “showstopper” bugs can’t be re-created in a real-world environment.

The real story is in the shape of the curve. Some shops don’t believe in wasting valuable resource dollars on “excessive” quality control. If fewer severe bugs are found, the curve will have a narrower “hill” and its peak will occur early in system testing. The likelihood increases that a “showstopper” will make it all the way to the end user’s desk. If the severity curve “flattens” -  does not clearly go down by midpoint in budgeted system testing (the middle portion of the curve) – the project is in trouble.

A complete project flow-chart “map” looks like a street map of a real estate development project or even a small town. A flow chart of a poorly designed legacy product can look like a map of the New York City sewer system.  A development QA effort that never really finds showstoppers is probably in deeper trouble.

The Sterilized Answer

In analytical terms, the reason we get dumb smartphones, home finance software that won’t install, and operating systems that won’t shut down is: inadequate testing resources shift the development bell curve to the left, where there’s less motivation and training to see the system from the user’s point of view. “It ought to work” is NOT a language spoken in the homes and offices of the end user.

The Bottom-line Answer

Complex systems require complex testing and a clever, flexible and rigorous strategy to ensure the product meets end user expectations and needs. This is true whether the product is a software office suite or a Ford Pinto. It’s never unfair to call a slipshod product “slipshod”.

Budget cuts, layoffs and outsourcing can kill a product. A company that cannot afford good training and documentation is particularly unlikely to be able to supply replacement offshore development teams with the resources they need to assimilate the legacy “knowledge base.”

When complex systems fail, all too often the defect was cast-in-stone way back in the design stage, and it was never detected (or it was, but was ignored) due to rushed development. Inadequate testing can only be explained by budget shortfalls and unrealistic release deadlines.

I’m guessing on the numbers, but the millions of lines of code in a modern operating system should be approximately comparable to all the software NASA used to put men on the moon in 1969. And even NASA-grade software has been known to fail for non-hardware reasons. When we think about it, it’s nothing short of a miracle our software works as well is it does.

Well, after all, every time you see the symbols “:-)” , you’d just replace the symbols with the image path to the appropriate smiley, wouldn’t you ?

So you can see the manual smiley markups, I even had to enclose the symbols in quotes for this post, to prevent WordPress from converting them to their image equivalents.

Outside of WordPress, it turned out not to be so simple. You see, every symbol in the smiley “grin” markup is also a “special character” in Perl and most other programming languages. The coding to test for their presence will therefore match to symbols which, themselves, are program control characters. So the program thinks it sees a syntax error and blows up.

Not only that, there are a lot more recognized smiley codes than the two I knew about. WordPress handles 44 distinct smiley codes. If you’re going to add smileys to your own projects, add all of them, as users aren’t going to be interested in guessing which ones you personally happen to know about.

I spent a day studying the WordPress code to see how they do it. I translated most of their relevant php code to Perl. I finally decided that (for my purposes) they are using the Large Hadron Collider to make refrigerator magnets, and I wrote my own code instead. That works for me.

Nothing like a little coding exercise to clear out the cobwebs. Now all I have to decide is what I want to use it for.

In the end, all I was able to use from the WordPress code was their markup-key to icon-value hash lookup table. I needed to write a subroutine to handle escaping of all the special characters. Even there, the characters have to be encoded in hex so the program doesn’t blow up. Fortunately Perl has a built-in library for the actual escaping (use URI::Escape). Lastly, I had to write the code for the program that outputs the test display below. It loops through the big hash table once. It loops through each word in the input text 44 times, analyzing each one to see if it matches this particular smiley. You can’t assume people will only use one smiley in an entry or post. But there should be a pre-test to see how many smileys the text sample contains. Then the program can exit as soon as it’s found all of them: done!

Example: In the test output below, quote marks enclose the found keys again, to make the display look more like the actual Perl html output. The quotes are not used in the original. The backslashes found elsewhere in the output below tell Perl not to treat the special characters as symbols, but just treat them like any other literal. In captured text containing smiley markup, you backslash all the special characters (this is called escaping control characters). You also escape the patterns you are trying to match. If there’s a match, substitute the corresponding smiley icon image for the matched smiley code markup, word by word. Then reassemble the words back into a sentence or paragraph. Finally, unescape the final smiley-converted text and print it out.

• Music: for years I’ve been careful to select PC motherboards with the best onboard sound processors (DAC’s). I knew I would be interested in finding the results of A/B sound comparisons between Mac and PC playing the same iTunes tracks in synch.
• iTunes: “PC music” is a hot topic in the high-end audio magazines these days. The thinking is that you have to get an external DAC to wring true “hi-fi” stereo sound out of your PC – and the pros are often as not using iTunes to create their own state of the art music servers – something I’ve been doing for years, using just the onboard digital-to-analog logic.
• And the audio quality winner is: Mac Pro, by the slightest of margins. My PC audio sounded indistinguishable from the original CD to me, or so I thought, so I didn’t see how the Mac could improve on that. Piped through the same back-end mini-stereo and Boston bookshelf speakers, the Mac highs sounded just a little crisper, and the bass just a little clearer and resonantly robust. That’s all the audiospeak you’ll get out of me – it was just enough difference that I could tell.
• HRT Music Streamer ($99): I wanted to see if one of these external DAC devices could really improve my PC audio. I ordered my $99 Music Streamer from Amazon, but it shipped from their trustworthy partner Audio Advisor. There is also a $299 Music Streamer+ with a better Bryston digital conversion processor chip. Art Dudley of Stereophile raves about this thing (the cheaper one) in his review. Believe it or not, all these devices, from $99 to $3,000, get the raw audio input from the USB data stream sent to any and all standard USB ports.
• It works. The HRT raised the PC audio to “indistinguishable” as compared with the Mac. The ASUS motherboard (M2N-SLI Deluxe) hosts an HD Audio Device, an ADI AD1988B, an Analog Devices Audio Codec.  (Check the link: it’s amazing what they cram into one chip). You would expect Apple to support top-rate media, so I suppose it’s a credit to ASUS that their more general-purpose motherboard came so close. Art Dudley must be using a Dell.
• I remain unconvinced that $299 or $1295 would get me a noticeably better audio experience. A good DAC is important, particularly if you’re running typical off-the-shelf retail PC’s,  but, goodness, there aren’t that many different grades of DAC chip on the market. If you can afford your table wine at over $100/bottle, go ahead and buy the $1,995 Bryston BDA-1 and let me know what you think – in plain English, not in winetaster-ese.
• Speed Comparisons: I’ve been running projects for SETI for years. I’m currently running it on (1) Mac, (2) PC’s, and a laptop. The Mac is pretty much producing as much daily output as all the other machines combined. SETI results below. Click the image for a readable full-size .gif image.
• Machines #5 and #6 are not active. #5 is my current PC, but under the old XP OS; the sixth is the Phoenix machine which only runs a few days a month. Average Credit scores compute lower with disuse. My old 32-bit XP installation (#5) used to crank out an average credit of about 690 units per day, so Win7 under 64-bit is about 1/3 faster on the same machine, and the average is still creeping up.

SETI Recent Results 12-24-3009

• Quicken 2010: I use Quicken to manage all the household accounts. Under Windows 7 I found the older Quicken 2009 no longer displayed investment share price in portfolio management, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of maintaining a portfolio tracker. The online Chat folks at Intuit assured me this feature would work under Q2010, so I upgraded, and it did work. Make sure you don’t check Run As Administrator in the executable’s Properties (even if you have Admin privileges): you’ll get the annoying dialog “Quicken does not support the Run As Administrator command”. Everything else works fine. If you do a 1-hour 100% clean uninstall and reinstall, and I did, you still have to un-check the Properties box to get rid of the dialog.  (That means their uninstaller didn’t find all old registry entries). Once I figured that out, it all works fine now. I wish their web page could have just said that.  Oh, and if you were thinking of migrating to Microsoft Money: did you know Microsoft tossed in the towel? MS Money is no longer offered and support will end soon.
• Sun Gonna Shine in My Back Door Someday Blues: If I ever get into the old Mac vs. PC flame war rhetoric, and I never did in the old days, I hope somebody will just shoot me. Having said that, if you want to install or uninstall a Mac app, you just drag the app’s icon into, or out of, the Applications folder. Heaven help us all if life on the PC side was ever so brilliantly simple.

A new motherboard and chip was financially out of the question. I’m running an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe with AMD 64 6000+ CPU. It’s not that old. By the time you add all the other stuff you always find you need, a slight upgrade turns into a major investment. I decided to go full bore with 8GB RAM, Windows 7 Pro (64-bit), and a better graphics card that would support “Windows Aero”.

The graphics card arrived DOA and is all packed up with RMA and prepaid UPS shipping label to send back to NewEgg tomorrow. The old card actually seems to work fine.

Windows 7 does not support a direct “upgrade” from XP to any flavor of Windows 7. Just as well. I wanted a clean install anyway, which MS calls a “custom install” to take some of the sting out of it.

You can dual boot multiple OS’s in Windows. I wanted to keep XP as a fallback during a transition period, and I intend to take my time. If you’re interested in dual-boot, by all means Google the topic before commencing. Essentially, you can only have one OS in a partition. You can either partition the existing C drive (if you have enough free space), or simply install a new HD (this is a big desktop box). I bought a cheap new 1TB HD, and ran the new OS install into a partition on that.

The Win7-64 install was the fastest and cleanest of any Windows install I’ve ever done. Windows asked for a name, password and OS serial number. It figured out everything else, including discovery of the Mac Pro and other PC’s on the network. The Windows annoyance factor has dropped 90%.

I like it so much I hate to boot back into XP, but that still works, too.

The Win7 interface is sleek, logical, clean and beautiful. I enjoy it very much. It strikes me as a cross between Mac Snow Leopard and Vista, with none of the ugly bad habits of Vista. I won’t say Microsoft “copied” the slick Snow Leopard look and feel, but I’m grateful that I can find my way around so quickly because of my Mac experience.

I had a couple of solvable glitches. This IS 64-bit Windows. I got my Microsoft bluetooth mouse working quite easily. Never being one to leave well enough alone, I had to go and install the iogear bluetooth software. All hell broke loose. Three iterations of driver updates later, I was getting blue screens and still no mouse.

I turned off the mouse, unplugged the bluetooth USB dongle, and uninstalled all the bluetooth software I’d installed. I then plugged the dongle back in, and turned on the mouse. It was discovered instantly, and not a problem since. I’ll worry about finding out how to let it discover my cellphone later.

The other glitch was one-time: I had an iTunes crash while I was trying to reconfigure my bluetooth mouse with the bad software. After uninstalling all the non-native bluetooth software (described above), iTunes worked perfectly again.

There are some differences where I miss the old ways. Right-clicking the Start menu doesn’t bring you a context menu, and I’d heavily customized my registry shell commands. Importing those changes into the new registry displays nothing. Instead of trying to make Windows 7 look like my old Windows 98, I’m going to take the time to learn the new ways of doing things.

I recommend Windows 7, and in particular, the 64-bit version. Without a hardware upgrade, I’m noticing about double the speed on most apps even if they’re not 64-bit: even Office is fast.  Boot time and shut-down time are less than 60 seconds – very close to the Mac. Agonizing 15-minute boots are a thing of the past.

I have the security of being able to say this because I have a Mac and a (Vista) laptop to keep me going, and, heck, I can still boot into my old XP installation. If your only machine is a notebook, and the hard drive’s nearly full, and you can’t afford to be offline for a while whilst getting your new environment up and running with the right drivers: just wait until it’s time to buy a new Notebook. Too many devices (touchpad, fingerprint, built-in webcam, etc) may or may not work until you get the required driver support.

The good news on drivers: in my own experience so far, I didn’t have to install any drivers. As noted above, I uninstalled the ones I put on the new OS. I didn’t even have to install nVidia and ASUS drivers for support at the motherboard level. Microsoft seems to have actually figured it out. So far, everything I need is installed and working correctly.

I will say that Mac has a better audio chip. The same WAV song played on  iTunes sounds distinctly crisper, clearer, and more “natural” on the Mac. I reported in an earlier post that I couldn’t distinguish between the great iTunes Windows and the original CD – but that A/B comparison was run through the same audio chip, so on reflection it was a silly test of audio reproduction.

Not to hijack the OS conversation, but the best solution is to buy an external USB DAC  – digital to analog converter. Art Dudley of Stereophile praises the $99 HRT Music Streamer USB D/A Converter to the skies, and the lab test charts back up his claim. (There is also a $299 version with a slightly better chip). These things are not toys for the iPod crowd, but a serious power tool for any audiophile who pumps WAV libraries of a PC or Mac music server through a serious home entertainment or audio system. Turns out, the digital audio really is a part of the USB bus stream.  DAC devices like this allow interception and processing before our relatively weak motherboard audio processors convert it to analog for your headsets, PC speakers, or stereo line-in cable.

Don’t get me wrong.  The onboard chips are certainly more than adequate for iPod, MP3 and AAW compressed sound. I was certainly impressed with my RealTek and SoundMAX sound chips. For WAV reproduction, better digital to analog conversion makes a difference you can hear at once. Thanks to Mac for demonstrating that.

Even the new Snow Leopard 10.6.2 is still working through a few refinements (the buggy Skype once crashed it, so I uninstalled Skype). So far, I would say Microsoft has done a remarkable job of simplifying the installation and presenting a clean OS we can look forward to using.

I do like my Mac better, and I’m not one of those “Mac vs. PC” snobs. I use the tools that do the job.

It’s a real pleasure to use Windows now, one I look forward to.

First test WordPress installation on local Mac machine. Click image for 1024x768 view.

Pictured above is a test WordPress installation running on a desktop Mac. It’s running under a free development environment for Mac called MAMP.  No internet connection or remote server uploads are involved at all.

WordPress is the popular free web blog engine that evolved into an excellent website platform. If the page pictured above looks familiar, that’s because Summitlake.com (and thousands of other sites) are running under WordPress.

Half of this article is general interest info, and half of it is tech talk for those who might like to start doing and testing web development on their own machines.

Thumbnail terms and functionality: WordPress is written in PhP, a popular web language related to Perl. It currently consists of around 866 files or 10.3MB per installation. PhP code can also be embedded in HTML web pages with the .php extension, allowing page customization without  Perl or CGI server side includes and heavy javascript. WordPress gets all its posts, pages and configuration parameters from a mySQL database, to which it must be connected. When you click a link to a WordPress article, the resulting content loads from this database, not from within the page itself. This means that you can change the look and feel (“theme”) of the page in an instant, without messing with its content at all.

This sounds complex to the newcomer, but page loads are faster than HTML and arguably just as reliable. By dividing storage, rendering and presentation functionality, what looks like a “page” to the viewer is a simple, logical division of labor to the programmer, content creator, or webmaster. As I write this post, I don’t need to be concerned with page design beyond adding graphics and fonting in a “WYSIWYG” window, nor even know how it works; I’m free to focus on writing the article.

Of course, having said all that, it really is complex. It’s possible to screw up a customization. I’ve “wrecked” the Summitlake home page several times. I’ve destroyed a department database a couple of times and had to re-load it. For this kind of work, it’s preferable to develop and test your changes on a test site or test server. I do have a private test site on Summitlake’s server, but the server is actually in Salt Lake City, and code changes have to be uploaded – another layer of intrusion upon the developer who wants to see immediate results. Having a test server right on your own Mac or PC means you don’t even have to upload your work to test the changes.

On October 24, I wrote about my first impressions of the Mac Pro, remarking “But I’ve always wanted to install a test server right on my own box. ”

I devoted yesterday evening to discovering how to do just that (without migrating to Snow Leopard Server). To my surprise, I had a test server up and running before turning in for the evening. Admittedly, it was a long evening for me – I “turned in” at 130AM.

At first, I just couldn’t get the server page to come up. It turned out I was typing an unnecessarily complicated URL. The server path to site root is predefined, but this is a Mac; you don’t have to do everything twice. Just type the URL as http://localhost/wordpress. You’re there.

Mac comes with most of the necessary apps pre-installed: Apache, SQLlite and PhP. But WordPress wants mySQL. And I already know how long it can take to set up the config files to get all these services running. For a test server, I wanted a quick demonstration server. Enter MAMP:

This freeware bundle installs and preconfigures Apache Server, mySQL database services, and the PhP page engine, to a standard default configuration. All you have to do is change or retain the default path to the test page (which includes the powerful phpMyAdmin) and server path to root (I chose “Sites”) and I was up and running in 1/2 hour.

This is the same stuff I run on our site’s virtual remote server, except for Apache, which I’m happy to let my hosting ISP worry about since it has never failed or needed my attention.

The free version of MAMP only supports localhost on the host machine, my Mac Pro. If you also want to view the test server on another machine (my Win-XP PC, for example), or if you actually would like to run a website from your Mac with a fixed IP address and domain name (I do not), then, for $99,  MAMP-Pro is for you. For the power and convenience, that’s an incredible bargain.

To install WordPress, I created an empty database, ‘wordpress’, in phpMyAdmin. I downloaded a clean current install of WordPress 2.8.6. I configured wp-config.php for connectivity to my fledgling database. At the outset, as I wrote before, I couldn’t get the URL right to run wordpress setup. I really just needed to type http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.

The “famous five-minute WordPress installation” actually takes about five minutes, including entry of basic WP setup fields like blog name and email.

After getting it running, I belatedly decided I wanted to change the password. They tell you, just use a user of ‘root’ and a password of ‘root’. Sure, Macs are secure, but published default pw’s are asking for trouble, just like ‘admin’/'admin’ defaults on router firewalls. Change the defaults.

I ran into trouble. There are also config files changed in the default MAMP installation that need to be changed manually if you change passwords. (You can edit files in BBEdit, TextMate or TextWrangler, and make other required command-line pw changes in Terminal).

If you are actually installing MAMP and WordPress on your Mac, bookmark and refer to these pages before doing anything else:

• Installing WordPress Locally on Your Mac With MAMP
• MAMP Frequently Asked Questions
• Cannot change MySQL Password after fresh Install. Save and print out the step-by-step instructions posted by PBear on Mar 01 2007 at 5:15 am.

Next Steps:

I’ve already loaded a clone of the custom Summitlake HOME installation, including yesterday’s database. The home page and linked articles load. The javascript slide show and portrait image are done by php virtual include. They do not work yet. The random quote snippets, server stats and “At A Glance” sidebar entries are Perl includes. They do not work yet. A lot of my code server paths are hard-wired (not relative paths) to defeat DreamWeaver’s rewriting of paths when a file is moved. Nowadays I mostly code in HomeSite or BBEdit. But I will get it going.

If you have a Mac and do website development, whether for personal blog or something bigger, this localhost server technology is robust, proven and here to stay. I recommend looking into it.

Cheers!

Unlike an earlier experiment a few years back, this router had excellent range. It’s an ASUS WL-520GU broad range wireless router I picked up on the cheap on a whim at a NewEgg sale, but I never spent the time to try to work through the setup.

In this configuration you just connect a wireless LAN port into an existing CAT5 network port on any fast Ethernet switch. I use NetGear switches all over the house. However, in what was to be its “permanent” location, I was unsuccessful in getting the installation software to connect to the wireless router. Finally, I just plugged it into the unused extra Local Area Connection 2 port on the back of my desktop PC. The installer connected just fine.

The next step was to configure the router through its HTTP IP address. The web browser configuration panel is much more sophisticated than the installation software, and worked perfectly. I set up a very secure connection and soon had my wireless Toshiba laptop connected to it.

Moving the now-configured wireless router out to its permanent home in the living room (about 100′ away), I connected it to the living room CAT5 connection. The Toshiba laptop, still here on my desk,  nevertheless got “Excellent” signal strength at that distance. I can’t see any signal drop-off.

In this setup the wireless is just a “repeater station” so you can rove with the laptop. Now I have the best of both worlds: the speed of 100Mbps CAT5, and wireless mobility for roving devices.

As others have pointed out, installation software is “horrible”. I saw that remark made about ASUS in a NewEgg user review; I would have to say that NetGear installation software is at least as bad.  Here we are criticizing only the software that comes with the installation CD’s; on the other hand, I’ve found that the ASUS and NetGear firmware HTTP configuration control panels that come with the same devices, which we use to administer router, print server and firewall router, are all reliably excellent.

Techgage review

• More software added: BBEdit, Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac
• In the mail: Dreamweaver CS4 for Mac (crossgrade)
• Win-PC networking fixed (issue on PC side)
• Installed HP P1505N networked printer for all machines
• Upgraded memory to 7GB (+3[2GB] SIMMS + 1 existing 1GB) - removed two 1GB’s to fill 4 slots.
• Added 1TB Hitachi SATA for backups and music

The hardware upgrades were particularly pleasant. Adding memory and drives in any well-designed computer case should be a no-brainer, but Apple makes it even easier with pull-out trays or slot frames. No need to access the motherboard. No SATA cables needed – the drive just plugs in.

The HP CD installer did not work well with Snow Leopard. I had to manually delete the install and reinstall a download. The Win-XP install went fine and left me convinced that the Mac installer version is a stripped-down afterthought. It is the only Mac installer I have yet used that does not follow Apple installer interface conventions. However, all machines now print great on the new ethernet printer, which runs only $249, half the price and weight of the non-networked parallel port HP1100 we bought for this household in the year 2000.

I bought the Hitachi drive “bare” – unformatted. On the Mac, just partition the new drive, which takes abotu 15 seconds, and you’re done. Time Machine, Apple’s backup utility, is backing up the Mac HD now and is 75% through a 48GB backup, in about 20 minutes. Impressive!

All in all, now I wish all my machines were Mac. So many Windows XP and Vista operations are SO slow – especially, startup, shutdown and Internet Explorer 8 – even with the very fast AMD dual core processor. It is edifying to switch over to the PC, and unfortunately somewhat of a letdown. I am hoping to shed some of the startup crap that slows Windows down so much. Larger apps are so bloated that the PC app manufacturers load “helper apps” that run in the background all the time, giving the user the impression app startup is quicker than it would otherwise seem. Managing this in msconfig works but is a pain – I never did find a really good PC startup manager.

Apple users used to have really outstanding startup managers. I see no need of one at the moment, but if I do, I’m confident they’re still available.

No one seems to know of a really good IPTC photo editor for Mac. This is “the other” embedded file-info format on photo images (besides EXIF). IPTC contains all the comments and keywords that many photo browsers like JAlbum utilize so neatly. I can use PhotoShop or PS Elements (I think), but Photoshop is quite klutzy for IPTC and EXIF, with no batch or profiling functionality, and changing IPTC in Photoshop updates the EXIF, which is unacceptable.

Regular users know I run project SETI 24/7. I also use it as a realtime benchmarking standard.

• Average daily SETI credits: AMD dual core (Win-XP) 756.27, Intel Quad core Xenon (Mac OS 10.6) 978.61, AMD quad core (Win-XP) 1,430.15 units.
• Measured floating point speeds: AMD dual core (Win-XP) 2993.42, Intel Quad core Xenon (Mac OS 10.6) 3131.16, AMD quad core (Win-XP) 2412.27 million ops/sec.
• The Mac has not accumulated an average SETI credit yet equal to the two main Windows machines, but it takes some time for SETI to catch up to what the machines are uploading after they come online.   SETI already ranks the Mac #1, followed by the two AMD PC’s.

No wonder my Mac friends would never consider running on other platforms!

Postscript:  Hewlett Packard Registration

“Thank You For Registering With HP”: Is this what we can expect as thanks for registering a new purchase with HP?