AkinsTech

Although I use Pidgin (formally GAIM) as my Instant Messenger of choice, I had a need to run Yahoo Messenger for something I was doing.  Anyway, have you seen the latest Yahoo Messenger?  Talk about bloatware.  So for the sake of cleanliness, I wanted to install the OLD Yahoo IM.  In searching for it, I ran across this site, http://www.oldversion.com/.  As the name implies they keep older versions of popular software.

In general, you’ll find that the older versions of software are simpler, more stable, and perform a specific task (as good software should).  Sometimes you don’t want all the bells and whistles of the latest and greatest version.  In that case check out that site and see if they have it.  If they don’t have it, you can always email me as well…  I keep a pretty extensive library of old software versions for that very purpose.

I saw this today and found it interesting. 

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199905713

Evidently, Buffalo is being ordered to stop selling wireless products due to patent violations with the 802.11g protocol, originally developed by CSIRO.  They don’t specifically mention what Buffalo is doing differently than other companies like Netgear, Linksys, et. al.  I find it odd, as many of these routers are based on the same Broadcomm chipsets. 

I guess we’ll see what happens.  At the very least, they are talking about as much as $4 per unit to CSIRO.  I’m not sure what that means in terms of retail price change, but my Favorite Buffalo Router will no longer be the $40 bargain it usually is!

While I like the Leviton Structured Media Centers, and the other pre-made enclosure “systems”, sometimes you just can’t beat the simplicity, freedom, flexibility, and price of a simple sheet of plywood. Here’s one I did recently in a 20-yr old house.

The plywood is just 1/2″ exterior grade CDX. It’s secured to the studs with 2″ drywall screws every 10″ or so.

We pulled two CAT-5, two RG-6 and a phone to each room of the house. The patch panel is a standalone (meaning not meant for a media system) 12-port “quick port” style from Leviton. It is basically a frame that accepts the standard quickport inserts which is really nice for mixing and matching cable types.

All phone lines in the house are run with CAT-5 and brought to a simple old-school junction box. The DSL is split off using a DSL Splitter. We have an alarm feed going to an RJ31X jack (in an inside room, near the alarm). Particularly with the phone and DSL, the plywood system is really nice in that you can troubleshoot easily, make changes, and really see what’s going on. Each of the jacks is clearly labeled (for instance “Red/Grn: TO Alarm” and “Ylw/Blk: FROM Alarm”) so that any alarm or phone company technician coming in behind me will know EXACTLY what’s going on. I wish I could say the same for the people *I* come behind…

Anyway, video is inside the grey metal box, distributed with a standard 2Ghz splitter.

The wireless router is my current favorite router….The Buffalo WHR-G54S which is rock solid stable. Buffalo MAY replace this router with a newer one, so get these while you can. Anyway, if you reflash the firmware with the DD-WRT open source router OS, you have a router that performs better and is more stable than just about anything out there. (More on this in a future posting) Also, note that the router is held in place with two blocks of wood. The Buffalo has extremely small mounting lugs in the back, making it quite difficult to wall-mount. So I just cut two pieces of 1×2 pine furring strip and sandwiched the router. Try that with a Leviton system.

Anyway, the beauty of this system is that you can do pretty much anything with it. Mount any device exactly where you want it. Move things around, etc. One of the huge benefits vs. a pre-made system is that you have more than enough room to work in. Furthermore, you aren’t limited to the various “modules” that the manufacturer makes. You simply find what you need and screw it to the wall.

So, I say if you’ve got the room, go for the plywood patch center. They’ll beat the structured media centers every time.

Anybody who’s been working with PC’s since the late nineties probably remembers Paint Shop Pro. Paint Shop Pro was a wonderful graphics manipulation program. At the time, it was a revolutionary piece of software. It wasn’t necessarily that it did anything NEW….but it did it in a way that other programs couldn’t. First it was SMALL. I remember PSP downloads in the 600K range. Second, it was FAST. Paint Shop Pro was highly optimized code that worked on even the most antiquated hardware. Third, it was inexpensive. (FREE). The shareware version of Paint Shop Pro could be used for almost ALL personal photo projects, and if you needed more than that, you could order the commercial version for a mere $39.99.

Over the years, though, PSP fell into the feature-creep trap that I feel plagues most software today. You have to release new versions, and you have to add new features. Merely refining existing features is no longer good enough. People need to see something new. More knobs, more buttons, more toolbars, more add-ons. PSP is now a “Suite” and was recently acquired by one of the worst peddlers of bloatware, Corel. At over a 100MB install, sadly, one of the best pieces of software in PC history is officially dead.

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For a while now (several years) I have been intending to start a blog.  Whether I’m talking about projects I’m working on, expressing my opinion in a forum on how things should be done, or just discussing what’s going on, I’ve felt that my time would best be spent putting that information into some central spot.  I have a lot of really good information buried in emails and IT forums that I think might be helpful in some type of searchable, readable format.  Furthermore, since my previous website was very blog-ish (chronological smattering of random info) I figured I’d just MAKE my site a blog. 

As with many things in my life, I tend to suffer from the “paralysis from analysis” syndrome.  In wanting things to be too perfect, or follow some master plan, I seem to never get them done.  For instance…  Years ago I started just dabbling in ASP…just enough to solve a few problems I had.  Meanwhile I was also using VBScript fairly extensively in my day job.  The two went hand in hand.  Then I used VB.NET to solve a few recent problems.  My experience (although brief) with ASP and VBScript made VB.NET a breeze.  So I decided that all efforts of mine would be within the Microsoft ASP/VB/.NET realm, as any knowledge gained could be directly beneficial to my career.

So when I needed a blog system, it HAD to be ASP.  Although I would PREFER a Unix/PHP/MySQL web host, I need to be realistic in keeping my efforts focused on the platform that will benefit me career-wise.  So, several times over the years I went looking for (and mostly failed to find) a decent (free) ASP-based blog system that met my needs.  I knew WordPress was pretty much what I wanted, but WordPress is PHP-based.  To be fair, Community Server (Commercial Product) and Forest Blog (Free) were pretty close.  But with Community server, it felt too much like I was USING community server.  Not only that, Community server just felt like it did too much.  It was an all-in-one site “system” and way more than I needed.  On the other hand, Forest Blog didn’t do quite EVERYTHING I needed.  In all fairness, Forest also has a system called “Forest Site” which may have met my needs, but I didn’t get a chance to try it.

In the end, I switched web hosts to one that runs on Windows 2003 Server with ASP.NET AND PHP.  Also, it supports MS SQL AND MySQL databases.  So I’ll be able to use WordPress as my blog, and still continue with my various Microsoft-oriented endeavors.  Who knows, maybe I’ll learn some PHP along the way.

So anyway, here it is.  I hope to update it at least once a week…perhaps more, perhaps less…with various ideas, tips, tricks, news, opinions, or just simply to show some things I’ve been working on.