Daily archive: April 29, 2009

Summer Techno-Ministry

April 29, 2009, by No comments yet

For the summer months we have traditionally had Sunday school. However, at the request of both parents and students, I am doing something different this year. We will still have class, but it will be completely voluntary.

How is this different from not having class? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I introduced the idea of using our summer months to work on the church website. We will meet and work on anything that needs to be done. I will bring my laptop, wireless mouse and keyboard and connect it to the projector. In turn, they will finally get their hands on my MacBook Pro and get a little hands on training in ministry. Some of the possible projects are:

  1. Setting up a YouTube channel
  2. Editing videos for the YouTube channel
  3. Getting photos from other church events to upload
  4. Suggestions on updating the website for possible visitors

From my perspective, its a win-win. The youth are happy and I get help working on the church website. I also get to set aside some time each week to update our content.

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Computer Remote Access

April 29, 2009, by No comments yet

Recently, I had a friend tell me that his computer has gotten slow and could I look it over. Sound familiar? It should. This is the same friend whose computer I have chronicled and done battle with in the past.

So, I stop by after work and look over the computer. While it is not going as slow as he previously described, I still gave it the once over. I quickly noticed that he had some Windows updates waiting to be installed. I did that first. Next, I just ran some diagnostics. In the end, it seemed to be running quicker and at least was not giving me an uneven experience.

But, before I left, I installed Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection software. After testing the connection, I was able to see his desktop on my Mac and be assured I could connect from outside his network. Now, I had a good way of connecting to his machine to check on it every now and again.

However, I also use VNC for the reverse type of connection. I use a PC at work and do not want to setup another mouse/keyboard on my desk. So, I turned on Desktop Sharing on my Mac (standard with IS X) and VNC viewer on my PC. Voila! Instant access to my Mac and less clutter on my desk.

While I choose to use two different products for this back and forth connectivity, I could have also used VNC on his PC and connected from my Mac. It comes does to personal preference. Since I connect to his machine from outside his network, I wanted the added security Remote Desktop Connection offers.

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Joomla Install Error

April 29, 2009, by 1 comment

Error: The XML response that was returned from the server is invalid.

That was the response from our Rackspace server as I tried to install a new instance of Joomla. As much as I want to say it was unexpected, the truth is, I have seen it before. I have a personal client who also uses Rackspace and Joomla for his business. When I first encountered this problem, I had to search high and low, even contacting Rackspace for help. It took a few days to get it fixed.

Ultimately, it was this simple. Don’t let Joomla try to create the configuration.php file. It won’t work. Why, I don’t know. Is it the RedHat Enterprise Linux or perhaps how Rackspace configures it, I could not say. What I can say is this, if I do not change permissions on the configuration.php.dst, it works great.

No problems loading the sample data.

No problems connecting the FTP layer.

It just works.

Wonderful.

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LaunchCFMApp -’Nuff Said

April 29, 2009, by No comments yet

We recently had some slowdowns on the wireless portion of our office network. We looked around and determine that (ahem) both an iMac down the hall and my MacBook Pro are generating the bulk of it. Since this is a predominantly Windows network and I love Macs, I was tasked with finding out what was going on.

I started out by looking at my own machine. The first think I wanted to know was what traffic was coming and going and by whom. That is, what programs/daemons were generating the packets of information. After looking over my Utilities folder, I was left wondering, “Well, how do figure this out?”. I searched the Internet and came across ProteMac Meter. While this is a commercial program, thankfully, it has a thirty (30) day trial.

So, I downloaded and fired it up.

Nothing.

This got me thinking, what could possible be generating this traffic. Next stop, my networking settings.

I noticed that I had AppleTalk running. Since it is not needed by the services I a running, I turned it off. That seemed to work for my computer’s traffic. I still had to deal with the iMac down the hall.

I looked over the network setting first. Nothing. No problem, install ProteMac.

Bingo!

I found something called LaunchCFMApp running. Until this point, I had never heard of it. After some quick Googling, I was made aware that this is something used to run Cocoa applications on OS X. Now, all I had to figure out was what is a seemingly OS 9 program doing on a current OS X machine that does not have Classic installed? Answer – it was MS Entourage from Office 2004. So, I told the user, try using either Apple Mail or upgrade to Office 2008. She did both.

After installing Office 2008, she went back to using Entourage. Now, I am thinking this will be fine because Microsoft has had some time to translate this out of Cocoa. Well, our little network problem and LaunchCFMApp came back.

She is now using Apple Mail permanently.

While I have never seen this kind of traffic problem before, it was nonetheless reproducible and instantaneous. Somehow, Entourage is generating a lot of traffic on our network.

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