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Scott's Column
New Design, Dreamweaver vs. Expression,
Money vs. Quicken, Learning Web Development,
Home Server
February 1, 2007
By Scott Lewis
Well, I finally finished the redesign of this site... and your looking at it. I am sorry to all of those that voted for the two blue color schemes (one with blue text on a white background, and one with black text on a white background for the main content). We will get to the color selection, the graphics, the tools I used. Everything. Sit back, because I have a lot to write about this month.
Current Topics:
- Gaming - Brain Age, No One Lives Forever, XNA Game Studio Express
- The Design
- The Color
- The Tools
- Web Development
- MS Money vs. Quicken
- Windows Live Accounts
- Home Server (Software)
I have been way too busy with learning web development, redesigning this site, and other computer endeavors to have any time to play games. I did buy a game cartridge for my sons' Nintendo DS. It is called Brain Age, and it has a bunch of tasks designed to exercise your brain... oh and it has a pretty good Sudoku game. Everyone in the house is playing Brain Age... except me.
As for PC games, I am stuck on No One Lives Forever. I will need to find a walkthrough to get past the point I am at when I find the time to get back into the game.
I came across Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express. This looks like a development tool to build games. Every time I come across a tutorial or book on game programming I wonder if I would be able to do it. I never get anywhere. However, a friend of mine (also a very good programmer) said we could be very god game programmers... if we were doing it full time. Full time for game developers is 60 - 70 hours per week. Ouch! I hate overtime.
I always say...it takes 6 month to become competent with a programming environment and a year to be great. I don't have a year of full time work to become a great game programmer. Maybe XNA Game Studio Express will enable me to develop a decent puzzle game without spending weeks or months on it.
Yea... when I get time.
No need to wait any further. I came across a blog that gave me the idea of the banner graphic at the top of this page. I am not happy with it. I got the basic look I wanted, but after looking at it long enough I don't like a few things. First is the floating cars. Two of the cars in the graphic look like they are floating in space. I didn't have a choice with the two Camaros on the right as that is from one photograph. I would have to completely start over trying to find two images to work with so I could "lower" the red car, or raise the red car's reflection. Even if I did this I would still be stuck with the fact that it still doesn't look real. If a car was really on a sheet of water you would see part of the undercarriage of the car. The camera and laptop have the same weird floating look. I wish they all came out as good as the computer did.
I wanted to do a glass effect to go along with the release of Windows Vista. The menu bar with the Home, About, Subscribe and E-Mail links was done as a glassy graphic. I tried to do an animated reflection on it when you passed your mouse over it, but I couldn't get it to look good enough. I also wanted to have an aurora in the background of the page that faded to a single color. There was a problem with Internet Explorer and Firefox. I could get the background to work with only one at a time. Each one did its own thing when I tried to have a background image for only part of the page. So much for building Cascading Style Sheet based web pages that are browser independent.
In fact, I had to change a few things to suit the two browsers. I tried to design the page using DIV tags. I could get it to look good in only one browser at a time. Ultimately I ended up using nested tables for the page. The content below the menu bar is in one big table. Then the navigation is in a table, which allowed me to get the tight fitting graphics that gave me the box look I wanted. The column text is also in a table for the same reason, to get the rounded corner box to look just right.
The big decision came to go with brown. I originally was going to go with blue. I mocked up a bunch of pages using a blue background, even for the column text. That's when I tried to do the aero/aurora thing. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get the look I was after.
I was ready to drop back to a simple blue color scheme when I came across a blog that used a very simple black and white schema. They had a fading background from medium gray to black which became the outer borders running down the page. This blog also had a nice banner graphic and a glass looking menu bar.
I tried doing the same thing with a rich blue. Then I was reading an article on the Microsoft Zune and decide I wanted to do a blown color scheme. If I get a Zune it will have to be brown. Why brown? Because Apple does the iPods in black and white, so brown is the anti-iPod color.
I used Microsoft's Expression Web product to build all the working pages to get to the final look. Once I had the look I wanted I ported the pages to Dreamweaver. This was to make sure I could use Dreamweaver if I had to. Microsoft is not making the Expression products available to MSDN subscribers. You can read all about that on my blog.
I wanted to use some form of template pages. To me this means that the major navigation and look of the pages is in a template, and the content is in the pages you see. In the background these are combined to make a great looking page. The goal is that once the look is done I can easily edit the content and not worry about the look anymore.
Both Expression and Dreamweaver do this about as I expect. I was very pleased with this. I actually like Expression Web. However, if Microsoft expects me to pay for it above and beyond the price of my MSDN subscription (a little more than $2,000 a year) then I will use the copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 I have.
I used a combination of Photoshop CS and Paint Shop Pro 8 for the graphics. I find some things easier in PSP even though they can be done in Photoshop. Plus I have more experience using PSP since I have been using it for over ten years. I only use Photoshop when I need it.
The breadcrumb feature I mentioned last month is not working yet. It is here, but it is still a work in progress as I don't have enough history with this design, yet. Hopefully I will have worked all that out by next month.
I am finally working my way though a book. "ASP.NET 2.0: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition." It is relatively simple, but it is teaching me more than I know about building web sites/pages using data driven ASP.NET pages. This is what we do where I work, and I was passed up for a promotion because I haven't learned Visual Studio and .NET programming yet. Oops! I am not worried. I didn't put a lot of emphasis on it because I didn't see a career path. I reported to a Director, and he wasn't going anywhere. Well, they made a friend of mine my manager, and created a Senior Programmer/Analyst and put our best .NET programmer (beside my friend that turned manager) in that position. Trust me, I expect to get that same title by the end of the year... sooner if I can.
Anyway, I will finish this book and I have a downloaded book at work I will also work through. Then I will start asking for Web work. I'll keep you posted. Right now I am on chapter 5.
It was time to update my personal finance
software. I have been using Microsoft Money
since Money 95 (4.1). I wanted to try online banking to the point of being able to
automatically update my finance data with the
bank's. Have the transactions entered and
reconciled electronically, rather than the big
manual event I go through every month when the
statement comes in the mail. I also want to use
the software to setup and keep a budget.
Normally I do a budget in an Excel Spreadsheet.
I wanted the cheapest solution so I downloaded
the trial edition of Money Essential. I
connected it to my credit union and was amazed
how easy it was. Then it became immediately
apparent that Money Essential could not do a few
things I wanted. Particularly, I wanted to
create my own categories for payments, and use
"forms" for data entry.
I downloaded the trial version of Money Deluxe
and saw that it did the custom categories,
and the budget setup was just about perfect. I
then set it up to use forms for data entry,
another feature missing in Money Essentials that
I would greatly miss from Money 95. So far all was
good.
The next time I got into Money Deluxe it would
not allow the forms for data entry and a couple
of other items seemed to revert back to Money
Essential's way of doing them. Huh?
I was testing this on a computer I would
not use
for my final install... just in case of these
things. I tried loaded Money Deluxe to a Virtual
PC. This would be a self contained test
environment I could rebuild easily.
Unfortunately I could not connect to my credit
union this way. I could still connect through
the test machine with the "hybrid" version of
Money.
At some point I needed to actually log onto my
credit union account on the web. They
implemented a new logon procedure that has you
confirm a picture as part of your logon. Also,
they changed from using your account number to
using an account name. I didn't give this much
thought at the time.
A couple of weeks passed and I figured I would
just bite the bullet and install Money Deluxe on
my laptop... a final install, if you will. I
will also install the software on my wife's
laptop when I get everything setup so she can
see what's happening in our account as well.
I got the same results from Money Deluxe on my
laptop that I did on the Virtual PC. I tried
logging on the credit union's web site and saw
the new logon. Oops. I forgot about it. I plugged
the account name and password into Money Deluxe,
but I still got the same failure to connect.
I went back to the test machine to see if it
could connect and low and behold it could not. I
contacted my credit union and they said simply,
"we do not have a contract with Microsoft Money
and they could not help me." Ouch! I remember
them mentioning Quicken and Money on their web
site. Quicken was mentioned more, but I did see
one reference to Money. Maybe I should try
Quicken. That means paying up front. Quicken
does not offer a trial version. They offer a
money back guarantee, so I supposed I will be
able to get my money back if it fails to work
with my credit union. I asked my credit union
and they responded that they didn't have a
contract with Quicken, but that several of their
customer use it successfully.
I bought Quicken Basic (same price as Money
Deluxe) and installed it on my laptop. I should
have tried to use a Virtual PC in case I hosed
things, but I didn't. Quicken ended up having
the same issues as Money when connecting to my
credit union. I contacted Quicken customer
support. I must say they were pretty helpful.
Some of their instructions where wrong, almost
like they were giving steps for a different
version of the software. In the end I was never
able to make a direct connection to my credit
union. However, I was able to download a "Web
Connect" file from my credit union and import
that into both Money and Quicken.
Now the battle begins. I will have to try each
one and see which is better. I need at least a
month of data to compare their budgeting
features. Since this is going to press on Feb
1st, I won't have time to do the budget until I
have all of January's data from my credit union.
I could try to work with December's data, but
that is a joke with all the Christmas spending.
It is far easier to wait for a full month of
January data.
My initial thought is neither will be perfect. I
briefly looked at the budget feature in each and
Money seemed easier to setup, but I did not have
a chance to truly apply that with custom
categories and pointing my transaction to those
categories. Quicken did a much smoother job with
importing my bank records from the file. I
didn't notice the second time I went to download
from my credit union that I downloaded data from
my savings account instead of my checking
account. Money took the data and tried to merge
it with my previous checking information.
Quicken told me it was for another account and
asked me to create a new account. Cool!
I really liked how Quicken imported files. I did
not like the budget feature in Quicken. This is
all preliminary. I will have to see how easy it
is to add a list of "payees" and setup the
payees to custom categories.
I will be working on this during the beginning
of February so hopefully we can start using the
budget then.
I'll let you know which I finally use. Quicken
is looking to get the node because they already
have my money (no pun intended). Money will have
to be good enough to make me ask for a refund
from Quicken. We'll see.
I had to create one of these when I signed up
for URGE. However, I noticed after using it that
I had entered my e-mail address incorrectly. A
typo. There is no place to change your e-mail
address. When I try to create a new account with
my correct e-mail address it says it is in use.
When I try to assign it to my current account it
won't let me. I also saw someone else's name at
one point during the Zune Marketplace setup,
which also uses the Windows Live thing.
The situation got worse when I tried to play
around with Microsoft Money. It requires a
Windows Live account. I had to put in my
incorrect e-mail address there to get going.
These Windows Live accounts are a royal pain in
the ass. I also don't like having to supply a
"user name" to services like URGE and
Zune Marketplace. I used
miniburb (from by blog). It
took it, but I can't use it to create a new
account. It is bad enough having to remember
passwords that you are allowed to set, but
trying to get accounts on all these services
when all the names you want to use are long gone is crazy.
I won't be able to remember the account name.
Why can't your e-mail address be your account
name/handle/screen name/whatever. And why can't
you change it if you make a mistake typing it.
Heck... you should have to confirm it by them
sending you an e-mail at the address you supply
to make sure they can contact you and someone is
not signing you up for some crap.
I built a home server a
few years
back. Since that time I have only had to
replace one
hard drive. So, if you didn't read the old
article I will recap... my server is a 450 MHz
Celeron system with two physical hard drives.
The C: drive is split into two partitions and
are seen as C: (30GB) & D: (90 GB). The second
hard drive is seen as E: (60 GB). The computer
has 384 MB of memory.
There is enough storage space on the server for
its current needs. No one is storing movies yet,
so pictures, music, downloads and my web site
are all doing fine. I tried installing Oracle
10g on it, but it is so slow it is unusable
(Oracle requires 512 MB. Oops!).
I would like to build a new server. I have read
the occasional article on home servers. My needs
are modest, and I am definitely in the camp that
believes a file/print server does not need a lot
of processing power. I still have the "old"
motherboard and CPU from when
I upgraded my
main computer. This could be the starting
point for a server. It should be fast enough,
that's for sure. The big question becomes what
will I really do with it and what components do
I still need to make it all work.
Let's start with what I would do with a
server... now that I have been running one for 4
years. Here are the items I need in a home
server:
1) File server.
2) Print server.
3) IIS (Web) server.
4) Oracle server.
5) SQL Server.
6) Domain Controller.
Let's go over those. I am already doing the file
& print server thing, so I have to continue
that. I am also currently hosting this web site
on my server. However, I am considering moving
my web site to a domain name (something like
www.myserver.com). That will have a monthly
cost, but it might be worth it from a security
standpoint. We'll see. Either way, I need the
web server capability to practice programming
web sites in Visual Studio 2005.
I need to install SQL Server to test deploying a
web site that I am building as part of a book I
am working on. SQL Server also requires 512 MB
of memory. It also requires a 600 MHz processor. Oops
again. We use Oracle 10g at work, and I would
like to try building web sites at home that use
Oracle. This would help be develop my skill set
to match my work.
Now for the Domain Controller. For those of you
that don't know I will try to explain. A domain
controller is a special server that is basically
the "master" server... master of its "domain."
This is different from regular servers that do
specific tasks (as we have above). When you put
computers on a network with a domain controller
these computers become clients to the domain.
You can have a PC on a domain that is not part
of the domain (you log on locally), but it means
you have to access resources on the network
manually. When your computer logs onto the the
domain (it does this when you log on the machine
itself) your network resources are available. In a home network this is not a big
deal. But some of the things you can do with a
domain controller can be handy. What I want to
do is create accounts on the domain that
everyone logs into with whatever PC they want. I
will also try to implement two features of a
domain controller. 1) Roaming profiles, and 2)
home directories.
Every Windows computer has profiles. They are
stored locally on the machine, especially in a
home environment. But in work environments it is
common to use roaming profiles so your profile
is the same with every computer you log onto.
The profile stays on the network (the domain
controller). Think about it this way, you have
two people using one computer. Each has a user
name (even if you don't have a password). Person
one logs on and changes his desktop background
to a cool picture and puts a few shortcuts to
his favorite programs on his desktop. When
person 2 logs on they don't see person 1's
desktop, but see their own that they can change.
By putting the profile on the domain controller
it can follow you from one computer to the next.
You should be able to log into each computer and
have all the same shortcuts, color scheme, etc.
on each machines. Cool! If you change your
profile on one computer it is changed when you
log on the other. I would like to set this up so
everyone in the house can log onto any computer
and have their own settings.
The home drive is a special network folder for
each users. Typically it is a drive letter that
everyone has. For instance, I could set it up
that the drive letter H: on my computer is a
network drive that exists on the server and I
would save all my files to the H: drive. When I
log onto any computer I always have my H: drive
available and all the file I need. Very cool!
The real trick here is that everyone will have
an H: drive, but each person's H: drive will be
a different location on the server, so
everyone's files are kept separate. You can't
see my H: drive and I can't see yours.
Ideally you setup this "home drive" to be the
location of "My Documents." This means that your
settings follow you with roaming profiles and
all your documents follow you because of the
home directory. This is getting really cool. There
will be issues to work out with the My Documents
for when you are away (should we take our
laptops out of the house) or if the server is
down for some reason. And what to do if the network
connection to the server is down.
Those are the two biggies. I would also like to
standardize on mapping a drive that points to a
common area... like a public drive that every
computer on the network can see. This will be a
place for people to put all the files they want
to share.
One last reason for the domain is to do better
backups. I want to implement an easy solution
for backing up everyone's computer. If we are
using the network for My Documents I could
backup from one place. If My Documents is local I may put some kind of
backup or synchronizing software in place that
would keep copies of the files in the My
Documents folder on the network. This means
there are always (almost always) two copies of
each file. Sort of a "live" backup all the time.
I don't know which method to use. I like the
syncing thing because it means there are always
two copies, one local and one on the network. If
files are only saved on the network I have to
backup the server more regularly to make sure
there is no chance of lost files.
I have heard rumors that Microsoft is going to
come out with a Home Server. I think this is
going to be a hardware/software solution. I
don't think this is what I want. I am not
looking for a media hub. A media hub server to
store music, pictures and movies is only part of
the fun. I want the Oracle and Web servers as
well for programming. What Microsoft needs to do
is create a stripped down version of their
server operating system that can be used for the
home. How hard can it be to strip down Windows
Server 2003 to just file/print/web services.
Then I could install Oracle myself. I may
install Windows Server 2003 on my next home
server if Microsoft doesn't come out with
something else. That is huge overkill for a home
server, but if there isn't anything else that
will let me do web development with Visual
Studio then so be it.
Next month I will discuss my ideas for hardware
to support this server. The big question is
whether to use RAID or not. RAID is a system
that uses multiple hard drives that look like
one big drive. You can use RAID to have
redundancy to prevent losing data. That sounds
cool. But is it? You'll have to wait until next
month to find out.
Conclusion
That's it for this month. I am so busy. I am
still trying to find time to compare photo
album software. I need to build a budget and
setup financial software from scratch. I am
doing the music service comparison. I am
doing the redesign, and have to move the
archives pages to the new format. I need to get cracking
on learning to build eCommerce sites in
Visual Studio .Net 2005. I want to learn a
little more about Flash and possibly
incorporate a touch of it on this site. I
want to get my domain name back, and look
into creating a database aware web site on
the Internet. The list goes on and on.
Stay tuned. I hope 2007 will be fun year!
