Bill Haenel

Music On Demand

Fri, 29 May 2009 09:05:00 -0500

My son decided to sit on our street corner and play tunes for passing pedestrians and vehicles.

He hung a sign on a nearby light pole saying he would take requests for a fee.

He played our baritone ukulele like it deserved a beating.

The neighborhood was undoubtedly enamored for blocks around.

We enjoyed a few moments together on the porch swing. We played well. A tenor uke and a banjo.

We want to play like Jake Shimabukuro. One of us might some day. It might not be me...

iTunes, Pandora, Amazon, eat your heart out. Music has ALWAYS been available on-demand.

Beaver Country

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:04:00 -0500

Within the past couple of days, after a long winter of waiting for ice-out (snow-out?), I finally made it back to one of my favorite fishing spots. I did not fish.

April 1st, the season opened for trout. That date is somewhat arbitrary, yes. After all, most of the good water around here has at least one or two good stretches of all-year, catch-and-release fishing. Not only that, but the water level, speed and temperature puts a damper on most fishermen's plans well into mid-April. So what about that date?

In the end, April 1 is one big sign of Spring trout fishing, along with small green plant sprouts poking through the dirt and snow, Robins bouncing around my very small yard, and this:

The appearance of a beaver lodge and his dam are not necessarily signs of Spring. However, being able to see his artwork, and also the level country he left behind as he cropped and milled the territory he claimed for himself are all a result of the snow having disappeared pretty well for good. We can now see the handywork that was, for a long time, under white camouflage.

This critter is a new resident here on the river. He got a lot of work done, presumably prior to winter, in preparation for a pretty long and what I would imagine would be warm and cozy nap.

The way the ice creeps up over the banks in big chunks, digging up the surrounding ground is often fairly violent. But I guess he had a plan that worked out. His little hut was in tact, untouched by the destructive ice from the river.

Two dams, two new ponds, a nice yard and a muddy lodge with an underwater driveway and indoor plumbing. What more could a little beaver ask for. Nice work, buddy.

In the area? Wanna have a look for yourself? Here it was:

Bill's Big Hypothetical Public Media Web Space Question

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:02:00 -0500

"What if I started a new public media web property of my own, but I didn't have a station?"

Here are the first things that pop into my head when I ask myself this question:

What would it look like?
What would it do?
What would it contain?
What would it offer?
What would I call it?
Who would visit?
Who would be my competition?
Who would be my collaborators and partners?
How would I pay for it?
How would I keep it valuable?
How would I continue to pay for it?
How would I keep my visitors' ongoing interest?
How would people find out about it?
Where would I call my "market"?
Where would I try to be visible?
When would people use it (time of day, day of week, etc.)?
Why would people visit?
Why would people pay for it?
Why would I do this?

I'm in a particularly advantageous position on this one, as I actually don't have a station. However, I think it's entirely possible that I could make this work. I know a little about public media stations, enough that I "get it". I know a little about building stuff online, enough that I "get that" as well. So there's really no reason why I couldn't pull this off. There will be some challenges.

I'll get to those in my next post.

POV's differ on Google's Oops, "warning visiting this web site may harm your computer!"

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:01:00 -0500

So I noticed that one of the hotter items being searched on Google this morning is the phrase, "warning visiting this web site may harm your computer!"

As I felt that this was sort of an odd search phrase to become so hot so fast, I thought I'd look into it a bit with a Google News search. It seems that while I was not paying attention (must have been busy living or something silly like that) Google accidentally blacklisted the entire internet.

This big oops is certainly forgivable, and just in case you work for Google, don't worry, you needn't phone me to apologize personally. I forgive you already.

In the mean time, the part that I found most laughable was the difference in the way this accident was perceived by different folks out there online.

tgaily.com, was nice enough to help us understand what was going on by posting images of what this Google blacklisting looked like.

The Guardian reported on the 5 W's, as any good journalistic agency should, and also provided an interesting financial impact tidbit, saying that "one expert" estimates the monetary loss to be around $2 - 3 million. They also helped me understand how folks in CA might have started their day today when the news broke.

By far, the most interesting article I read this morning about Google's Blacklist Mayhem and "site may harm your computer" Adventures, came from American Thinker, at americanthinker.com. Their headline read as follows:

"Google Blocks Conservative Websites"

Really?

I could be way off base, and please, if I am, and if you're with American Thinker (I hope we can do some better thinking than this, fellow Americans, really), please feel free to correct me, but doesn't this reaction seem just a little, well, crackpot, to you?

The Haenel Website Doctrine

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:12:00 -0500

I recently had the opportunity to review the work of a website designer from a fellow web firm. I was reviewing the work because we are entertaining the idea of working cooperatively on a project for a mutual client, and the client would like to know what I think of the work the other firm has done for them to-date.

I don't want to say I am an overly critical person, but that's probably true. On the brighter side, understand that I am as critical of my work as I am of others'.

That said, my review led me to think of a few rules under which we operate religiously at my own firm, Haenel Communication Technologies, when developing a website strategy. I think I'll call these rules, the Haenel Doctrine:

Thou shalt obey the 2.5 Second Rule.

The 2.5 Second Rule says that your website has approximately 2.5 seconds to get and keep the attention of a site visitor before they bail out and leave for good, so you'd better make sure they see what they came looking for right away. Get to the point, and do it quickly.

Thou shalt obey the Primary Action Rule

The Primary Action Rule says that you must establish an internally agreed-upon goal that you expect your visitors to fulfill when visiting your website, based on your business goals. If your visitor only does one thign while visiting your website, what would you like it to be? Once you've established this goal, make sure you've laid out an easy-to-follow roadmap of sorts which leads your visitor to fulfillment of that goal as quickly as possible. This leads us to our next Rule:

Thou shalt obey the 2-Click Rule.

The 2-Click Rule says that statistically, your visitor will leave your site after having made 2 clicks or less within the confines of your website. So, remember your Primary Action? Better make sure your visitor can fulfill their (your) goals within 2 clicks.

Thou shalt begin with a Visitor-Centric Architecture

There are lots of ways to go about structuring the architecture (navigation) of your website. The most common one I see is an organization-centric method whereby we gather all of the information we'd like to have int he website about our organization, get it...

New Smallmouth Bass Fishing Video from Don Meissner

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:12:00 -0500

Hey, folks. We just finished our most recent installment in the Fishing with Don Meissner video series. As I watch it myself, I am reminded that I am no pro videographer. But we do have a good time. I'll say one thing: there aren't a whole lot of places where you can go and get monster Smallmouth like the ones we get with Will Clute on the St. Regis Reservation. Don't believe me? Have a look for yourself:

Using IH2 for ZenCart on a Plesk Server with ImageMagick 6.0.7

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:30:03 -0500

So I don't have much time to write here, but this took me some time to debug, and as a result I felt strongly compelled to share my findings with the few loyal readers I may have here at billhaenel.com.

I have a Plesk VPS server on which we host several sites. One of the sites we host there is a ZenCart-based shop. The ZenCart version installed is 1.3.8a.

We needed some good image handling for auto-resizing and such. We have a script that I created several years ago for this, but the Image Handler 2 add-on found at http://breakmyzencart.com/image-handler is just so much better than ours. Plus we had used it on several other shop sites, hosted at other servers with different configurations, and it worked flawlessly.

Apparently, the version of ImageMagick available for installation on our Plesk VPS is 6.0.7. 6.0.7 does not come equipped with the "-composite" directive for IM's "convert" comand. That directive is used by IH2 for layering and such when resizing images automagically. This is a big problem for those of us using IM on a Plesk VPS server.

The missing "-composite" component caused the entire resizing operation to fail, and subsequently the entire product display routine. Small hole that needs to be filled, IMHO.

The solution was to remove the ImageMagick convert path setting. This setting can be found in your store installation at includes/extra_configures/bmz_image_handler_conf.php, line 15, "$ihConf['im_convert']". Just set it to blank, or ''. Then be sure to set, in the same file, the $ihConf['gdlib'] variable to 1 or 2 (preferrably 2) as you're going to need it now that you've effectively trashed ImageMagick.

After turning off IM, I then ran into trouble with GD's memory usage. It was causing the script to crap out because it needed way more memory than was allocated (this is apprarently caused by the way GD handles uncompressed images or something...?). Anyway, this required a temporary configuration change within the load_imageGD() function in the ih_image class, found in file, includes/classes/bmz_image_handler.class.php, at line 615. To do this, I simply added the line, "ini_set('memory_limit','100M');" in as the first line within that function. That seemed to do the trick.

After all of that mess, it finally worked. It's really slow the first time you load a page with a lot of images, or the first time you load a product with one big original. It simply needs time to process and make that first cache. But once it's made, it goes much more quickly on subsequent page loads.

So, in summary:

Turn off ImageMagick,
Turn on GD,
Set the script to use more memory,
Run a first-time pageload to fill your cache before your client sees what you've done.

Gimme a shout if you need to know more. Sometimes I even reply.

Building Successful Open Source Software OR maybe a community?

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:08:00 -0500

My good friend John Tynan from KJZZ in Arizona sent me a link to the video below today, and I love it because it talks as much about developing a productive community as it does about developing a good open source project.

I can't possibly say enough times how much I believe that the key to success in any such project is to have good people, a good direction, and good communication - in that order!

Enjoy this video, even though it is almost an hour long!

Now that you've seen it, you are required to love it as much as I do.

Slow Printing from Windows XP on a Linux Printer

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:07:00 -0500

This one has driven me nuts for several years, and it happens, without fail, every time I set up a new machine on my small network here at my office.

The deal is this:

Server running Mandriva Linux with Samba
Printer connected to Linux server and using CUPS
Server connected to network
Workstations connected to CUPS printer via windows printer sharing a la Samba

So far so good, right? But I'm not finished. The problem comes when you try to open the printer properties dialog, or open a document with MS Word and then try to print it. Here's what happens, for example, when you try to print a Word document through the above-noted CUPS printer:

Open MS Word
Open or create a document
Enter the printing process
Wait
Wait
Wait
Realize you'll be waiting for a while
Notice Word says "Connecting to printer. Press (Esc) to cancel"

OK. You get the picture. It takes a while

Apparently there's some problem with bad registry entries in Win XP or something that causes this to happen. Based on the symptoms, I'd say the bug rears its ugly head when the OS tries to connect to the printer and say hello via the network. Anyway, I've bookmarked my favorite solution, and it goes like this:

Click "Start"
Click "Run"
Type "regedit"
Click "OK"
Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USERPrintersConnections
Delete the thing that says "DeviceOld = REG_SZ"
Now delete everything else in there:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERPrintersConnectionsConnections
HKEY_CURRENT_USERPrintersConnectionsDevModePerUser
HKEY_CURRENT_USERPrintersConnectionsDevModes2
HKEY_CURRENT_USERPrintersConnectionsSettings

All of it
Restart

So this all sounds scary, but it's worked for me over and over again. I hope it works for you, too. If it doesn't, or if your computer explodes, please don't blame me. Editing your registry can cause problems sometimes, so be careful.

For more info, here's the site where I found these instructions long ago: edoceo.com (CUPS printing...)

Good luck!

Initial DVD DMA-710 says "no disc"

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:07:00 -0500

A couple of years ago we bought three, yes three, DVD bookshelf units from Wal-Mart. THe model? THe Initial DMA-710.

We loved these units because they were a great price. We didn't expect the height of hi-fi performance, we just wanted something to put in our offices and bedroom. At first they were great. Then things went downhill. Here's the letter I just wrote to Initial Technology, Inc., about these units and their "problem":

"Hi -

I have three Initial DMA-710 units. They all exhibit the same symptoms. They were fantastic for a while, then after time passed eventually they would all start to say "no disc" when a DVD disc was inserted. CD's would play fine at that time. But then eventually these machines all started saying the same thing for CD's as well. As even more time passed, the occurrence of the "no disc" message became more and more frequent, until now, none of the players will play any discs at all. They all say "no disc" when any disc is inserted.

How can this be fixed? I can assume that this is a flaw in the system design as I have three of them that all did exactly the same thing in exactly the same manner. I've also found that many users have written about this same problem in various places online, so it appears to be common. Is there a known remedy for this obviously known issue with these units?

Thanks,
Bill Haenel"

I don't have any really big complaints with the company or anything. After all, we paid only $89 for each unit. However, I think it's worth writing this post and following it up with any suggestions offered by Initial, as I have seen lots of folks online not knowing what to do about the problem when it happens to them. So if I get any good info on the problem, I'll be sure to come back here and post what I've learned.

Bill