We are excited to be making available the latest version of DotNetNuke (V4.8.2) to our hosting clients. DotNetNuke puts the power to create, manage and publish Web content in your hands. You can take an active role in managing information on your Web site, intranet, or extranet.

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Attached is a video that you can download to learn about using many of the features of DotNetNuke. (Windows Media Player WMF file format.)

DotNetNuke3_2_Product_Overview.zip (12.60 mb)

This past Wednesday April 30th, while getting ready for work and watching the morning news, the lead story was of a major fire in Hollywood which turned out to be The Basque Restaurant and Night Club (featured in George Clooney's Oceans 11 when the club was called Deep) located diagonally across the street from my building (The Taft Building) on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. All traffic on Vine was reported blocked and Hollywood Blvd. traffic was at a stand-still, so I didn't even attempt making it to the office until late that afternoon. It was enough watching the 40 foot flames on TV.

When I got to the office traffic was pretty much back to normal but fire trucks were still everywhere and the smell of smoke was everywhere. My office reeked of smoke so all I did was check mail and make sure everything was OK and left for the day--cursing that I just paid $450.00 to have the drapes cleaned two weeks ago. I wondered (hoped) if Fabreze would do the trick and get the smell out. Fortunately when I returned the next day, the smell of smoke was gone.

There are still fire trucks and arson investigators there today. Here are two interesting articles from the LAFD blog regarding the fire.
http://lafd.blogspot.com/2008/04/hollywood-and-vine-basques-in-morning.html
And because of the historic significance of the building and the fact that it is the only single story building left at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, the subsequent arson investigation...
http://lafd.blogspot.com/2008/05/atf-national-response-team-joins.html

This was only three days after the well know eatery "Off Vine" burned down on April 27th at 5:20 p.m. This restaurant was about two blocks from my building. Fortunately the owners will be re-opening, as this was a favorite lunch spot for me.
http://lafd.blogspot.com/2008/04/blaze-erupts-at-landmark-hollywood.html

Here's yet another story about strange and quirky things happening for supposedly no reason. (It turns out there is a reason, but why Microsoft would think that a user would know this intuitively is beyond me.) So many things that seemingly 'go wrong' in Vista that are actually caused by the 'enhanced security features' Microsoft incorporated into Vista to protect users from viruses and other attacks while connected to the Internet.

As a preface to the story, let me briefly explain one of these 'protection enhancements' called "Data Execution Prevention" or "DEP". Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature  that is intended to prevent a program from running in a place in your computer's memory that is not usually intended to run programs. This helps prevent certain exploits of your system. However, there are some programs that need to use this 'protected' area legitimately, and this is where the problems begin.

And now back to the story--when browsing to some web sites, I noticed that Internet Explorer would crash and I would sometimes get a warning something to the effect of 'DEP or Data Execution Protection had to close the program to protect me'. I was already somewhat familiar with DEP because of some other problems I experienced previously, so I decided to use the same fix--add Internet Explorer to the list of programs that would not be protected by DEP. (DEP protects programs from executing in certain memory areas that are considered off-limits for safety reasons.) More...

I have seen too many small and even more medium sized organizations that do not have a centralized IT infrastructure and even worse have no written IT policy or operations manual. Consequently there is no coordination between departments and no continuity necessary to accommodate employee turnover. I have seen this lead to some truly undesirable consequences.

There was an organization I worked for that had an ISP that provided their Internet connection and assigned IP addresses. They had an IT department that is in charge of the internal network and manage the Exchange server for company email, file servers and provided support for users. They outsourced their web site hosting to another company. Each department managed their area of the web site via MS FrontPage to conserve cost. Each department that worked on the site would sort of 'assume'  they were responsible for the entire site which lead to a whole myriad of problems.

These are some of the consequences that were directly related to this lack of organization and centralization in just one company: More...

CIRA has informed us that they will be sending an informational email about the changes to the Administrative contact for all .ca domain names on May 6th, 2008. You can read more about the specifics of the new CIRA WHOIS Policy at CIRA's web site - http://www.cira.ca/en/Whois/whois_intro.html

Points of note:

• Effective June 10th, 2008, the .ca public WHOIS will no longer provide personal information for individual domain name registrants.
• Registrant information for domains registered to corporations will still be provided.

This will be a welcome change and will help to prevent unscrupulous companies from using whois information to perpetrate domain hijacking and other scams on domain owners.

We are excited to announce that we will be upgrading our email server to the new release of SmarterMail 5.1, currently in beta testing, as soon as the manufacturer releases it to market.

SmarterMail 5.x builds upon a solid reputation of stability, performance, and value by adding hundreds of new features and enhancements—solidifying its position as the cost-effective alternative to Microsoft Exchange™ for businesses.

Synchronization of calendar, contacts, and tasks is available from Outlook™, Windows Mobile devices, PocketPCs, and Smartphones (e.g. Motorola Q™, Palm Treo™, Samsung BlackJack™). All users can access the complete set of email and collaboration tools from an industry-leading Web Interface that supports all major internet browsers.

Security features have been enhanced with 99% antispam protection along with standard antivirus, intrusion detection, and attack prevention. SmarterMail 5.x has integrated the Yahoo! DomainKeys authentication standard and is compliant with regulatory requirements for email archiving (Sarbanes-Oxley)1 in SmarterMail 5.x.

We are eagerly awaiting the upcoming release of version 5.1 and all of the new features it will afford our clients.

Here are a list of some of the features I especially am looking forward to: More...

One of the most frequent mistakes made by novice web designers is putting huge images on their web pages—images that are too large and take too long to download. Images need to be optimized for quick loading and proper style proportions before putting them on web pages. There is a delicate balance that needs to be achieved between file size and picture quality as the majority of load time for a web page comes from the images.

There are three areas where bytes can be shaved off your images: bit depth (the number of colors), resolution (the density or number of pixels per inch the image contains), and the dimension (the actual length and width of the image).

The actual dimensions, or size, of your image is the easiest to achieve, but avoid just setting the dimensions for the image in your web authoring program. You need to resize your image to the proper dimensions before inserting it in your web page; otherwise your image will appear smaller, but in fact the entire large image is still being downloaded. The dimensions are being restricted, but the size of the image being downloaded has not changed.

The resolution and bit depth are a bit trickier, but fortunately there are various tools to aid you in accomplishing this. One of the best is Adobe Photo Shop, though this solution is pricy and has a relatively steep learning curve; it is best left to professional web developers and graphic artists.

One of the best and easiest to use image optimizer programs for novice web masters is available free from Bluefive Software and can be downloaded here. Try it out; I’m sure you’ll like it. You can even use it to optimize your images before you send them in your emails—your friends will thank you.

The last few weeks have found me in Vista hell with the fires being extinguished just yesterday...what a relief.

Vista has a new security 'feature' called User Account Control (UAC), which is designed to prevent novice computer users from accidentally doing anything on their computer that might compromise security. UAC causes several pop-up warnings to appear when a user opens certain programs which advise the user that a potential security risk could be incurred if they continue with this action and requires them to either click "I know what I'm doing--Allow" or "Oops--I'm not sure I should be doing this--Deny". (You might have seen these annoying pop-ups featured in a recent TV ad for Apple computers.)

You have the ability to turn this 'feature' off, if you feel you know what you are doing, which fortunately is a good thing, because it seems Vista thinks almost everything you do on your computer is a potential security threat, and it is REALLY aggravating to continually get these pop-ups.

Here is where the problem arises. I use QuickBooks for my accounting. QuickBooks has the ability to download automatically billed credit card charges from your bank--however this feature will not work if UAC is turned off. This is just one of the many compatibility issues between QuickBooks and Vista--even though they market their product as being totally Vista compatible.

So, normally during the week, I would keep UAC turned off to avoid the pop-ups and turn it on at the end of the week to download the payments that were received during the week; and immediately turn it off again after the payments downloaded. (Turning UAC on and off requires a reboot--just to make the whole process of turning it on and off even more annoying.) More...