Archive for the ‘Internet Buzz’ Category

What is Twitter? Social Networking 101 for my Mom

This is for you Mom!  Over the Christmas Holidays, my mom asked me, “What is Twitter?” 

I am sooo busted.  It was one of those dinner conversations where you get a flashback to being 14 years old again trying to explain how some new trend like “the mullet” is catching on.  So I gave it my best: 

It is a way of communicating online with text updates, that are 140 characters or less to anyone that chooses to read or follow your profile.  It is like stripping everything out of facebook, except for the updates.

(Mom) Who do you communicate with?   With your Friends, Family, and Co-Workers….Ok, let’s be realistic here, a bunch of random internet personalities or anyone that chooses to find you interesting.  People can then search on things you post, like Recipes. 

(Mom) What can you say in 140 Characters or less?  Really anything, like what you are doing, breaking news, interesting links and facts.  You could tell all your friends that you are really excited to play Bridge tonight.

(Mom) Why can’t I just call them?  What if you were playing bridge with 1,000 customers and want to broadcast something to everyone?

(Mom) I think I will pass, and will you please get rid of that Mullet! 

Unlike my Mom, you can Follow Us on Twitter here!

Dedicated Gaming Servers Running on a Windows or Linux VPS, Avatar vs. Modern Warefare 2

Hosting environments and operating in the cloud is becoming more and more popular, and for good reason.  It’s cost effective and far more stable and reliable than managing your IT infrastructure in your own facility. The cost for having your own IT staff and energy alone will kill your margins.  One industry that is benefiting from this growth is the video game industry. Video games are rapidly becoming a far more profitable endeavor than even movies.  To put this into perspective, Avatar made $73 million domestically and $232.2 million worldwide in the opening weekend.  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 generated $310 million in revenue in just the US and UK in only the first 24 hours!

The biggest reason for the popularity of video games is the online multiplayer game play. Gamers are able to interact with their peers as well as total strangers around the clock. This is making video games into much more of a social event.   What makes this possible? Dedicated game servers.

Having a dedicated piece of hardware that runs the server application provides a far more efficient and effective game play than a strict peer-to-peer scenario.  Many groups will set up their own game servers are run them from their homes.  The problem here is upstream bandwidth to run the gaming environment is limited in residential internet connections.  Having virtually unlimited bandwidth availability the vital to an optimal gaming environment.  There’s nothing more frustrating when playing a game online than a bad connection or you have a problem connecting to the host.  Anyone who has played Modern Warfare 2 knows that one the best new features is the ability to change hosts. In the past a user was chosen to be the host and if they had a bad connection everyone suffered. Or even worse, if they dropped out, the match would end. With Modern Warfare 2, if someone drops out or the host has a bad connection, it will automatically find a new host and migrate the match with minimal downtime allowing all the users to complete the match.  

The best way to prevent lousy connections or loss of connectivity to the host is to place your game server in a data center.  A data center provides not only great stability to the environment for uptime, power and security, but virtually unlimited bandwidth availability.  Once you’ve decided to take it to this step you are left with two decisions. Decide whether you would like to build your own server and place it in a co-location facility or place it in a managed server environment. The benefits here are pretty clear. A managed dedicated server eliminates all the headaches that come from keeping the server updated and allows you to essentially have your own IT do this for you.  A final item to consider is going with a Virtual Private Server or VPS. With virtualization, datacenters are able to dramatically reduce the costs and provide redundancy and failover benefits as well.  Whether you’re looking to host Unreal Tournament, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty or any PC game, and considering your own game server, think about putting this in a more stable environment.

Run your own Gaming Virtual Server with RackWire.com VPS Game Server Hosting.

Installing Web Apps, PHP, MySQL on Hyper-V Server 2008

Are you running a Hyper-V Server, or a Standalone Dedicated Server 2008, and want to utilize an use to use and install Web App, or Web Application?  Microsoft has leveraged the following Web Apps for easy Download/Install on your Web Server:

  • PHP 5.2.11
  • MySQL 5.1
  • URL ReWrite 1.1
  • SQL Server 2008 Express
  • Streaming Media Services
  • Joomla! , SugarCRM, WordPress, Textcube, nopCommerce, Moodle, SilverStripe CMS, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, Drupal, nService. Amplifeeder
  • And Many More

It is kind of hard to believe that Microsoft is leveraging all these Open Source tools on thier Platform, like SugarCRM a competing CRM product as well as MySQL.  But in my opinion, it is great!   Here is a Step by Step Guide on getting your Web Applications up and Running on MySQL/PHP:

1. First Step, go to Microsoft and install the Microsoft Web Platform.  The Installation is pretty straight forward and takes under a Minute.

2. Run the Web Platform Installer.  You can then Choose Three Catagories: What’s New, Web Platform and Web Applications.

3. Select the Applications you want to Install, such as WordPress on Windows.

4. The installer will require some dependacies for WordPress such as a MySQL Database, PHP 5.2.  It will ask for a Database user/password:

5. The installer will then ask for the Web Site Settings for the new web application, and even allow you to add new directories.

6. The Installer will complete with all the applications that were installed on your server.  Next, run the WordPress Easy Web Setup and you are up and running!

As an added bonus, there are even additional Database tools and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2.  Nice!

Well that is it, really easy to get PHP Apps up and running fast on Windows Server.  To get your own Windows Hyper-V Virtual Machine to Install Applicaitons on Server2008 Here.

Free fix for Windows Black Screen

Many people have been experiencing the windows Black Screen issue with Windows 7.0 where you start windows and it goes to a black screen and just stays there.  It will look something like this:

WindowsBlackScreenFix

With a lot of time trying different things and looking for solutions we ran across this posting from Prevx which will easily fix this issue.

Prevx offers a free fix for Windows Black Screen

Firstly, there appears to be many causes of the black screen issue. The symptoms are very distinctive and troublesome. After starting your Windows 7, Vista, XP, NT, W2K, W2K3 or W2K8 PC or server the system appears normal. However, after logging on there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window. Even this window might be minimized making it hard to see.

If you have these symptoms you can safely try our free Black Screen Fix. It will fix the most common cause we have seen of this issue. Running the fix program is easy under normal circumstances, simply download with your browser using the link above and run the program. However, if you are trying to do this from the PC which has the black screen it is a bit more tricky. In these circumstances follow the procedure below:

1. Restart your PC

2. Logon and wait for the black screen to appear

3. Make sure your PC should be able to connect to the internet (black screen does not appear to affect this)

4. Press the CTRL, ALT and DEL keys simultaneously

5. When prompted, Click Start Task Manager

6. In Task Manager Click on the Application Tab

7. Next Click New Task

8. Now enter the command:

C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” “http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=BLACKSCREENFIX

Note this command assumes that you are using internet explorer as your browser, if not substitute your browser path and file details for those of iexplore.exe or use the Browser option of Task manager to locate it.

9. Click OK and your browser should start up and begin the download process

10. When prompted for the download Click run, the black screen fix program will download and run to automatically fix the issue.

11. Now restart your PC and the black screen problem will hopefully be gone.

I must stress that this tool will not fix all black screen issues. There can be many causes. But if your black screen woes began in the last 2 weeks after a Windows update or after running any security program (including Prevx) to remove malware during this time then this fix will have a high probability of working.

If you Google Black Screen then you will find a whopping 80Million plus results, mostly dominated by people searching for a fix to this problem. Thousands of users have resorted to reloading Windows as a last ditch effort to fix the problem, avoid that at all cost. We hope we can help a good many of you avoid the need to reload.

By the way – the cause of this recent crop of Black Screen appears to be a change in the Windows Operating Systems lock down of registry keys. This change has the effect of invalidating several key registry entries if they are updated without consideration of the new ACL rules being applied. For reference the rule change does not appear to have been publicised adequately, if at all, with the recent Windows updates.

In researching this issue we have identified at least 10 different scenarios which will trigger the same black screen conditions. These appear to have been around for years now. But our advice is try our tool first. If it works great. If it doesn’t you are no worse off.

Good luck.
Dave Kennerley
Prevx Support

This seemed to work like a Charm. We would like to offer our Thanks to the people at Prevx



Email Spooling – ETRN – Backup MX

Have you ever had your mail server crash and have mail messages bouce back to the senders?  Yes it is a horrible thing when your mail server crashes. The scramble begins for the IT department. All incoming email is bouncing.

Your IT department is trying to correct the problem and rushing to fix it. This can lead to many fast desicions and sometimes wrong desicions are made when rushing to fix the problem.

If your email is critical to you and your business you should have a backup email server that spools all incoming email when your server is down. This is known by a few names backup MX, store&forward, ETRN.

Email Spooling – This is a highly scalable and efficient service for customers with an internal messaging system (such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Notes, etc.) that is connected to the Internet.

A simple modification of the MX records in the DNS of your domain name (so as to reference the backup server) will direct your mail to the backup server until your server comes back online.

Record FQDN Record Type Record Value MX Pref
domain.com MX mail.domain.com 10
domain.com MX backup.domain.com 100

When the primary mail server is not available the mail is delivered to the backup mail server. Once your primary server comes back online, the backup server sends the stored email to the primary server

Below is the normal config

email1This is what will happen if you have a backup in place and your server is unavailable.

email2

Implementing this type of back up is very easy to do and will give all IT people the peace of mind they need to do there jobs better.

RackWire.com has teamed with NeverBounce to offer e-mail backup and message spooling.  Try our NeverBounce e-mail Spooling Today!

Installing Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

As a Microsoft Partner we were invited to Install and Microsoft Office 2010 Beta Release.  First thing we did was start the Download Manager by getting Office 2010 Beta Here.  In order to Install Office 2010 you need the following:

  • 500 MHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor or higher, 256 MB of system memory or more, 3.5 GB of available disk space
  • Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista with SP1, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 with SP2 or Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit).
  • After downloading and running the 684 Mb Office 2010 Professional Plus Beta Installer.  It is nice you get to Beta the Professional Plus Version.  The Setup Was surpringly faster than previous version, and took under 10 minutes total.  I guess this is not a good thing if you are an hourly consultant. 

    2InstallBeta

     

    Outlook 2010 Impressions: Seeing how e-mail consumes most of my corporate career as of lately, I am most excited about some of the new features in Outlook 2010. 

    1. Outlook 2010 Setup.  Setup was a snap hands down for an Exchange server, which was always easy in previous versions.  An internet IMAP/POP account was also automated, configured my RackWire e-mail server automatically, but defaulted to POP mail servers by default.  There is even a setting to set up a Text Messaging Account. 

    OutLook2010_RackWire2

    2. Threaded Messaging is a huge plus after a few hours of use.  It groups messages from the same sender/subject under one expandable group.  The Conversation Grouping is similar to Google Mails threaded Messaging…..but not as savvy.

    OutLook2010_RackWire6_ThreadedMessages

    OutLook2010_RackWire5_ThreadedMessages

    3. The ability to ignore conversations.  This allows you to ignore that big CC: chain that is going around the office about what size Font we should standardize on for footers. 

    Word 2010: Some of the intial benefits are the added Formating and Screen Capture Options, as well as the improvfed layout.  After using Office 2010 for a couple hours, I already like the menu layouts much better than the previous versions.

    Office2010

    Tomorrow when my expenses are due I will be exploring Excel 2010 in Depth.  For now the biggest features I see are some intelligent scorecarding and charting, and it no longer Speeds past the last cell when you are highlighting or scrolling multiple rows.

    “10 Best” Must Try Twitter Tools for Business

    In Random Order are some Twitter Tools worth looking into.  Depending on what you are using twitter for, weather communicating with Customers, keeping track of clients or just tracking the “Twitter Information Highway” these tools will get you going in the right direction.

    1. TweetDeck – This is a Must Have!  TweetDeck is a personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more.  Allows you to update multiple accounts at once.  Next on Deck….a Adobe AIR Update.

    2. CoTweet – A must have tool for Companies and Businesses that allow multiple users to Share one Twitter Account.  Allows Multiple Accounts and Multiple Users.  Hey, Who wrote that I Sleep at my desk?

    3. Twazzup – This Tool shows real time tweets for your Twitter name or other Twitter Key Words.  The name alone reeled me in.  Hey Mike……Twazzzzzzzupppppp!

    4. Twitter Grader – Get Your Grade!  This tool grades your Twitter Account based on the following: Number of Re-tweeting of Posts, Updates, Rank, Followers and number Following.  So are you a better Twitter than a 5th grader?

    5. Twitter Karma – The #1 way to get rid of people that are not following you. Karma says that if you use this site, you will get 1 more follower.

    6. FriendorFollow – This tool tells you which people you are following are following you.  Really helps weed out the spammers, that follow you for a day to SPAM you.

    7. 2tweet - Allows you to Tweet Multiple Photos & Videos from you email. Hey, take a picture, it will last longer!

    8. Social OOmph – Used to be called tweetlater.  Best uses, send direct automated messages to new followers and send out future tweets, like in the year 2000!

    9. MyTweeple – Make a decision about the people you are following by checking stats and reviewing thier latest tweets.  Don’t agree?  Have your Tweeple call My Tweeple.

    10. TweetMeme - Get daily information on the Hottest and Most Popular Daily Tweets out there.  Kind of like the Digg Philosophy of what is getting the most traction, and remember If it is on the Internet it must be true.

    New Reader Add:

    11. HootSuite – This tool allows you to manage multiple users across multiple accounts and follow keywords, statistics and keywords.  I think there is going to be a HootSuite Riot. 

    Most Popular Must Have WordPress Plugins

    Based on last months user survey of  RackWire.com App Market users and overall Feedback, we have compiled our Most Used, and Most Popular WordPress Plugin List, in no particular order:

    Sociable – Social Bookmarking made easy.  If you are blogging, the ability to socially broadcast your Posts is pretty important to Broadcast over Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Etc.

    Google XML Sitemaps – Create Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo Compatible SItemaps for your WordPress Site.  If SEO is on your radar, this is an easy and Simple Plugin to use.  Make sure you select Yahoo and enter your Yahoo Application ID.

    SexyBookmarks – A great functioning tool to get readers to suggest your WordPress Page/Post to others via Social Medias.  Who am I kidding, I just like the name.

    Contact Form 7 – It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well.  In addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, etc.

    NextGEN Gallery –  A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.  My personal Favorite Gallery Manager that is a well written Plugin and easy to use.

    WP to Twitter – Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll, also can auto shorten Url’s and Pictures.

    All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog to improve on your Blogs SEO.  A Must Have!

    WordPress Gravatars - Uses Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section. Uses the comment authors email to display their Gravatar. It also gives the user an Author Profile picture, based on the users Gravatar.

    No Comments on Pages - No Comments on Pages is a tiny WordPress plugin which, when activated, disables posting of new comments to all pages and hides existing ones.

    Branded Login Screen for WordPress - Branded Login Screen for WordPress lets you use custom login screen instead of WordPress default. Branded Admin which lets you change the admin area is also available.

    Twitter Tools - Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress. You can also archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes), post a tweet from your sidebar or the WP Admin screens and pass your tweets along to another service.

    FB Share –  Adds a Facebook Share button to your WordPress posts, similar to the ReTweet or Twit This Plugin.

    This list will continue to grow, as there are many talented Developers out there.  Happy Blogging!