I absolutely love my AppleTV, the kids love watching photos and home movies, video podcasts, etc – we love rarely having to go to Blockbuster to rent movies, and we also love having complete control over our family’s television viewing (we canceled our cable and save that money and avoid the junk out there, occasionally buying a show to watch…wished they would lower the cost down from 1.99, but oh well! we spend time as a family doing other things.)

With our cable cancelled, we have a slingbox for those must-see shows, foxnews, and recorded programs. We watch it on our iMac and even have connected my MacbookPro to our 50″ plasma TV for the important stuff.

I have been wishing we could watch our slingbox on our AppleTV and finally we can!! I have been following this thread and finally greg Rice posted easy to follow instructions how to do this: How_to_install_SlingPlayer_on_AppleTV. Thanks greg!!!

It works! I did not do the reset he suggested and did not need the recovery.dmg. Also I had to create the folders Applications and Documents in the frontrow user folder on the ATV. I was tripped up a little at first when I didn’t see the mouse and the keyboard didn’t work…until I realized you don’t see these until you launch SlingPlayer and focus is on the MultiFinder.

A tip: I was able to change window position to center it by changing the window position of slingplayer on my macbook, exporting preferences and importing those preferences on the slingplayer on ATV (after copying that exported file to the ATV of course). I tried having it startup in full screen but that caused occasional crashes.

One last note: sound does not come out through my optical out, but it did come through the HDMI connection to the TV.

JUST IN TIME FOR MARCH MADNESS – YESS!!!!

So here’s what I did:

1. Sign up for MobileMe – yes, that’s right, it’ll cost you. (Of course yahoo push email is free, but I’m a gmail lover)
2. Follow usual setup instructions for MobileMe on your computer and iPhone
3. In gmail settings, forward all incoming mail to your new MobileMe email address, also choose to Archive messages after forwarding (up to you, really).
4. Make sure you also have your gmail account setup on your iPhone
5. On iPhone, change the smtp server in the Account settings for MobileMe, to be the smtp.gmail.com that is used by the gmail account.  This is the important step: all outgoing email will have the reply-to info replaced by gmail’s smtp server to be your gmail address, not your mobileme address even though it came from there.

Go ahead, test it.  Send an email to your gmail account and watch it push instantly to your iPhone!  Beautiful, isn’t it.

Here’s another good thing: I was worred that all of my labels in Gmail would not be able to be used now if I’m reading everything and replying using my MobileMe inbox.  Well, you can’t do this on your iPhone, but on your desktop, assuming you also have both gmail and mobileme accounts setup in your mail client via IMAP, then you can drag a message from your mobileme inbox to a gmail “folder” (label) and gmail knows how to handle it.  In other words, no duplicates.  The message is in the Archive (All Mail) and labeled with the new folder/label you dropped it into on the mail client.  Nifty, huh?

Well, I just got this setup, so I’ll see how it works for a few days.  You may want to try it out too!

Tags: gmail,

1. Using FTP client, upload bugzilla tarball to LP (placed in the parent folder to where you want bugzilla to be homed. I put mine in the root www folder public_html so it will expand to a subfolder and run from http://mydomain.com/bugzilla.

2. Using LP’s Cpanel File Manager, navigate to uploaded tarball, select the filename and extract (see file operations on right)

3. Noticing the new folder created, select this folder name, and rename to bugzilla.

4. For this same folder, select Permissions and change to 775.

5. The install script ./checksetup.pl must be run using cron jobs since we do not have shell access on this box. In Cpanel, go to cron jobs and enter a job to run once:

cd '/home/youracct/public_html/bugzilla' ; ./checksetup.pl

Also specify your email that you want the output to be sent to. Schedule it to run a few minutes from current time, and make sure it runs only once.

6. Wait for email, the script will have checked for required perl modules.

7. If required or desired modules are missing, email support.lunarpages.com or open a ticket with them and ask them to install the modules on your server.

8. Once all modules are present that you need, edit the localconfig file per the installation instructions. Also, using the Cpanel Mysql tool you will need to create a database and a database user for this application. I created a db called bugs and of course it was renamed to account-id_bugs. The same with the username. These database values are needed in the localconfig file. I edited my localconfig file with the Cpanel file manager.

ISSUE RAISED TO LP TECH SUPPORT: apache is not running under the group ‘apache’ or ‘www-data’. Last resort will be to use “” as the $webservergroup value in localconfig.

Once resolved, the remaining steps will be completed.

LP ANSWER: You must run the install script with $webservergroup = “”

9. Additional steps required since we’re in a shared environment and the install script doesn’t always complete:

• edit the .htaccess file in the root bugzilla folder to include these two lines:

DirectoryIndex index.cgi
Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI

10. Edit the cronjob to run checksetup.pl non-interactively since we don’t have a shell. This is done by using an answer file (see here). You’ll have to create this answers file and put it in the same directory as checksetup.pl.

cd '/home/youracct/public_html/bugzilla' ; ./checksetup.pl answersfile.txt --verbose


11. Rerun the cron job, same script, it will detect the edited localconfig file and run the installation script. You should get db tables created. Inspect the email results for errors.

Now you can login as the admin user and start configuration!!

Note: The script did not like my answers file and I always got a “bad file descriptor” error. Here’s my workaround:

Run the cron job without the answers file, it will create the db tables, etc and wait for user input for the admin user. At some point it will die or you can kill it with another cron job.  At this point the bugzilla site is accessible but there are no users defined. Go to main page and create a new user that you will use as the admin. Once created, submit this cron job that will make the new user admin and then it will complete the remaining installation steps of the script:

cd '/home/youracct/public_html/bugzilla' ; ./checksetup.pl --make-admin=newuser@domain.com

Enjoy!!

We had a Scalix email server running for some time in a Windows Virtual Server virtual machine (SUSE 10.1 and Scalix 11.1) which was not bad…sort of a learning experience for me, but it became a hassle to maintain. Our dedicated server with godaddy ended up crashing every other day, and down goes our email. So, we considered the replacement solution, and that’s when we happened on Google Apps.

Since our domain name is registered through godaddy, and they have a nice domain control center app with complete dns control, the switch to Google Apps was painless. I can’t say the same about godaddy about their dedicated server product, but at least I will keep registering domain names with them with the ease and control the provide for managing those domains.

Anyway, the setup for Google Apps was simple, intuitive, with clear instructions to make the change-over painless and fast! Within 15 minutes I had it setup, and 15 minutes later I had the domain pointing to google servers. As the dns entries propogated to the internet I soon began to see email on my domain come trickling in to the gmail mailbox. Awesome!! Google has done it again.

The added bonus is that we get google docs, personalized start page, and google calendars all available through our hosted domain, so you type calendar.yourdomain.com and it goes to Google Calendar with sharing among your domain accounts an option.

If you sign up for the premium account (30 day free trial), Google provides an IMAP migration tool, which worked flawlessly and brought all of the existing mailbox content over to the new Google Apps email account.

All in all, it was a painless, fast switch over and I happily retired the Scalix virtual machine. What a great feeling to turn that baby off knowing I’ll never have to deal with it again.

Palm Treo650 < – > Outlook contacts/calendar < – > Gmail contacts/calendar

So I am basing my procedure on this great article.

Step 1. Sign up for an account on scheduleworld.com.

Step 2. Download funambol outlook client. Install per the instructions and configure per the information provided by scheduleworld.

Step 3. Synchronize Outlook with Palm Treo (already configured, using software that came with the Treo). This step just makes sure we have synchronized data in Outlook before proceeding.

Step 4. Run funambol plugin for Outlook.

Step 5. Log into scheduleworld and confirm you can now see the synchronized data.

Step 6. In scheduleworld.com site, click on Google Sync and setup google account info. There are also several google calendar sync options in the Preferences page that I have set so that it will sync the google calendar with each syncML session.

NOTE: so far, I’ve only been able to sync contacts with regular gmail account and not my google apps domain services account.  So I’ve done a google export of contacts from scheduleworld that I loaded to my domain google apps account.  I don’t suspect scheduleworld will be able to add contacts sync to google apps because of the google apps APIs, they contacts APIs seem to be available only to premium users at $50/yr.

The app’s reports module seems easy enough to work with (and it will be nice when it is moved over to it’s own module rather than a subsection of projects).

We started using the billing codes on our tasks, thinking this could be totalled up for either invoicing or tracking actual internal costs against a budgeted project (most of our projects are budgeted and not time and materials). 

So the first thing I wanted to know is the total costs incurred for a project so we can manage within our budgets and maintain a healthy margin.  Well, no report for that.  It would be nice to have a field on the project view similar to actual budget, but nothing there either (I think I saw on the forum they intend to add it…??).

Well, after a brief inspection of the database schema, here’s a rough query to get the answer.

select p.project_id, p.project_name, p.project_target_budget, p.project_actual_budget, p.project_percent_complete,
sum(t.task_duration) as tot_duration,
round(sum(l.task_log_hours),1) as actual_hours,
round(sum(l.task_log_hours * b.billingcode_value),2) as actual_cost
from projects p, tasks t, task_log l, billingcode b
where p.project_id = t.task_project
and t.task_id = l.task_log_task
and l.task_log_costcode = b.billingcode_id
group by p.project_id, p.project_name, p.project_target_budget, p.project_actual_budget, p.project_percent_complete

Now the only thing left to do is create a report in dP, will do that next when I have time (I have to get a project deliverable out to a client today…back to work.)

The ACL permissions system in dP is pretty good, based on phpgacl (I don’t know anything about that, but my quick take is it’s a decent role-based, section/item access control subsystem, of course otherwise the fine developers of dP would not have selected it).

So it was fairly straightforward, after learning the right location and screens to click into, to create a user with restricted access…that is to only be able to view and edit data related to a project they are assigned to.

The first thing we noticed was that certain views on projects and tasks display the target budgets ($) and actual budgets…we don’t want our restricted users to see this information.  Unfortunately, from what I could see in the ACL system, there was no way to set permissions down to the field level, only modules and module-items.

So I googled, looked around, and didn’t see anything out there (maybe I missed it), so I decided to start inspecting the code to see what could be done. 

My first thought was that it would logically make sense to restrict view permissions on sensitive information like budgets to certain user types (CEO, Director, Manager) and deny for others (Employees, Contractors).  I read in the dP forums that user type is purely an information attribute of a user/contact.  It is not used anywhere in the permissions.

I reviewed the roles and permissions used in the system and nothing really made sense to use, at least not as much as user type.  What I was after was to grant view rights to user types of Manager and above.

What I discovered is that this can easily be done by checking the user type and conditionally writing out the field or not.  So here’s what I did.

Projects view: \modules\projects\view.php

added line 9:
$fullaccess = ($AppUI->user_type <= 3);

modified line 243 (now 244) from:

<td class="hilite"><?php echo $dPconfig['currency_symbol'] ?><?php echo @$obj->project_target_budget;?></td>

to:

<td class="hilite"><?php
  if ($fullaccess)
  echo $dPconfig['currency_symbol'] + @$obj->project_target_budget;
  else
  echo $AppUI->_('####');
  ?></td>

And it worked! Since this has to be done in many places, for whatever we deem as “sensitive,” then I’d like to put that in a class or something so it can easily be called.

So, nothing terribly exciting or complex, but it highlights the beauty of opensource.  You can start with a great application and customize it to your needs.  I’ll try to share other mods we make as we go along.

So, I’m starting this blog to document my experiences and mods - since I just made my first one.  I’ll get to that next.