Got another inherited G4.

I also inherited a Mirror drive G4 tower from a former colleague at Hempfield. I am working on a project for school and this is a perfect machine to turn into a server.

This picture here is what I have however, I have a 17″ Apple display not a 23″. I have 2 17″ lcds in fact, the one is with the G4 Cube.

I also inherited an original 15″ LCD that apple produced. I may use that for the server project. The cube can handle a dual 17″ display setup but I need an adapter. So I am excited to get this project started. I think my room is started to get a little warm with all the computers and monitors that are on and running. Thank god the cube has no fan.

PowerMac G4 Cube, ahead of it’s time?

I just procured an old PowerMac G4 Cube this past week. This machine was debuted in 2000 and then was laid to rest in 2001.

Overall it was a great machine for it’s time; the latest G4 processor, cd-rw or dvd-rom, up to 1.5 gigs of ram, and no cooling fan so its really quiet.

Another cool observation to mention, the design itself to get to the “guts” of the machine, you unlatch a handle and the entire machine comes out and is all grafted to a cube shaped skeleton. It makes things very easy to access (memory, wireless card option, hard drive, and logic board).

The problem was, the price. It was priced around $1499 and for that the consumers would rather put $1500 into a G4 tower with dual processors.

The machine itself is great, and saves so much desk space. If the price was different back then I believe it would have been as successful as the Mac Mini is today. I will utilize this machine until the day it dies. I may even pay to get a third party processor upgrade to a single 1.5 ghz G4.

This truly was an innovative computer design ahead of it’s time.

WWDC 2009 thoughts…

WWDC was exciting to se what new stuff would appear in the upcoming months. I am particularly excited about 10.6 and some newer features. Expose on the Dock is gonna be great for me when I have many documents or photos open in Photoshop. I am also really happy to know that I will be getting back about 5 gigs of HD space as well.

The new iPhone was less exciting for me, yea ok, faster 3G and come cool new features but nothing that I will plan on running out to upgrade, especially since I do not have as much of an income as I did at Hempfield. I do have to say that Apple will take more of the cell phone market with offering the $99 dollar iPhone, that will most likely piss many of the other cell manufacturers off since they just released new smart phones.

I have mixed emotions about the rebranding of the laptops. I read an article on monday about “Pro” not meaning “Pro” anymore as it used to. To me the pro version of the laptops are those still that are “mobile powerhouses” that can do the work of a Desktop in a laptop form. The difference used to be that the pro level laptops had a dedicated video card that could handle the more graphic intense programs. The new 3 lower end models of the macbook pros do not have dedicated video cards. I hope consumers realize that they aren’t getting a pro level laptop at the lower cost. the pro level laptops are the 3 higher end models of the Macbook pro line. However, those consumers who dont plan on do much in FCP, or high end manipulation in photoshop, or audio editing in Logic Pro, then the 13″ is fine. They still are amazing machines, just not what a “pro” is looking for.

Next project….

I was given my next project at work. Ever hear of any software from www.spiceworks.com ? Its a free IT management system that is only apparently doing 85% of what we need it to do for the hospital. Some of the features include: software, hardware, and network inventory. It also has a network monitoring piece to the software as well. These are just a few things that it can do. I am not sure how impressed I will be after working with it, depending how well the user interface looks and how well it keeps an inventory. Free is good but free is not always best for when it comes to a management system for your IT department and for what your dept. wants/needs it to do.  I have seen some powerful management systems before that can do a lot. (The Casper Suite by Jamf software) for example that manages Apple hardware and software. We will see if I can get this to work 100% or this may not be the solution we may find another product that will allow us to do what we want it to.

It’s Live ! Learning new things everyday.

So driving into work this morning, It kinda hit me that in the DotNetNuke portal itself I may have needed to change the portal alias. Sure enough I get to work quickly figure out what I may need to change it to, and it was almost like magic where it starting working. After putting the IP address of the server as the portal alias it worked. I had it entered inncorrectly.

DotNetNuke it to hell…….

So, let me begin by saying that no the site is still not live yet to the network. It works great on the locally on the server and IIS is configured correctly and I can navigate to the site however, it just comes back saying “cannot connect to server” well by the end of today, NO one can tell me why this is happening, not my co-workers or even my former co workers from Hempfield. So I am actually at a loss and not sure what to look at to try to fix it to get this ready. It is somehow not seeing 4 files that it needs to launch the actual site. They are there in the folder where they should be and yet, NOTHING happens when I navigate to the site. Today is a perfect example of why I am switching my major to something else.

Update on DotNetNuke project

I spend all my time at work today fine tuning the DotNetNuke site at the hospital today. The custom form module I installed is working rather well. The day was spend modifying the questions and text fields to pull the correct data into the SQL database. Not only that, I also needed to find out what format I needed the phone #’s to be in so we can check it with the payroll database.

Around 1:00pm we gave a demo to the hospitals COO. He gave it the thumbs up after a few minor tweaks. So we were good to go on.

By the end of the day everything is complete and  was asked to add “help” buttons to give examples of what to enter into the field “7175559876″ for phone #’s and “name@mhyork.org” for e-mail addresses. So tomorrow I’ll finish that up then we can publish the site to the rest of the internal network and we can start the process of collecting the data.

I only realized today that we are going through this whole process because we need accurate and correct data to hand over to the AlertNow people. When I was still at Hempfield, Mike Graham and Jeff Swarr had implemented the AlertNow system. It basically is a rapid communications systems used in need of emergencies or other important informational messages that you would need to get out to your staff and/or community  Via: phone call, text message, or e-mail.

The project should be completed this week and we should have all the data collected by the end of next week. Here is hoping…..

DotNetNuke at Memorial

After being impressed working with DotNetNuke at Hempfield on their new website before I left. I have decided that bringing it to Memorial Hospital would be a project that would get the thumbs up.

I was given a project to somehow collect all the contact information (e-mails, home/cell phones) of our hospital physicians, administrators and staff to cross check with our payroll database. The idea is for us to get the correct information to create an “alert now” type of directive that will allow us to get information or a message to the staff in need of an emergency.

Originally I was asked to learn Visual Basic and write a windows application that would basically be a “contact form”. After spending about 4 days learning about SQL databases and learning a bit of Visual Basic I started building. The database part was easy enough in SQL but the windows application was a bit tricky for me since I was trying to get the “submit” button to actually insert the data that was filled in each text field into the SQL database. I was so close and I know its a few minor modifications away from actually working however, I was on a tight timeline.

I finally spent an evening thinking about other ways this could be done and it finally hit me…. I knew that DotNetNuke already had a “registration form” that would you could fill out and submit data into a SQL database so I did some researching and I found a custom module that allowed me to make a custom for of my choosing and link it to a table in the database.

So with that I got permission to try DotNetNuke before we contracted this project out to someone outside of the hospital.  It took a few tries to get it installed due to some hardware and software issues but then finally, third times a charm and I got it installed on the third server I tried. (with Mike Grahams help of course).

Once it was installed and the portal was running it was about another hour until I got the form module installed and had the custom form built. It wasn’t perfect yet it was usable and I  got the “looks good” from the boss.

This weekend I found a DNN skin that would fit well to the hospital (color,theme,layout) with some slight adjusting the skin fits well to the website that the hospital already has.

Hopefully I can get the hospital to use DNN for more than just gathering staff contact information. Maybe i’ll wait to see how well this will work and how well this is gonna be received before I mention that we can use this to replace the intranet we already have.