No, no, no. Not me. The web site moved. After some pain and some gain, I have successfully migrated this web site to my dad’s web server. I’m still using the same name, all of the adjustments have been done. It was lots of fun, actually, because I had to renew my linux skills in configure Apache, installing PHP and MySQL, and migrating databases. The photo album was the biggest part of the move, but it was no sweat thanks to the scp command. With the server change, I thought the layout needed redone. I didn’t really have time to work out a new design so I just went with a template I found on WordPress.com. Yeah, I didn’t design this layout but I think it’ll work until I make a new one sometime this year. I did have to make some adjustments to this one to get my logo up and the photo album working sanely in Firefox.

The main reason for the move was that 1.) Kirby’s a bit loud in the storage room 2.) the cabinet that he’s sitting on is starting to wean itself from the wall, and 3.) we want to give the kids their own computer for some educational software. Kirby’s not much in power but it should be quite enough for them. It won’t be hooked up to the Internet so I’m not too worried about the security and wacky issues. Maybe later on, but not now. Once I get all of the data off or backed up, I can reformat and set it up for them.

Otherwise, the web site’s up and running again, hopefully faster and a little more reliable. Alas to Kirby, though. He’s in for some remodeling.

Microsoft released its final version of Internet Explorer 7 last night. I haven’t had the chance to check it out yet. I don’t expect a lot of changes from the RC1 release that I installed on my test box at work since release candidates are most done with bug fixes needed. I had been testing my sites and web applications with the betas and as far as I could tell they didn’t break. The CSS support was better although not perfectly supported like in other browsers. I’ll see how the release version goes and find a link to have both IE7 & IE6 installed at the same time. Also seems it’s only available for Windows XP and Server 2003 – no Windows 2000 support. Geesh. I may have to actually put XP on my home Windows partition… or get IE7 working in Ubuntu…

Recently I’ve had to create a web form that would submit a request through our internal trouble ticket system. That part’s fine. It was the part where I needed to filter the requesting users according to a few criteria. In order to submit the form, the the user would need to be (1) on our new domain, (2) based in a certain city, and (3) on certain email exchanges. At first, I was thinking how I would accomplish this task. Active Directory! Right! That’s what ASP.Net is good for! But how?…

I searched and searched. I did find articles but the wording, bad grammar, and confusing posts made it a tad difficult to understand at first. I asked a co-worker who actually had wrote a site that interacted with Active Directory. Thank you, Matt, for getting me started on this. The example code he gave me was very helpful and I found it was easier than I thought. I tried it out and was overjoyed. There. I can search AD and grab the account name with no problem! But… What about the other properties I need for this project? What are their names? I scoured the Interweb in search for an answer to my plea: Where’s a list of all of the properties that I can access? No luck at all. All of my searches ended with the same old articles. The fact turned out to be that all Directories are going to be different according to the infrastructure’s needs. Slap myself. Duh. Well then, back to the old coding board with me.
(more…)