Why do this? Because otherwise, getting to the point where you can start developing themes or plugins is a pain.

I consider myself a well rounded developer. I don’t play favorites. That means, from one day to the next I may find my self in php, coldfusion, or java. I build prototypes using ext.js framework and also have local versions of Joomla, Conflunce, MediaWiki, and even Websphere portal with WCM, and SAP Portal (I keep those beasts locked away in a WMWare enviroments). But VMware is overkill for something as light Lose Weight Exercise as WordPress.
Here are the steps for setting up a local WordPress dev enviroment with Server2Go.

1. Download Server2Go – there are several versions. To pick the right one, check the requirements of the software you want to run. Since I want to run wordpress – I look at it and downloaded this one - (only ~23MB – nice).
   
2. Extract it somewhere (you can move it later) and and launch the server2go.exe. this starts the server. Any time you want to work in in, just launch it. If you want to change the way it works (like launch firefox instead of IE, edit pms_config.ini file.
   
3. Server2Go will launch IE for you and show the default screen. Now we have to create a wordpress database. So click phpMyAdmin under tools on the right.
   
4. In the Create Database feild type “wordpress” (no quotes) and press “Create”.
   
5. Download the WordPress package and unzip it into the htdocs folder in your server2go folder.
   
6. In your browser type: http://127.0.0.1:4001/wordpress/
7. Follow the instructions onscreen – click the create wp-config.php button, then “let’s go”
   
8. Type “wordpress” (no qoutes) into the Database name feild and submit.
   
9. Then you see this and that’s it! WordPress should now be installed.
10. Once your in wordpress, you can download themes from the internet and unzip them to the themes folder. Once you do, you can see them on the Design page in the wp_admin.
11. I like to find a theme that is close to what I want and modify it. Once you find one you like, create a site in dreamweaver and edit the theme from there. You can save changes to the php files and css and see them in immediatly on the site by refreshing.

1. From Windows install disk goto E:\I386 folder and open open (Double click) on the FP40EXT.CAB file. It should open.

(or – if you do not have the disk, find a working XP computer and go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\40\bin).

2. find fp4autl.dll in the list and copy it (ctrl-c)

3. go to c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin and paste it (ctrl-v)

4. Restart the 2007 office install

Viola! (thanks guys over at http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=627360)

Powered by ScribeFire.

Option 1) Spray paint the card a solid color. This works well. I spray painted it solid silver for a few days, then solid black. The black card was well received but I found out that many merchants need to know what kind of card it is. So I looked into other options. Note: you need to remove the spray paint with sand paper, but be careful around the numbers before you try the other options. Otherwise the card starts to get too thick with paint. For my wife’s I tried solid pink and stuck a visa sticker on it from option 3 below.

Option 2) Iron on transfer paper: This was what another site proposed. this did not work well for me. The theory is design your card in photoshop and print it onto Iron-On T-shirt Transfer Paper ($10 at your local hobby store). Cut out the design, use spray on poster board glue to secure the transfer to the card and iron on low heat. I did not like this. In all my attempts the card ended up too thick to use at swipe ATMs. Plus, the iron removed raised numbers from the back. Note, the numbers are not part of the card design – I added fake numbers to the picture just to illustrate – you want the raised original numbers to come through which is why this option sucks.

Option 3) Recommended. Buy some quality Inkjet sticker paper. Print your card design and stick it to the card. You can do front and back just on the back, do not cover the magnetic strip. The stripe WILL work through the sticker but having a stick on front and back makes it too thick (or so my wife says). Once the sticker is in place take a knife and lightly scratch back and forth across the numbers to make them come through and continue to press the sticker down around the numbers as they come through. Mine looks and works perfectly Again, the numbers are not part of the card design – I added fake numbers to the picture just to illustrate – you want the raised original numbers to come through. Here is the back:

I am still experimenting to try and give the card a good plastic look. At first it looked and felt a little to “papery” so I sprayed a coating of gloss on it.

Remote Executive Assistant

• Do you spend more time on routine administrative tasks instead of important business issues?
• Are you suffering from information overload?
• Are you finding less time to devote to your personal interests?
• Are you up against a deadline and need help with research on your project?
• Do you have an interesting idea but need help in creating a business plan?
• Do you need assistance for extensive internet research and database creation?
• Do you want to create/improve your website which gets you more customers?

Tasks they do:

• Formatting/beautifying any MS office files like word, excel, PowerPoint
• Quick mail mergers and sending mass mails in your name; Email & fax blast
• Internet search or any other sources that you provide them access to
• Designing customized greetings cards and sending them on your behalf
• Fine tuning your logo, business cards and other stationary including converting image to vector
• Data processing like data entry, OCR conversion; creating the PowerPoint presentation from the handwritten data;
• Updation, normalization & standardization of database;
• photo edits; b/w to color
• Shopping
  assistance like comparison of models & prices, listing of shops
  within a specific area with address, phone number & route map

Has anyone tried this?

The first thing you need to know is that in GMail, your chats are actually stored as normal emails with a tag "Chat". So all we need to do is convert the chats to email, upload them and tag them as "chat".  Below are the 5 steps to get them uploaded!

Step 1) Extract Yahoo IM chats to Text files
Yahoo saves your chats in an encoded format. Normally you can use the Archive reader that comes with Yahoo to read it, but in order to upload them, we need to convert them first. I downloaded and installed Dapyx Yahoo Messenger – it is free and does a good job of converting extracting the files from the Yahoo Archive and saving them as text files. Before you download it though – please be warned – It changes your IE homepage without asking and I did have a problem with the time zone. All the dates where correct but the times where 9 hours off…I sent an email to the Dapyx support and posted a bug to their forum but I have not heard back.

Step 2) Convert the text files to unix email format
Once you have the files converted as text the next step is to turn them in to email messages that Thunderbird can use. I wrote a simple vbscript that reformats the txt files into unix email format that Thunderbird can import. This script reads through all the text files in a given folder and turns them into one large output.txt file.

Instructions to use this file:

1. Download this file to your harddrive (note: never, ever run strange scripts on your computer unless you know what they do – right click the file and select and click edit to see what this what this one does – that said- lets run the script) – double click to get started
2. It will prompt you for some info – where are the exported text files from Dapyx, what is your name, and where do you want the output
3. It takes about 20-30 seconds to convert the chats to email
4. After the script is done, it will tell you its done. Open the output.txt to see the chats in email format the thunderbird can open.

Step 3) Import the email into thunderbird
Copy the output.txt file into a folder that Thunderbird reads and remove the .txt extension (unix email files have no extension) so it will just be output (with no .txt). Restart Thunderbird and you will see all you chat as emails with the first line as the subject and the date and time of the chat as well as who it was with.

Step 4) Upload to Gmail with IMAP
I already wrote about this earlier.

Step 5) Tag as chat – When you import them to gmail, make sure you have gmail tag auto tag the mail when it comes it – the word "chat" is not allowed so I used "yahoo chat", "aol chat" etc.

Your done! Enjoy!

Here is my strategy…

First, ALL my documents go in the “My Documents” folder that windows provides. The first thing I do when I re-image my computer is right click on that My Documents folder and change the location to by my secondary hard drive. So the C: Drive in my laptop is for installed programs, and the D drive (I replaced my cd-rom with a second drive) is for all the files I care about. If I have to check my laptop at the airport (which I never, ever do – electronics are not covered by the airline policy) or leave it in a shady area – I pop out the D drive and put it in my pocket.

So, lets look at my D drive (My Documents folder):
As you can see, the one that is most out of place here is the “Camtasia Studio”. A lot of software when you install it, creates a folder in My Documents. The one I hate the most is Adobe, which creates a completely empty folder for NO APPARENT REASON. I delete it all the time. The other trouble maker is Mircosoft OneNote….a nice program, but…I use Google Notebook.

I also have divided my Projects at the root. Prior to this I had one projects folder with sub-folders. You have already seen the Email folder in my previous post, so lets get to the interesting one and look at Clients. This is by far the elephant in the room with 8.19 GB, 6,197 sub folders, and 91,743 files.

Inside the Project (Clients) folder, I have organized things by year, and client name (sorry – I thought I better blur out the client names – that’s not important here anyway we are talking about the structure itself). Alright now, stop trying to read it! If you want to know where I’ve worked just ask me, I’m not ashamed.

Before this I did not have the year as part of the title, which was good because I often go back to work for the same clients over and over and all their projects grouped together, it also allowed me to press the first letter of the client to jump to that folder. So why add the year, because it adds consistency with how I organize my other folders such as Photos and helps with Back-up.

Next lets look inside one of the client folders.

Reference Folder Structure
In 2002 I started to notice a growing problem, although my projects have similarities, I was difficult to back and find files from old projects because I was not following a naming convention. To be honest, since I don’t work with the same team from project to project, naming conventions are hard to follow. I come with mine, others come with theirs and we end up compromising – taking the best of each and doing what is right for the project and the client.

The idea was to start each project with a set of empty folders that map roughly to a pattern that had been established on many projects. I then retro-fitted the structure to old projects.
Here it is (you can also download a zip file that creates this empty structure)

It is still a good structure, but it has a price – first of all, when you start a project, all the folders are empty, so you spend time clicking through them, looking for files that don’t exist. So you get annoyed and delete the empty folders. At this point, you start creating folders on demand again. This would be solved if windows had a better file management system using tags or at least showing file count at the folder level.

As for Music, I let itunes orgainize it, I don’t like how it does it, and I hate how when I reinstall itunes I loss at lot of info like playlists and rankings.

What else? If you have a question, our found this useful, tell me in the comments.

This post gets a lot of attention, so I rewrote part of it. It will give you step-by-step instructions to take all your old email (in my case over 10 years worth) and upload it into Gmail. Over the years I have used several different email clients: Pine on Unix, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. I am currently pretty comfortable with Gmail and have been using it since it was released. Like many people I am a data pack-rat and have kept all my email files (well, almost all – sadly I discovered a 6 months gap). My vision is to put it all into Gmail so I can leverage the great search and tagging features they provide. So here are the steps.

Overall Strategy – get everything converted and loaded into a local server, then sync it to Google.

Why do it this way? There are many advantages. First, if your just moving 100 to a 1000 messages with no attachments, then you can just skip all this and use the IMAP interface found in Google’s FAQ. That method allows you to “see” you gmail account in outlook (or thunderbird or lotus notes) and then just drag or copy messages from one box to the other.  But if your moving more than 1000 messages (or in my case 20,000 messages) with lots of attachments, that will take you days, and you have to sit there are watch it because you can only move about 200 messages at a time. In this method, we consolidate first to a local email server (I’ll show you how to set it up below) running on pc, then let the two accounts (your local one and gmail) sync on their own. Any other way and you are stuck sitting there, dragging and dropping or copying and pasting 200 messages at a time from one folder to another. Second – this keeps all dates in tact. It is really nice to see message you send in 1995 in your Gmail account. Third, once we do this, we can use it as a local backup of our Gmail – just incase the unthinkable happens to Gmail. (I said don’t think of it!)

Ready? Let’s get started

Here is the over all process – you will notice that I installed a email server on my computer called Mercury. This allows us to set up a IMAP and POP account locally that is much faster and will serve as a local backup of all email. 

Step 1) First find all your email

I dug through all my old hard drives and consolidate my mail into one location. As you can see, I have outlook (pst) files, lotus notes (nsf) files and files from an old Unix (pine) account I had at school. The zip file (all 2.7GB of it) is the finished product – all my email from 1995 though 2005 (2006 and 2007 are in gmail already).

 
If you are looking at my files, you see a lot of overlap, that’s ok, better safe than sorry…we can delete the duplicates once they are in Thunderbird using an extension.

Step 2. Download the Software

• Thunderbird (free email client) – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
• Mercury (free email server) – ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/m32-452.exe (read about it)
• Lotus Notes (free trial) – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/
• Outlook (free trial) – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx

Why Thunderbird – because it is open source with a large developer base. This means there is a good set of tutorials for writing extensions if I to want later on (for those visualizations). Also, I’m making a long term bet that 50 years from now, there will still be tools that import these files – (since they are just text files with no encoding and no database) – plus Thunderbird is really fast and can read 6gb of email quickly (lotus notes and outlook tend to slow down). So Thunderbird will be the final destination on my computer and I will upload from there.

Step 3. Install the software

• Thunderbird – just default everything
• Mercury – Make sure you set it up for both POP and IMAP when you get those options in the wizard
• Lotus Notes – Default
• Outlook – Default

Step 4. Import Unix files to Thunderbird

These are the easiest because Thunderbird will read these natively. All you have to do is copy the files in to the local folder and reopen Thunderbird.
A) Find out where thunderbird is storing your local files. To do this go to Tools > Account Settings. (note I renamed the local account to Ben Shoemate (all mail) but what your interested in is the "Local Directory" copy that and go there in windows explorer. This is where you need to copy the Unix files (they are files with no extensions). Just copy them to this "local folder", close and restart Thunderbird. Your old mail will be there! That’s it!

Step 5. Set up a local Email account in Mercury.

Open Mercury – if it is all ready running you will see down in the windows toolbar by the clock.

Otherwise , Start > Program Files > etc..

Once Mercury is open, go to Configuration > Manage Local Users > Add User
Because there is so much mail, I am going to set up a different local account per year. Gmail.com can import from 5 accounts at a time, and this will save a lot of time later on. So just make up an account name – I use my initials and the year and a simple password.

It should look like this when your done.

Each of these accounts are real email addresses. When you are local (in lotus notes and outlook) you can map to them with bs1999@localhost
In gmail, you can add them as bs1999@youripaddress (i.e. bs1999@111.111.122.11).

Step 6. Lotus Notes NSF files to your local email with IMAP

Once lotus notes is installed, you can simply double click the nsf files to open them, or you can click File > Database > Open > browse

You should see your old mail now. Ahh the memories….But don’t stop to read everything again or I’ll never finish this tutorial! Now, in lotus notes we are going to map to the local email account you set up in mercury. (Note: Gmail now has IMAP so you could just map directly to gmail if you want using the same procedure – but again, it will take a 100 years if you have this much email).

Go to File > Preferences > Client Reconfiguration Wizard

Check Pop or IMAP and click next.

Select IMAP, enter your new email account you set up in mercury, and type localhost, click next.

enter your account name again, and enter the password you gave yourself.
Click next, enter localhost as the server and your email address again – this doesn’t matter since you will not be using this email address for very long and it won’t show up on any of the mail that goes through it.
next, next, next your done.

To open the view of this in notes, click the "Databases" icon on the left panel and open your new account (this might take 2-3 minutes while notes creates a new nsf file etc.)

Now you should have you local account open. Now simply open the old nsf file, go to the "all documents" folder, select all, copy (I think it will only let you copy 2500 at a time) and then switch to you new email account and paste. Once you have all the messages for that year in the local IMAP account, close the nsf and repeat for all nsf files, and all years.

Step 7 – Outlook to your local email with IMAP

The same as in lotus notes – open your pst, then add the imap account and copy and paste.

• To open the pst go to File > Manage Data files and click Add.
• To open the local IMAP account go to Tools > Account Settings > New email account

Check the box that says "Manually configure server settings".

• Select Internet Mail
• Enter your Name, Email address (bs1999@localhost) and password, select IMAP, the server is localhost for both incoming and outgoing

Once you have mapped to this account, simply copy your old mail from the PST to the new account.

Step 8 – Clean it up in Thunderbird

Connect Thunderbird to you local email server (mercury) and download all your mail. Just like in outlook and lotus notes, we are going to add an account to Thunderbird and let it download all the mail you just put into it from lotus notes, pine and outlook.

• Open Thunderbird
• Click Tools > Account Settings > Add Account
• Enter Account Name (for me its bs1999@localhost), Name, email address (bs1999@localhost)

• Click Server settings

• Click OK.
• The next thing I did was organize copy them down into my local Thunderbird account and used an extension to delete duplicates
• Then I spent some time looking for gaps…oh well

Step 9 – Upload to gmail

By now your local account has a lot of mail. Let’s start pulling it into gmail. I set up a new gmail account to test it first. From there I can pull it into my main account.

• Log in to gmail
• Click Settings > Accounts > Get Mail from other accounts (Pop3) > Add other accounts
• Add your accounts from your local account. Note: you need you IP address. If you have a router you will need to route ports for pop3 (port 110) to your local computer. Log into your router to do this. While your there, get the IP of your router (ITS NOT the one that starts with 192. or 10. those are always local addresses)

(that’s NOT my IP address btw)

Next – gmail gives you some great options to tag the mail as it comes in, do it. Even if your not a tagger – do it.

You might also want to leave the message on the server (your computer) if this is a trial run.
Click Add account. If you get a problem, make sure your firewall is open, you port is mapped, and your password is right.

Next I’ll show you how to upload all those old chats…

If you liked this post, check out my other greatest hits:

• Words Einstein never said (but everyone thinks he did)
• Rewriting the Star Wars Prequels (they need it)
• Pimp your Credit Card
• The story of the bear and the big dipper

So, I am here to tell you, that as of right, now, there is no way to:

• Add yahoo or google users to you Sametime list at work
• Add sametime users to you home google talk of yahoo IM.

Why no one is saying this is a product of the uncertainty caused by being unable to confirm a negative. It’s not just me either, there were at least 2o questions about this in Yahoo Answers. Including the one I added.

So here is my promise – if someone says it can be done, I will document it, and update this post. Also, if you can tell me it can not be done, because IBM has not set it up yet, that is good to. It is the uncertainty that kills us.