Ronney Black dot Com

Happy New Year to all. I hope your holidays were pleasant. When I was young all the boys on my street would visit and play with each other's toys on Christmas.  My favorite visits were to Lindale's, who had an American Flyer train set which was a bit different from my Lionel. American Flyer and Lionel were the dominant train companies in the fifties and sixties and the owners of each set had pride in their outfit while respecting and admiring the features of the other.  Unlike the Windows and Mac/Linux 'wars' of today.

This holiday season was much like my childhood days in that my buddies and I played with and demonstrated Windows and Linux systems to each other. Will is quite an accomplished Windows system administrator. He showed how Windows servers can assist in the deployment and managment of multiple desktops in an organization. Really impressive stuff. I was so impressed that I came to the office, fired up an underutilized machine and installed Win Xp Pro with VmWare. Then I used VmWare to install a Windows 2000 Server instance. It worked fine after I figured out that I had to pin W2K to one processor on my dual core AMD machine.  All was good in the neighborhood. Really slick stuff. The W2K server runs like a charm - just as expected.

So I fired up a session of VmWare and installed an Ubuntu 7.10 instance. Again it worked like a charm. In fact both W2K and Linux were running at the same time and my 'client' pc's were able to see and utilize their shares and web pages. Real slick stuff. The VmWare machines however seemed a little sluggish because the host machine has only 2 gig of ram.  I started thinking about a decent long term solution and realized two things. I needed a machine and an os that would utilize more memory. Figuring out the machine part is not too challenging, pick a dual or quad core processor and mobo capable of 8 or 16 meg of ram and put either Vista or Linux on the box and off we go.

Having been trained as in both Unix (SCO)  and Windows (NT 4) system administration I realize that I have a warm spot in my heart for Linux that Windows never garnered.  Back in the day - I won't say which day - SCO ran a series of ads on in computer magazines. The ads pictured a desktop computer on a table in a glassed room.  The PC had many cables coming from the back along with the heading Instant Mainframe.  Now in those days mini's and mainframes ruled the roost and PC's were just becoming important as users realized that they could build their own data and reports without having to depend on and wait for the computer department to handle their requests. Networking as we know it was not quite full blown and Novell was just starting to get it together.  Yet the promise of low cost, centrallized data stores and applications with PC's and terminals having access was tremedous.  At my earliest I jumped on the chance to realize that potential with an SCO rig on. 

A few years later Microsoft came around with  NT 4 which was almost reliable. One of my employers at the time was running a Pick database on ATT System V and needed to upgrade his systems.  The vendor of the primary application pushed the benefits of their Windows version and we bought into NT 4.  It certainly was not as stable - In fact it was really problematic. Coming from the really stable unix world where we booted systems and let them run literrally for years without downtime, to the Win NT 4 world where we had  to reboot weekly  - or is it now called refresh - was a real drag.  In my mind Microsoft's server products have still not rivalled the Unix experience.

And all this is in mind as I think about my future system, which at this point seems to be a quad core intel processor with 8 gig of ram with Linux as the host operating system and Windows Xp, 2KServer, 2003 Server and Vista as guest installations under VmWare.  Wish me luck as I start the New Year with a new vision. I'l keep you posted.

Here's a shout to our new client. Ala Ritz Kiddie College in Cleveland. Ms Denson and her crew signed up for and have been using the RBA Webservices Child Care Attendance and Tracking System for almost a month now. They, along with First Fruits Child Care, have been pleased with the applicaton. Let me know if you would like a demo....

And by the way fusemail has been humming along with no trouble. I may have a solution.

My hosting problems, which began with the nolonger EasyCGI takeover by Incompetence Inc. led me to GoDaddy, who offers a pretty good bargain. If it were not for the close to horrible email.  Customers have complained that it takes nine to ten hours for email to arrive, If it arrives at all.

So the search began - Google Apps has gotten good reviews so I tried it. Spam protection is good, mail arrives timely, but the interface is clunky. I like to sort mail by sender, date, and header. Those options are not available.  The service seems reliable and is only $50 per user per year.-

Now Fusemail seems to be the provider of the moment.  The administrative interface works fairly well, is flexible enough for my needs and  is more affordable for my clients. And the users like the interface much better than hoarde or the google webmail  interface. It's spam protection is seemingly very good. V has onle had one piece of uncaught spam in the last three days - and she was getting 20 to 40 pieces of uncaught spam from the GoDaddy email system.  So let's see how it goes... Hopefully this will be the last time I have to change mail hosters.  That is until I find a good - cost effective - Zimbra host.

I recently realized that I could do a better job of handling my accounts receivables.  I have been using Quickbooks on Bigdaddy, my 17 inch Toshiba laptop/notebook. V offered to take on that responsibility and I quickly agreed. Then I realized we would need another copy of quickbooks and we would need to centralize the data flles.  This would be okay but since I'm on the road for most of the day wwe would have to make the files avaialble across the net.  Not a problem if I open a VPN prot to the home office. But then it dawned on me. Build a Web App. Having written at least half a dozen ar programs over the years this seemed like a no brainer.

So I fired up my trusty development box and began with VWD 2005. The I thought - heck if this is good for me maybe it will be good for someone else so I built it as a dot net nuke module. It's a work in progress bu t so far it allows for the managment of customer information and one-line-item invoices. Now to build a few reports.

This morning I woke up intent on working out. I got so far as doing a few stretches, then it dawned on me that I had not checked out my web sites. So much for the workout. Good news is that the Perel JOnes and Sons Funeral Home as well as the Cummings and Davis Funeral Home have achieved top rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN - at least if you search by name.  Likewise First Fruits Child Care gets first page ranking on a google search by name.  Now the challenge is to get them ranked by business type. It would be great if they popped up high with a search like Funeral Cleveland, or Child Care Euclid.  I'm not sure how to do that but I'm working on it.  Meanwhile V said I should develop a web based invoice system for Ron Black & Associates - It seems we don't want to give Intuit $400 for a two user quickbooks.  It should not be too hard of a project..... ( that's what they all say )

I just took a look at my Zetta Kappa Kappa web site ( Zata Kappa Kappa is a Cleveland chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, of which I am a member).  It seems the images are not consistently displaying. The site is built with DotNetNuke and hosted by PowerDNN.  The advertise that you can have unlimited portals per web hosting account - problem is they don't adequately support more than one portal per hosted account. Consequently the secondary portals periodically flake out on us.... Time to go.  I already closed my hosting accounts with No Longer Easy CGI.  It may be time to do the same with Power DNN.

V and I live in a part of Euclid known as Sherwood Forest. We have plenty of deer but no Robin Hood,  Our neighbor reminds us of Friar Tuck but that's another issue.  The good folks of Sherwood have banded together to for a neighborhood group knows as the Sherwood Forest Friends Association.  V has been elected VP and offered to build a community web site. So here goes a real live opportunity for Dot Net Nuke, the content management system of choice here at RBA Web Services. Check out the site and let us know what you think......

Just found out that I failed to put up a link for the Indulgements Web Site - so here it is - Your Unique Gift Basket Headquarters and while you are n the shopping mood - check out our friends at Midwestern Leather Products - they have designer purses

Well today was a day of days. My fraternity, Omega Pis Phi, Zeta Kappa Kappa Chapter had it's annual founder's day celebration. This year a luncheon was held. It turned out to be a very nice affair. And to top it off I was honored with a Superior Service Award for my tutoring/mentoring of youth at the City Mission.

These are the notes for today

I finally figured out that I need to have multiple web sites linked to sites that I want to have decent google rankings. So I have five different hosting services and now I will put pages on each service - and the pages will have links to the others - and each page will attempt to have content that changes regularly - Let see what we get Todays Links are to Pernel Jones Funeral Home  the Cummings and Davis Funeral Home - so lets see what we get. Oh yeah - heres a link to Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church and EMS Rams

RBAWebServices can use a boost as well