WTF

The Drupal community, and open-source community at that, has always had the altruistic goal of being accessible to all. The hope is that as freelancers and tech gurus go out into the world, maybe we can help by making better, more secure websites.

And then you have piece-of-crap hosting like that of Network Solutions.

Now, I only bring this up because as I work with clients to get their internet presence setup, sometimes you're stuck working with their choice of hosting provider, hosting package, and admin credentials.

This means crazy php.ini setups, no ssh access (because the cheap plans don't enable this), and passwords like '1234myfirstname'. Never the eternal pessimist, I figured I'd leave a few words of encouragement and one small tip to those that run into this.

First, don't give up. Although you can't convince your client to pay you monthly hosting fees on your leased vps (who hasn't tried that?), continue to make their internet presence more than a site built by iPowerweb. Yeah, you may have to wrestle with a table-filled layout, but a little progress is better than no progress.

Second, scour the drupal forums for a solution. Sometimes it may take a couple of days, but it seems like everytime I run into a roadblock, someone else has as well. A forked, non-hacked core, Drupal install on a POS hosting provider is STILL better than an MS Access-driven site hosted by 1and1. :-)

Third...if you're on Network Solutions, and get the dreaded email of 'we will not turn off register_globals or magic_quotes_gpc because it would affect other shared hosted sites', take a deep breath, laugh at them uncontrollably, blog about it, then put this piece of code in the cgi-bin of your vhost within a text file called 'php.ini':

register_globals = off
magic_quotes_gpc = off

Yeah, this whole blog post was all about solving the Drupal install message of 'TURN THIS CRAP OFF', but I figured the it was better suited for the community to at least know I didn't give up! Why it ignores this directive in .htaccess or the ini_set() in the settings.php is beyond me, but....it does work.

Thanks go to this forum post, btw.

It's been a busy couple of weeks for your friendly neighborhood Nerds...  Jeremy just flew out to Chicago to meet with a potential new employer, Luke finally used some of the 6.8 million vacation hours he'd accumulated over the past couple years (seriously, Luke, who DOESN'T take a day off in two years?!), Aaron just had another baby (say "hello" to Lars, everyone), and I'm tying up loose ends at my current day job, getting ready to start anew at a new gig on October 1.  Sadly, that means you've all been neglected.

Fear not, gentle readers.  We'll get our act together soon and get some new material up here as soon as the dust settles.  Until then, I thought I'd waste your time with a completely useless tale about my recent experience on the Dell Premier website.

If you're not familiar with the site, Dell Premier is basically a corporation's one-stop, personalized Dell shopping page.  Your business's rep sets you up and you can logon to take care of all your Dell purchasing needs in one place.  Generally works pretty well.  Generally.

And that's how we segue into the Nerdliness.com homage to Highlights Magazine's "What is Wrong With This Picture?"  Just took this screen shot from my Dell Premier page a few minutes ago, looking at toner cartridges for a Dell 3115cn (click to see the full version):

So what's wrong with this picture?  Well, let's start with the title:

That generally should show the name of the company your account is associated with.  Guess what?  I don't work for the Denver International Airport.  Man, I knew that airport had a reputation for things going wonky, but I had no idea it was contageous.  Fortunately for them, just looks like the title is tweaked.  I don't seem to have access to any of their other information.  My account information is actually mine, etc. 

Oh, and notice what product it thinks we're looking at:

Sure, I've been in IT for some time and have years of experience noting the difference between keyboards and toner cartridges, but I think my three-year-old daughter could tell ya that these ain't keyboards.

Finally, there's this:

Ok, so this one's not really a glitch, but it certainly qualifies as a "WTF" to me...  So you can buy the black cartridges individually for $109.99 (not on that page), in the convenient and cost-saving three-pack for $320.07 (saves $9.90), or the WTF-inducing 84-pack for $9,239.00 (a whoppin' 16-cent savings!).  Not sure what I find more amusing:  the fact that they even offer an 84-pack of toner cartridges, or the fact that they think the same people who might actually need to order it would be stupid enough to buy an 84-pack instead of saving $277.04 by ordering 28 three-packs...

I promise the next posts you see will actually be relevant and informative. 

Sure, this isn't the most timely of reviews. After all, the T-Mobile Dash has been around for months now. Thing is, though, that my Dash keeps giving me new reasons to write about it...

Few months ago, my wife's cell phone died and, since she's not as nerdly as I am, she volunteered to take my phone and let me buy a fancy new one (any wonder why I love this woman?). Anyway, soon as she said that, I ran over to the local T-Mobile store so I could scope out new toys before she had a chance to change her mind. Ended up walking out with the T-Mobile Dash.

Overall, the phone's ranked somewhere between "OK" and "Pretty Good" for me. I like the size, feel, and features (when they work, see below). The screen's pretty and sharp, the QWERTY keyboard works surprisingly well (even for we fat-fingered folks), etc., but there are a few things that annoy me about it. For starters:

1. The placement of the volume strip. The volume controls on the side of the Dash, right where my index and middle fingers go when I'm holding it during a normal conversation. For the first couple of weeks I had the bloody thing, I kept accidentally turning the volume up and down in the middle of calls. It has some sensitivity settings, but those never worked well for me. Ended up disabling it.
2. The headset that comes with it. T-Mobiles throws one of those stereo headsets in the Dash box where the cord for one ear is longer than the other. No idea why anybody would ever want that. Is the idea that you can share the headset with someone else while you're listening to MP3s or something? Just ends up getting tangled up all the time. I've nearly thrown the thing out the car window several times as I've frantically tried to unwind it to take a call. Would use the speaker phone feature, but...
3. The speaker phone sucks. Horrendous sound quality. Can barely hear what people on the other end of the phone are saying (and vice versa).
4. Flaky wireless. I'm too cheap to pay the $19.95/mo that T-Mobile demands to use their Internet access, so the only time I browse on this phone is when I'm within range of my own Wi-Fi network at the house. When it works, it works well. Problem is that it's inconsistent. And I don't mean inconsistent the same way Wi-Fi connections are always inconsistent.For example, on the main screen, there's a spot that usually lists the status of the Wi-Fi connection. When you've turned it off, it says "Wi-Fi: Off" and when you're connected to a network is lists the SSID of the WLAN. I use the default setting that says it should turn off the Wi-Fi adapter if it can't establish a connection within a certain amount of time. However, sometimes it will go through the connection routine as though everything is hunky dory, but I won't be able to browse. I can usually tell when that's happening because the status screen says "Wi-Fi: " instead of "Wi-Fi: Off" or "Wi-Fi: ". When it happens, I have to turn the phone off and on.
5. Flaky SSMS. My wife and I trade text messages all day, so it really gets on my nerves when my phone misbehaves. From time to time, it just won't let me access any of the messages in the various folders. I click on one and nothing at all happens, but other features still work just fine. Again, only way I've found to fix it is to reboot the phone. Guess I should expect those reboots... After all, it IS running Windows...

Today, though, this thing took its random goofiness to a new level. I had just finished typing out a text message to my wife and, when I pushed the "Send" button, my Dash gave me this message:

Sorry about the poor quality. Had to throw the phone on a scanner to capture the image and, needless to say, scanners aren't exactly designed to scan LCD screens. If you can't read it, it says "The phone is currently off. Would you like to turn on the phone?"

Talk about your Catch-22's. If the phone is off, how the hell is it giving me a message that says "the phone is currently off?!" It's like when you get an email from customers/end-users informing you that email's down. Does not compute.