The current version of FlashChat (5.0.10) contains a configuration file for Drupal integration (drupalCMS.php) that doesn’t work. So for starters, download the Drupal 5 & 6 Integration Kit.

That solves many problems, but not quite all.

Installation

The integration kit contains a mostly-working drupalCMS.php script, and a “Who’s in chat” block module for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. It takes just a few small tweaks to make these operational.

The new drupalCMS.php needs no changes if your database host is something simple like “localhost”. But mine wasn’t - mine is “localhost:/tmp/mysql5.sock”, encoded in my Drupal settings.php file ($db_url variable) as “localhost%3a%2ftmp%2fmysql5.sock”. If your database host looks like mine, then you need to make one small change.

In drupalCMS.php, search for:

      $parts[host]

and replace this with:

      rawurldecode($parts[host])

Edit 29-Dec-08: Veronica just fixed the host parameter code in her Drupal Kit.

I encountered one more installation problem. This last problem is a bug in the general installation code, not the Drupal-specific code.

When I got to Step 7 and tried to install FlashChat bots, I got a 500 Server Error. This turned out to be because the install program was setting permissions of 777 to the flashchat temp directory and all subdirectories. My Web host is running SuExec, so allowing the world write permissions will always generate a 500 Server Error.

So when I got to Step 7 and the error, I used an FTP program to set the permission of temp and its subdirectories to 775 (no write permission for the world) and refreshed the page. That allowed it to load successfully and install the bots.

Displaying FlashChat within Drupal

When FlashChat is launched from within Drupal, it uses the Drupal users table and automatically logs in users who are logged into Drupal. So far, so good.

But by default, it opens into its own browser window. You lose all your Drupal theming, blocks, headers, and footers. I didn’t like that.

It’s very simple to make FlashChat display within a Drupal page. Just create a new page and enter this code:

      <?php

      echo '<iframe width="100%" height="450" src="flashchat/flashchat.php"></iframe>';

      ?>

Note that the source string shown here assumes that FlashChat is installed in a subdirectory under the Drupal root called “flashchat”. If you put it somewhere else, adjust the code.

Beware the Block Quirk

The FlashChat module for a “Who’s in chat” block works very nicely, but beware: You must go into the Admin area for the FlashChat module and save settings before enabling the block, or an error will prevent you from accessing your site. The FlashChat variables are not saved to the Drupal variables table until you go into the Admin area and save settings.

If you’re reading this after already encountering this error, just launch phpMyAdmin and delete the flashchat entry from the blocks table. That will get Drupal running again.

There are two things you should check when you are in the FlashChat Module Admin area:

• Make sure the name of the FlashChat directory is correct. The default is “chat”, but I called mine “flashchat”.
• You will want to remove the link to “Go to chat” if you want an embedded chat (or edit the code). The “Go to chat” link opens FlashChat in a separate window without the Drupal sidebars, header, and footer.

To change the link so it opens to your embedded chat, find this line in flashchat.module (the line is wrapping here, but it’s one line in the file):

      if($chatLinkText) $chatLink = '<a href="' . base_path() . $chat .
          'flashchat.php" target="_blank" title="' . $chatLinkTitle . '" alt="' .
          $chatLinkTitle . '">' . $chatLinkText . '</a><br>';

Replace it with this:

      if ($chatLinkText)
          $chatLink = '<a href="' . base_path() . 'fchat" title="' . $chatLinkTitle .
          '" alt="' . $chatLinkTitle . '">' . $chatLinkText . '</a;gt;<br>';

And then make sure that your Drupal page with the chat uses the url “fchat”. Don’t call it “flashchat” or it will launch FlashChat in a separate window (if your directory is called “flashchat”).

Configuring FlashChat

I find the default colors for FlashChat to be unreadable and headache-inducing, but happily this can be changed to match your Drupal theme. You can change many other aspects of the program from the adminstration area, as well:

http://yoursite.com/chatdir/admin/index.php

There’s a bug in the sounds feature in FlashChat 5.0.10 - settings are ignored. If you’re desperate to mute the sounds, you can delete the /flashchat/sounds/ folder.

There are some things that are not figurable in FlashChat that should be, and new chatters can’t see ongoing discussions from before they joined the chat. If these problems bother you, take a look at the phpFreeChat module for Drupal 5.x.

There’s a copy of the phpFreeChat module on my own Web site because I shared it from there while I figured out CVS, and don’t want to break the link. There’s also a phpFreeChat-compatible theme on my site that I haven’t uploaded to Drupal yet.

phpFreeChat is a great program (I added an “away” feature in the Drupal version), but has a limitation that may be a problem for some people: it conflicts with jquery if it’s on the same page. For most people this isn’t an issue, but if it is for you, you can use FlashChat - another feature-rich chat. I figured out how to integrate this with Drupal 5.x, and will post the configuration file and instructions shortly.

I googled this problem, and found some complicated advice about failed installations and the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. But I find that this error occurs when a program installs just fine in every respect except that it leaves the Windows Installer Service running.

There’s a easy way to fix this.

Right-click on the Computer icon, wherever it exists on your system, and select Manage. (I’m using the Classic Start menu, so the Computer icon is on my desktop. If you’re using the new Start menu, the icon is in the Start menu.) This opens the Computer Management utility.

Select Services, right click on Windows Installer in the list and select Properties. If you’re having the problem, the Windows Installer service is started, and the Stop button is disabled. Simply rebooting doesn’t stop the service. Here’s how you stop it.

In the Properties dialog, change Startup type to “Disabled”, click OK, and reboot your computer. This stops the service. After your computer reboots, again open Computer Management (right-click on Computer and select Manage), open Windows Installer Properties, and change the Startup type back to Manual. Now you’re good to go and can start a new installation.

I have a brand new ThinkPad running 64-bit Vista. But when I tried to install Microsoft Office 2007, no joy - it would copy the files from DVD then stall until I cancelled it. Same thing happened with Office updates. When I tried to install the Java Development Kit (JDK), I got an error message saying that another install process was running and that had to complete first.

After much pain, I finally tracked this down to the Brother XP spl Service (BrSplService - brsvc01a.exe), installed with the software for my Brother MFC 420CN. I still have no idea what this does, but I did find a patch for the problem on the Brother site. Problem solved.

I have a recurring weekly appointment in Outlook, and I wanted to change the time of the appointment. That should be easy, right? You’d think you could change all the times going forward? But noooooo. Outlook warns you that if you make a change, all exceptions will be lost. But actually, it’s worse than that. It changes the time of every appointment - including appointments that occurred in the past. Happily I found a workaround.

This tip comes from a site devoted to Outlook tips. It’s a great site - I’ve used it before. Here’s what you do.

Export your calendar folder to an Excel file. (And when you’re done with that, close Outlook and make a backup copy of your .PST file, just in case of disaster - you never know.) The export function doesn’t support recurring appointments, and for our purposes, this is a good thing! It allows you to convert the dates you want to keep into non-recurring, individual appointments.

Edit the Excel file to contain just the recurring appointment between the dates you want to keep. This is easy to do if you sort on the appointment subject. Delete everything that is not the recurring appointment. Then import the edited Excel file back into Outlook. If you have long notes, you may need to copy and paste them into the non-recurring version since there’s a length limit for exports.

When you’ve assured yourself that all is well, delete the recurring appointment, then create a new recurring appointment for the new time (or just stop at deleting, if there are no more appointments in the future). Problem solved!

Memories, memories. I started at PC Magazine very shortly after Michael Miller became Editor-in-Chief in 1991. In fact, my first interview was with the previous Editor-in-Chief, Bill Machrone.

I confess to mixed feelings about the end of the print edition.

For many years I loved working at PC Magazine, and I worked hard. Putting together the Utilities column every two weeks was an escalating challenge over the ten years I was editor. The utilities got increasingly complex as more and more functionality was added to the operating system.

But then PC Magazine fell on hard financial times and there was wave after wave of layoffs. Eventually the ax came around to me. I’d been working as a full-time freelancer under a handshake agreement (yes, I’m naive) with then-editor Joel Dreyfuss, who had since left the magazine. The bean counters who’d taken management control were legally able to lay me off without severance pay, and they did - quite abruptly. That was how it ended for me after 12 years of 70-hour work weeks, producing what for a long time was the most popular column in the magazine.

So while I’m mostly over my anger (it’s been a while now since I left), I admit to a little bit of schadenfreude. Did the print magazine fail due to mismanagement after Michael Miller left, or is print just on the way out, or both? Hard to say.

In any case, I am sad that my relationship with PC Magazine ended on a sour note because I spent so many happy years there. The good old days in the 1990s were a great ride. I’ll try to focus on that.

Here’s how I was finally able to connect (listing only the changes from the default). I’m running Pidgin 2.5.2. All the setting changes are on the “Advanced” page of the account setup dialog. Of course, what worked for me might not work for you, but hopefully it will help.

MSN Messenger

I checked “Use HTTP Method” and voilà! With that one small change it connected.

Google Talk

• Check “Force old (port 5223) SSL.
• In the “Connect port” field, enter 443.
• In the “Connect server” field, enter “talk.google.com”

It may not have been necessary to enter talk.google.com explicitly, but it doesn’t hurt and it works now so I don’t want to touch it!

Yahoo Messenger

This one was the big pain - pain to find, that is. The solution is actually very simple. I just had to change the port. The Pidgin support site lists a bunch of ports that are known to work with Yahoo: 20, 23, 25, 80, 119, 5050, 8001, 8002. But not all the ports may work on your computer. Naturally, the one that worked for me was the last one I tried: Port 23. And now - finally - it’s working.

I had some other miscellaneous difficulties. For a while, I couldn’t get Google Talk to recognize that I was online. The solution was to delete the account and recreate it. And for a while my buddy icons weren’t displaying. But after exiting and restarting Pidgin a few times, they now all display.

Hope this helps someone.

I asked this question of a very nice man who has worked at a store in my neighborhood for years, and came to this country by risking his life walking through the Mexican desert. (The trick to survival, he said, is to cross in winter when it’s cooler.) Why did he do it? The answer is simple - there’s no way he could have gotten a visa. Coming here legally was not one of his options.

Poor people looking for opportunity cannot get visas to enter the U.S.

If you’re educated and have a job waiting for you at a big American company, you can get a visa. But if you’re a poor Mexican who wants to come to this country for the opportunity it offers for education and advancement, forget it.

The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor is inscribed with a lovely poem that begins:

Give me your tired, your poor…

That was America’s attitude when my great grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1907, but it’s false advertising today. Today, America’s motto seems to be:

Give me your best and brightest. If you’re tired and poor, KEEP OUT!

So what I’d like to know is, why has immigration criteria changed so drastically, and why do policymakers never talk about it? You hear debates on walls and amnesty, and everyone seems to agree that illegal immigration should be stopped. But you never hear discussion of the oppressive visa-granting criteria that drives illegal immigration in the first place.

Somewhere along the line, America changed. We went from being a haven for the downtrodden and persecuted, to a clique that only the privileged and elite can join. Is this the kind of country we want?

The ship that brought my great grandfather to America was the Carpathia. Less than five years later, this same ship would answer the Titanic’s desperate distress call.

To maximize speed, Carpathia’s captain cut off heat and hot water to the cabins and diverted all available steam to the engines. The ship finally reached the Titanic lifeboats at 4am, and rescued 705 survivors.

And there’s video - video of the very ship that brought my great grandfather to the U.S., as it returned to port with Titanic survivors.

Three short video clips from 18 Apr 1912, as the Carpathia returned to New York from the scene of the Titanic disaster.

I also found some still pictures taken during and after the Titanic rescue, uploaded to Flickr from the Library of Congress.

Titanic Lifeboats on the Way to Carpathia

Survivors of Titanic on Carpathia

Titanic Lifeboats in the Way to Carpathia

The Titanic rescue wasn’t Carpathia’s last brush with history. It was sunk near the end of World War I by torpedoes from German U-boats. In 2000, the wreck of Carpathia was found off the east coast of Ireland.

I never would have known about our family connection to the Carpathia if my brother hadn’t recognized the ship name while showing our great grandfather’s passenger record to his daughter. She was studying Ellis Island in school.

What Color Is That?

I use Dreamweaver 8 (Macromedia version) for Web development and while I like it a lot, it’s a resource hog - so much so that I can’t launch my bitmap editing program at the same time to access its color selection feature.

I wanted a color selection program with a tiny footprint - something that does everything I need but nothing more. After looking at over a dozen of them, I finally found one that’s just about perfect - all the more so because it’s free: Color Cop. (Voluntary donations are accepted.)

Color Cop lets you identify any color on the screen, enter a color code to see what it looks like, use a standard Windows color selector to find a color, determine whether a color is Websafe, snap to the closest Websafe color, and sample colors using multi-pixel averages. It’s nicely designed, intuitive to use, and the entire executable is just 96K.

The elegance of Color Cop reminded me of another very elegant program I found that has nothing to do with programming.

Do I Need a Coat?

I live in New York City on the fifth floor of a walk-up. I like to tell myself that this is actually a good thing - saves me money on a gym. But on the downside, it’s inconvenient to walk outside to check the weather before deciding what coat to wear. I wanted a little tray program that would tell me the weather, but most weather programs are huge and full of features I don’t want or need like hurricane and tornedo alerts (not terribly relevant for New York).

I finally came across a gem of a program called DesktopForecast. It costs all of $4.95, and it’s totally worth it. Its two little tray icons give you the main information you need at a glance. A right-click opens a context menu with more information. And if that’s still not enough for you, you can link to the Yahoo Weather site for the full scoop.