Every day something in the news catches my attention about how someone has neglected a child some where in this world or some new family is struggling with raising a new baby. Recently I found out that Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City Missouri has been trying to raise money to build out a birthing center to give new families the right start from the beginning.

For the past few years the TMC Charitable Foundation has hosted a charity golf tournament to raise funds necessary to build the new birthing center at the Lakewood Campus. This year, Infini-Source has offered a donation of 25% per paid invoice for those attendees who present a 4 x 5 Golf Baby Golf card that will be given to them at the Golf Baby Golf 2009 Tournament on June 12th.  This money will go directly back to Truman Medical Centers to help with building the birthing center.

Starting June 12th through September 12th 2009, if anyone presents the 4 x 5 Golf Baby Golf card to us when we visit your business or home, and your invoice is paid at the time of service, Infini-Source will donate 25% of the bill directly to TMC Charitable Foundation in support of the Birthing Center.  Every baby deserves a healthy start at life from the very beginning and we at Infini-Source believe in the services that TMC delivers to the community of Kansas City and surrounding areas.

Not only will you be helping your business or home/home office computer(s) by having Infini-Source provide you with a quality service but you will also be helping families out within the Kansas City Metro area.

Continuing on from our discussion yesterday.  If the problem with the extra Unicode character could only be reproduced using the Visual Editor and not the HTML Editor, what exactly did that mean?  Before I could answer this question, I started looking at how Wordpress displays blog entries versus how I was displaying each blog entry on my website.  That’s when it occurred to me!

The problem all along did not totally revolve around Wordpress.  Granted some of the issues with the changing of the database collation initially caused this; however, for my website and the others that I manage the problem was with my code.  What I mean by that is, any page that I custom built to display blog entries had to have the page character set set to UTF-8.  The pages that I had custom built to display the blog entries had the ISO-8859-1 character set which is the Latin-1 character set.

Change this:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″>

To:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

What took a few months to finally nail down, only took a matter of seconds to change on my website.  Once I changed the character set from ISO-8859 to UTF-8 for each page that displayed blog entries, the Unicode  disappeared from the page permanently.  So, if you are still having trouble with this Unicode  in your blog posts and you do not use the built-in Wordpress site files to display your blog entries on your site, check your character set and set it to UTF-8.

Also, if you are unsure by what I mean by custom blog pages, take a look at the following url’s:

1. http://www.infini-source.com/iBlog/
2. http://www.infini-source.com/blog.php

The first link is the standard Wordpress site and the second link is what I am referring to as the custom page.  The custom page uses this kind of code to display the blog entries:

<?php
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
the_date(”,’<h2>’,'</h2>’);
?>

<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<h3 class=”storytitle”>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

<div class=”storycontent”>
<?php the_content(__(’(more…)’)); ?>
</div>
<p>This post was written by <?php the_author_firstname(); ?> <?php the_author_lastname(); ?> at <?php the_time(); ?> and was</p>
<p>posted in the following categories: <?php the_category(’ |’); ?></p>
<p><?php the_tags(’This Post was also tagged as: ‘,’ > ‘); ?></p>

<?php if ( comments_open() ) : ?>
<p>
<?php comments_popup_link( ‘No comments yet’, ‘1 comment’, ‘% comments so far’, ‘comments-link’, ‘Comments are off for this post’); ?>
</p>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><?php _e(’Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.’); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

As I mentioned above, I changed the character set on the blog.php page to UTF-8 and now we can say case closed!  I hope if anyone out there is struggling with this exact issue finds this page and finds this bit of info useful.  If you have any questions regarding this, please feel free to comment on these posts.

As promised, I will further elaborate on what I have discovered.  My situation may be unique and it may not be.  What I do know is after several upgrades and installing the plug-ins that I mentioned yesterday, I started researching this issue further.  My research resulted in further testing on my blog.

Most of the Wordpress forum posts that I had found suggested that in order to resolve this issue all that was needed to be done was to remove the following statement from the wp-config.php file:

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

Unfortunately that did not help at all for my site.  That resulted in an extra character being displayed at the end of each sentence – or rather at the end of a sentence in which TWO spaces were typed in after the period.  Strange huh?  Exactly!  I also found that the problem only appeared when the Visual Editor was used when creating Posts within Wordpress; not with the HTML Editor.  If I typed up an entire post with the HTML Editor, the Unicode  was no where to be found in the post or in the database.  That is even stranger right?  Right!!

As I stated, this problem has been persisting for many months for myself and for my customers.  With each upgrade I would become hopeful that the issue would be resolved.  Needless to say, none of the upgrades resolved it.  Once I discovered that the problem could only be duplicated by using the visual editor, I started searching again on Google for more answers.  This time I found a Bug Ticket on Wordpress.com that specifically mentioned that typing two spaces in the visual editor caused the now infamous  to show it’s ugly face!

The workaround mentioned in the ticket:

Workaround: after spotting a post with spurious characters, visit “Manage -> Posts” after logging in, click on the offending post and click “Save”. The Âs should disappear.

Didn’t work for the sites that I manage.  At least someone out there had managed to reproduce what I had already seen.

I’ll share more of this adventure tomorrow!

Over the course of several months I have witnessed the unicode Â’s displaying it’s ugly face across a few blogs that I manage for customers of mine, including my own.  Open Source Software is such a wonderful gift to humankind but with that gift comes some interesting side effects as some of my customers might call it.  These side effects are nothing new to the software industry as a whole; however, I feel that resolving the technical glitches revolving around Open Source related packages sometimes takes more time.

Do not get me wrong in any way.  I love all things Open Source and believe whole-heartedly that knowledge should be shared with the human race openly.  As one of my friends and colleagues put it recently, “When it comes to Linux, sometimes it takes a while to get the kinks worked out to make it work right; however when you finally have it working just the way that you want it - it runs almost better than any commercially available software package out there.”  I couldn’t agree with Scott more.

By now you are wondering where I am going with this post right?  What does this long rant have to do with Wordpress?  Remember those unicode Â’s that I referred to in the beginning of this post?  There has been some discussion about all over the place about this topic.  Many people have come up with different ways to tackle this problem.  Some have written Wordpress plug-ins that change the database character set from latin1 to utf8 and another one that searches the database for any character and then replaces it with another one called the search and replace plug-in.

Of all of the solutions out there, the two above mentioned plug-ins aided me the most in resolving this strange issue with Wordpress; however, neither one accomplished the greatest task of permanently resolving the issue.  Post after post, upgrade after upgrade the Unicode  persisted on all of the blogs that I managed.  It was extremely frustrating, almost to the point that I was considering other blog management systems.  Thankfully there is a solution that worked for me and I will tell you more later – that much I promise!

I wonder if any stray characters will show up in my blog.  They have been showing up in another blog that I manage recently, both are using the same version though so this will be interesting.

There are times that I come across a specific need that only a specialized application can satisfy that need but only to a degree it seems like. For instance I was working with a colleague of mine a while back who stumbled upon a application that can scan a network for available print servers and push network printers or rather install the network printers onto remote workstations without ever having to visit the workstation. Neat idea right? Absolutely!  But the problem with this application is that the workstation scan in a large environment takes close to 30 minutes to complete.  Which by the time the application finishes scanning the network for workstations, the target machine that you want to push a printer out to can possibly be offline or unavailable.

Since most of the environments that I work in involved Microsoft Active Directory, I began to wonder, “Wouldn’t it be possible to just type in the workstation’s computer name, check to see if it’s online and then push the printer out?  How long of a process could that take once you have the Print Server Name and the Print Queue Name that you are trying to push out?”  I believe we are going to find out in the next few weeks as I have been reinventing that proverbial wheel so-to-speak.

What are your thoughts on this?  I would love to hear them!

I know this is not the typical technical blog post that I write, but I wanted to put the spotlight on a specific company that will be showcasing their company at this event today. Rhino Builders is the true leader in the remodeling industry that truly does take care of their customers from start to finish and beyond. They have been awarded many high honors for outstanding workmanship to demonstrate this ability, but I believe that it is the positive customer feedback that Rhino Builders receives from its customers that truly illustrates that they are indeed the premier remodeling leader. You can witness this for yourself by visiting them on the web at www.rhinobuilders.com

Below is a picture of the booth at the Kansas City Home Show, click on it for a high res view!

PSTools has over time become one of my favorite tool collections on the Windows Platforms, mainly because of the speed and ease of use that the command-line-interface that his tools afford his customers. PSTools allows anyone to administer any Windows NT/2k machine either locally or on a network. I use pslist and psexec daily to get a remote listing of processes running on a machine and to execute processes or to “kick off” batch jobs on remote machines. Let’s start off with a tutorial on pslist, continuing from our discussion yesterday of the unix version of ps.

Before we continue, you must have PSTools installed and configured already prior to attempting this tip and trick. If you do not have PSTools installed, please download them now. Now, let’s continue on. Navigate to a command prompt and make sure that pstools is within your search path by typing “path”, you should see the following output in your command prompt window:

C:\Documents and Settings\paulf>path
PATH=C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Co
mmon Files\Adobe\AGL;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\Program Files\Micro
soft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ulead Systems\MPEG;
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ulead Systems\DVD;C:\Documents and Settings\paulf\
Desktop\Utilities\Pstools

C:\Documents and Settings\paulf>

If you do not have the directory where you placed the pstools in your PATH, you must put it in your PATH or you will have to navigate to the directory through the command prompt by typing cd “directory name” etc… etc… until you arrive to the directory where you placed pstools. Now let’s take a look at the listing of commands that are available for use with pslist by typing “pslist /?” into your command line:

C:\Documents and Settings\paulf>pslist /?

PsList 1.26 – Process Information Lister
Copyright (C) 1999-2004 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals – www.sysinternals.com

Usage: pslist [-d][-m][-x][-t][-s [n] [-r n] [\\computer [-u username][-p passwo
rd][name|pid]
-d Show thread detail.
-m Show memory detail.
-x Show processes, memory information and threads.
-t Show process tree.
-s [n] Run in task-manager mode, for optional seconds specified.
Press Escape to abort.
-r n Task-manager mode refresh rate in seconds (default is 1).
\\computer Specifies remote computer.
-u Optional user name for remote login.
-p Optional password for remote login. If you don’t present
on the command line pslist will prompt you for it if necessary.
name Show information about processes that begin with the name
specified.
-e Exact match the process name.
pid Show information about specified process.

All memory values are displayed in KB.
Abbreviation key:
Pri Priority
Thd Number of Threads
Hnd Number of Handles
VM Virtual Memory
WS Working Set
Priv Private Virtual Memory
Priv Pk Private Virtual Memory Peak
Faults Page Faults
NonP Non-Paged Pool
Page Paged Pool
Cswtch Context Switches

C:\Documents and Settings\paulf>

That is a lot of options to play around with, but the ones that I use mainly are -t and \\computer. The -t switch will output a list of processes with all child processes attached to their parent processes in a “tree output” format, makes for easier viewing. The \\computer option allows me to see what processes are running on a remote computer within my network. Now let’s take a snapshot of a remote computer, if you do not have another computer, just use 127.0.0.1 as the “computer” that you want to take the snapshot from. Type in “pslist -t \\127.0.0.1″ and you should see something similiar to the output below:

C:\Documents and Settings\paulf>pslist -t \\127.0.0.1

PsList 1.26 – Process Information Lister
Copyright (C) 1999-2004 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals – www.sysinternals.com

Process information for 127.0.0.1:

Name Pid Pri Thd Hnd VM WS Priv
Idle 0 0 2 0 0 16 0
System 4 8 104 542 1876 220 0
smss 892 11 5 21 4316 452 236
csrss 980 13 14 769 29616 5144 1792
winlogon 1008 13 19 625 65276 6444 9740
services 1056 9 16 346 29772 5260 4076
VersionCueCS2 224 8 31 704 239128 61420 84976
mysqld-nt 1404 8 12 4385 70200 17896 43856
mdm 380 8 4 85 24240 2356 772
sqlservr 480 8 23 329 1734744 26140 35908
nvsvc32 648 8 3 113 25956 3624 2188
SMAgent 692 8 2 28 22244 1704 508
svchost 760 8 6 144 39876 5720 3648
ULCDRSvr 844 8 2 21 8016 868 228
searchindexer 968 8 19 952 247448 18968 21872
searchprotocolhost 736 6 6 268 40708 4916 4344
searchfilterhost 3268 6 5 94 36792 3488 3108
svchost 1264 8 15 215 63760 5068 3076
dllhost 2760 8 13 739 81764 20608 12216
svchost 1348 8 11 503 38388 4476 1960
MsMpEng 1472 8 17 320 80536 21516 16684
svchost 1516 8 70 1804 211008 36340 25088
svchost 1612 8 6 98 30320 3460 1444
svchost 1712 8 18 421 53064 8324 4492
spoolsv 1912 8 13 201 64680 7748 4612
sqlagent 1964 8 8 139 41848 2488 2420
alg 2352 8 5 103 32932 3456 1132
iPodService 2384 8 11 123 36016 3764 2252
Adobelmsvc 3248 8 5 42 14456 1172 332
lsass 1068 9 19 547 45440 2188 4900
explorer 244 8 14 550 109812 18564 19888
SMax4PNP 636 8 5 159 40620 956 2440
iTunesHelper 1424 8 4 108 34216 1348 1240
rundll32 1592 8 1 37 32636 376 2316
VersionCueCS2Tray 1608 8 2 47 31844 376 932
SMax4 1632 8 2 85 36720 872 2136
jusched 2052 8 1 34 28704 84 724
opwareSE2 2072 8 1 28 19048 340 568
qttask 2084 8 2 49 29764 348 736
MSASCui 2128 8 15 348 47900 3488 5500
USISrv 2144 8 2 29 19076 468 548
ctfmon 2208 8 1 128 39468 1944 1020
firefox 2264 8 15 301 226432 87740 86380
msnmsgr 2308 8 10 397 79500 2512 8744
putty 2740 8 2 69 34556 4784 1204
WindowsSearch 2928 8 10 276 77984 1404 6084
sqlmangr 2932 8 2 80 37860 1084 1360
NetPerSec 2936 8 1 77 33304 832 1176
YahooWidgetEngine 3332 8 9 296 63596 988 2440
YahooWidgetEngine 3728 8 6 616 55460 2728 4448
YahooWidgetEngine 3740 8 6 290 55676 3664 3624
YahooWidgetEngine 3892 8 5 268 56784 4760 5424
YahooWidgetEngine 3916 8 6 307 55312 832 3848
YahooWidgetEngine 3948 8 8 504 67072 8288 5724
FRONTPG 3504 8 6 405 135588 5640 9888
wmplayer 3704 8 26 656 204260 110352 94576
cmd 3860 8 1 31 30200 2604 1960
pslist 3392 13 1 112 14032 1404 504
Photoshop 4044 8 7 326 226428 5420 83160
Adobelm_Cleanup.0001 712 8 2 32 20352 2168 588
Adobelm_Cleanup.0001 1568 8 2 32 20352 2168 588

C:\Documents and Settings\paulf>

Now you are probably asking yourself, why do you use this? I use this application to see if any applications such as spyware/adware are controlling a machine remotely. If I see a process that does not look like a normal process and by normal I mean not firefox or YahooWigdgetEngine or winlogon, then I will lookup on the internet what that process could potentially be and if that process has been reported to be spyware I will try to remotely kill the process before I visit the machine to wipe it clean. It is just another tool in my arsenal.

I am going to start publishing “technical” tips and trips on various operating systems over the next coming weeks. My hope is to foster some discussion about the various platforms that are available and tips/tricks that are not widely used by the common computer user. This post will focus on Linux/Unix and the command ps with the output piped into grep to “search” for a specific process.

First off, what is ps on a *nix box? PS displays current active processes on a unix, linux, BSD or Mac OS X machine. An active process can be an application such as Firefox that you are using to browse the world wide web, skype to make Voice-OverIP Calls on your PC or KPDF to view a PDF document within your favorite Window Manager [i.e. KDE, AfterStep, etc]. Or a process can be a much more complicated background process that handles File I/O to Memory Management. Basically, anything and everything that runs on and within your computer becomes a process at some point.

Now, PS has many options, but I am going to keep it simple to the scope of this article and that would be to search for a specific process within all processes that are active on the system. Let’s say you were searching for all active processes that had firefox associated with it, that command would be: ps -aux | grep “firefox”

When I issue this command on my linux machine I receive the following output:

root 2584 0.0 0.2 4392 1176 ? S 22:02 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.12/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.12/firefox-bin -UILocale en-US
root 2589 69.2 6.5 143312 33596 ? Sl 22:02 0:25 /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.12/firefox-bin -UILocale en-US
root 2613 0.0 0.1 3912 656 pts/0 R+ 22:03 0:00 grep firefox

This tells me that the user named “root” has the application open and the process identification number is 2584 and 2589. What do you think? Hopefully you will find these tips and tricks informative and fun to use on a day-to-day basis. Let me know what you think!

After many months of designing and redesigning and just plain nit-picking our brand and image; we have finally settled on our new website look and feel. We feel that you will enjoy the simplistic feel and the easy to use navigation bar at the top of every single page. We are in the process of revamping our customer page, this site will unfortunately take much longer since it simply has more functions and features than our main page such as account information, system messages etc. We hope to bring that site online in the coming weeks.

We thought it was important for anyone to come to our site and tell a friend or two about our site via the “Tell A Friend” page instead of having to launch a email application, they can tell the world straight from our website. Hopefully you too will feel the same way!

What do you think so far? Let us know what you think!

I am always on the lookout for tools that can enhance the way that I work on my computer, especially when those tools are free or close to free as you can get. Primo PDF is one such tool. I have been using this application to create PDF’s from web print jobs for the past year and I have been thoroughly impressed with the ease of use and the speed at which the application can create PDF files. All you need to do is, download, install and click on File | Print and finally click on the Primo PDF Printer Icon to print your document into a PDF file. I know some will say, “You can do that with Acrobat Pro” and yes you can, but can you do that for free with Acrobat Pro?

This tool comes in handy for creating digital copies of online bill-pay confirmations when I pay my utility bills online, this way I have proof that I paid the bill and do not have any paper to file away. Try it and see how this application works for you!

I’ve added a new category of sorts to our blog called “Things to think about”. This category is for discussing the customer experience and how everyone is involved in it. One thing I hear a lot from potential customers is, “The guy/gal that usually comes out never really listens to me”. We as a society have been accustomed to getting things done quickly and a lot of the time we do, but we also tend to not pay attention to detail. The one detail that often gets over looked is what the customer is saying.

Building relationships with your customers is the key to a successful business, but how do you build that relationship? What has worked for me has been listening to what they the customer is saying to me. Not just listening, but truly understanding what the customer is trying to convey. I do this by not only by writing down notes, but I will repeat to the customer in my own words what they just said to me. This tells the customer two things: 1: I heard what you said and 2: This is what I heard. Is this what you are saying?

Usually by just repeating in my own words, the customer will smile and agree with what I have said back to them. This not only builds an awesome rapport with them, but it’s another tool that you can use to market yourself to your customers.

What do you think?

My name is Paul Friedrichsmeyer and I am the CEO & Owner of Infini-Source – One Source Solutions located in Lee’s Summit MO. I provide Information Technology Consulting Services to individuals and Small-to-Medium sized Businesses in and around the greater Kansas City Metro area. My business service offerings revolve around the principle that you, the customer should be growing your business, not running it. Let Infini-Source manage your technology needs, leaving you with the task to making your business grow.

I created this blog so that any current and potential customers may discuss anything related to technology, including my company.  I welcome all forms of feedback and comments!  Thank you for taking the time to read my posts, I look forward to hearing from you soon!