Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

We're almost done moving to the new Eau Claire data center, and what a trip it's been. 

We moved our DNS servers yesterday (and I'm still looking for signs that I broke something subtle along the way) and almost all of the web sites are now moved.  We still have a few  email-only accounts to move over, and then we'll be ready to shut down the servers in Michigan, and re-install some of them in Eau Claire. 

A few months ago we launched a new web site for the American Composers Alliance in New York CIty.  ACA is a nonprofit that publishes scores for modern classical composers. Although this site is fairly traditional in looks, it incorporates power search routines so that performers can find compositions that meet specific criteria, and also uses powerful and simple to use multimedia features.

I'm happy to announce that we have just negotiated a space for a new data center in Wisconsin.  This will mean that we will be bringing all aspects of the business into Wisconsin, including our hosting and backup infrastructure. Our new Eau Claire, WI data center is very well connected to the Internet, and will provide us with high-speed low-latency connections.  The new data center has redundant power and is very physically secure.

I'm happy to say that Cruiskeen Consulting LLC's recent proposal to the Knight News Challenge has been requested to make a full proposal.  This means that it will move on to the 2nd round of the News Challenge judging. Our proposal is to create a system to build Gov.. 2.0 transparency web sites for townships in Wisconsin, and then to aggregate the news from them into a site that would provide categorized news feeds from them for use by reporters and other interested parties.

New security-related Drupal releases came out yesterday.  We've already upgraded all of the Drupal 6 web sites that are under maintenance contract to Drupal 6.15.  We will be doing the existing Drupal 5 web sites later today up to 5.21.  So far the upgrade has gone very smoothly, and also fixes a number of bugs in Drupal 6. 

As always, please contact us at the helpdesk email address if you have any issues with your sites.

The White House web site is now a Drupal web site.  The change of whitehouse.gov to Open Source is a welcome change, and may be the harbinger of more to come if this works out well.  The site is handsome and seems well-designed from a first glance.  The use of more Open Source software in government will be welcome, so let's hope this all pans out well.

I've been playing around with the Mozilla Labs project Weave.  Weave is great for people like me who work on multiple computers at different times,and on different platforms.  Now I can sync up my bookmarks, forms, passwords, etc.  between my browsers (well, Firefox anyway) oin all the machines, and do it transparently and securely. 

So far this has been working great.  In the past I used Foxmarks, which was nice, but not as powerful as Weave (didn't sync as many things) and was fairly obtrusive - it would occasionally hijack all the cpu cycles (particularly on my netbook) as it as syncing up.  Weave seems a lot less obtrusive, but takes a while to sync up.

I'm particularly intrigued by some of the single-sign-on features in Weave.  It can automatically log you in to web sites (only if they're https:  pages) and has a rudimentary implemention for OpenID, which I finally got to work after some playing around with the configuration (since i'm not using Mozilla's OpenID provider).  This still seems a little wonky, but it's potentially a great thing to be able to make logins to web sites (and I use a lot of different web sites) more transparent. 

Weave is still in beta, and may make your computer burn up in a big funeral pyre of disaster, but it has so far worked great for me.

New versions of Drupal 5 and 6 were released yesterday.  These primarily fix a number of security issues which were recently discovered, and also introduce a number of bug fixes, particularly on Drupal 6. 

We've just released the new web site for the American Composers Alliance, a publisher of classical music based in New York City. Their site makes heavy use of audio  and the Dash media player in Drupal. We're also working on a number of innovative search mechanisms to find compositions by the composers published by ACA.  Enjoy listening to some of the music that ACA publishes.

Cruiskeen Consulting LLC has changed the ICANN domain reseller that we are using.  We had previouslly been a reseller for GoDaddy/Wild West Domains, but for various reasons, including having a much better API for our systems, we have changed and are now reselling through Enom.  This change is fairly transparent for customers who have domains registered with us.  Some of you have transferred your domains to our new system, but if you have not, you'll see very little difference in your domain control panel, except that the old URL for Cruiskeen Consulting LLC now points to a ve

Just thought I'd make a list of recent things I've tried out that I really like:

VIrtualbox - I'm running VIrtualbox OSE on my Linux desktop.  This is great, as I get to fire up other virtual machines on my desktop with very little trouble.  At the moment I can run either the Windows 7 release candidate or Solaris as a window on my desktop. So I think it's time finally to get rid of dual-boot on my desktop,and just run Linux on the desktop with the ability to run WIndows 7 in a window for those few times I really need Windows (this is partly for dealing with client issues, and partly because I've not yet weaned myself from Quickbooks).  It's sort of RAM hungry, of course, and I think it's time to apply more memory to this cranky old desktop system, or perhaps to upgrade the motherboard to something vaguely modern. 

Windows 7 - Well, it's not so much that I like it as that I find it much more tolerable than Vista.  Its not that Iv'e given it an extensive workout, but it's a lot slimmer than Vista (it's LOTS faster in the virtual machine on my desktop than Vista is running natively). 

Acer Aspire One A0751h - I bought this little netbook because my laptop was getting crankier and crankier after almost 4 years of use (I was getting tired of bending the screen just so to get it to boot) and I wanted something lighter and with more battery capacity.  I  bought one with the 6-cell Lithium Ion battery.  This particular model is either a really big netbook or a really small laptop.  I'm struck by how similar it is to my old IBM Thinkpad 360,  but with a processor and memory capable of running a modern OS.  With the 6-cell battery, a gig of RAM, a 160-gig disk, an 11.6" screen and wireless, it really meets just about all of my portable laptop needs, and it will run  between 5 and 8 hours on a charge (depending on which OS I'm running and whether the 802.11 card is running or not).  I can finally get through a day at a conference without searching for a power strip. 

This machine is a little odd in configuration, largely because of some of the odd restrictions put on it by the Microsoft/Intel cabal.  It's a netbook with a larger-than-10" screen.  So Micorosoft won't let them put XP on it unless they slow the processor down to 1.2 gig.  This is nuts.  So -- I have the nice bigger screen, and a REAL size keyboard, but I need to have a slower processor.  Also, Intel apparently charges more for their processors if they're hooked up to a bigger screen (which makes sense because - um - well - because they can, that's why) So I end up with a slightly crippled netbook because of market manipulation.  I can have a faster CPU OR I can have a bigger screen, but I can't have both unless I run  Vista.  Cripes.  Anyway, I really like it despite that.  The CPU seems fast enough for most of what I want to do with this system, and having a full-size actual keyboard makes up for a lot as far as I'm concerned.  Besides, it's red, and really cute.

We are implementing a new automated system for hosting and domain sales. As part of this new system, we will be changing the company we use for domain registration sales.  We had previously partnered with Godaddy/Wild West Domains, and will in the future be using Enom as a reseller. Because of this, our current customers with registered domains will receive an amail from Godaddy around September 1, informing them on how to continue managing their domains.  Your login credentials for your domain account will remain the same as always, but you will be directed to a new web site to manage your domains and certificates.

We are implementing a new domain sales site at https://billing.cruiskeenconsulting.com, which will be more tightly integrated with our new hosting system and will allow you to purchase hosting on-line, along with domains and certificates starting on 9/1/2009.

For years now web developers have been wishing that Internet Explorer 6 would go away.  This has been like tilting at windmills, since many businesses are still running Windows 2000, which has never had a newer Microsoft-sanctioned browser offering.  The faults and irritations of IE 6 are legendary, and have caused the hair of many a web developer to fall out prematurely.

Really nice article on Mashable about how arts organizations are using social media - lots of good ideas.