Working in a Safe Enviroment Tech Testing

I wanted to post this before a lot of people started reading my articles and trying them on their own machines. I write many articles about different software that I have tested or used, this however does not make them safe or bug free. I can't recall anytime in the last 15 years that I installed software and felt positive that the software I installed had no bugs. Software is designed by humans. For the most part I do not believe the majority of us are out to get people but developers do make mistakes.

So here is a rule of thumb when testing software, always make sure you have a good back up of the machine you are working on before you start, or an easy recover method. Make a short simple plan to get you back to square one.

Best practices:
1. External Hard Drive - Buy a spare external hard drive this is great for back ups and vms.
2. VM Ware Product - Purchase a vm product.
3. Extra Email Account - Create a free gmail garbage email account.


External Hard Drive:
Roughly a 250gb slim line light weight drive with no power will cost you under $100.00. If you are willing to work with a large less mobile drive with a power supply, you can probably buy a 1 Terabyte drive for under $250.00. I prefer the small light weight drives with no power supply, I find that I am more likely to take a back up on another machine if I can quickly move my drive from one machine to another. By the time I am writing this I will bet that you will be finding 500GB slim line drives just over $100.00.

The hard drive is very important, take full back ups whenever you use software. Taking the full back up will save you lots of valuable time. These back ups will pay you back in full after just the first time you need to recover from a failure. Also use this drive to store base vmware installs. These vms are were all you product testing should occur. Avoid using your local machine to test. Create a virtual machine with a base install and make a copy to your local drive and run this each time you wish to test.

VM Ware Product:
This may be a little out of order because I talked about using a vmware above, I also intended to have a seperate vmware blog to help people quickly test new products at low cost to them, and guarntee that they can continue with there local machine afterwards.

Vmware is a product that allows you to create a virtual machine and run on top of your local machine. This virtual machine running a seperate file system keeps you underlying file system secure. Although the filesystems are seperated you still have the capability to communicate to the underlying os.

If you do not understand this concept don't worry I'll have another blog coming soon just on vmware. If you do understand this read on.

There are several different vmware products on the market today. Microsoft has a vmware product called "virtual pc" and company called VMWARE has a product called VMWARE workstatuon, and VMWARE player. I highly recommed the vmware product line. I also recommed purchasing a copy of vmware workstation, you can however get away without the product by using the VMWARE player. Because my preferences are so outweighted to vmware workstation, I will primarily blog in relation to this product. In the future I am sure I will do a couple blogs on both vmplayer and virtual pc by micorsoft. The concepts will apply to both these products as well but the method of performing the task may vary.

Extra Email Account -
If you haven't done so already create a catch garbage email account with google. Almost every product you test will require an email address the last thing you want to do is staturate you personal email box with tons of product information. Go to Gmail and create a new account use this account for all download products, remember the password because you will occasioanlly need to go here to get a registration code or verify your email address. If you later decide you really want emails for a product then change your email in the products email management area to your personal account.

Last believe

The last thing I want to mention is that I frimly believe that everyone should attempt to learn atleast one new thing a day. For those in a technical position I believe that this is probably not even enough. So my post will be updated daily with new information.

WAMP for Wordpress update

I am going to start today write my notes on wamp for wordpress, but I realize that my long term goal will be to run this app server and database on a linux host or a LAMP project. the princapals will be the smae either way but the installs will very depending on the OS.

My believe in learning new things

There's a couple things you should know when reading my blogs. I believe learning is best done by doing. I do believe there are some people who can read and automatically understand with no attempt to perform the task. For the most part through I believe that we need to physically try something to truly understand it. I also believe we learn best by teaching others. I believe we can learn something ourselves but when we attempt to teach it to another is when we truly find out what pieces we do not understand. So this is what drives me to write these blogs. I write them primarily for myself as a learning aid. I believe if I can describe how to do something to someone else then I truly understand it myself.

Black and White Site Design

You'll notice my blogs all are very black and white in nature. This is for my own personal reasons. I leave my sites black and white and with little distractions for the following reasons.

1. Hard to focus on a reading with colors other then black and white.
2. Hard to focus on a article with lots of distractions.

I believe that too many colors on a computer monitor is hard to focus on for any length of time. I believe that the best colors for readability is black and white. So you'll seldom see me change colors unless the site I am working with has little or no reading.

I also believe lots of side advertisements distract from the readers ability to quickly read the article they are reading.

For these reasons you will find almost all of my blogs are designed in black and white with few distractions.

I will be adding AdSense to these sites but I will not over due the number of ads posted on each site.

WAMP project

I recently was involved in a project which required me to bring up a word press server in very short notice. A company had designed it's website without having established the location for hosting. The Simplify Wamp Blog Post is a basic guide on the steps I took to quickly bring the website online with little effort. Although this may not be the best practice for handling this type of server this approach was used to quickly bring the server online for another team to work with.

Blogger Adsense

Well strange as this is when I went to create my AdSense account, it did not allow me to use the blogger website to sign up. AdSense expects a working website as part of the enrollment but if you add a blogger website as your current website it errors back to you.

I was able to find an article on blogger.om which explains using AdSense in your blog. So although this is slightly confusing on Googles part it seems of no concern.

AdSense on blogger.com