The device has a swivel on the male USB plug. This allows you to utilize in a variety of positions and situations. For example, on my 17″ MBP, you would use the configuration as shown, when using the primary USB port on the right side of the laptop. However if you wish to use one of the ports on the left side, the swivel allow you to rotate 180 degrees and stay away from the power plug.

Another unique feature is that the center port (of the three on the side) is articulated. This would allow you to plug in a create more space in case a larger device (such as a ‘monster’ flash drive was occupying one of the adjacent ports. This feature, along with the 180 degree swivel was very well thought out.

The only complaint, on my device I was able to swivel the male USB connector 180 degrees and try it on the left and right sides of my MBP. However, I was unable to swivel it back. At that point, I could only move it approximately 90 degrees, which in my case would not allow use on the right side (primary) USB port on the MBP.

I noticed a small Phillips head screw, near the swivel, and visible in the photo. I loosened it slightly, and whatever was preventing the connector from moving, was freed. Now the plug rotates freely, without binding.

This hub looks to be the answer to connecting several devices, portable hard drives, iPhone/iPod, etc. It does this in a nice, compact, streamlined package. I would recommend, especially after testing on my MacBook Pro.

Downsides, if any… Well, the device is not “powered” if that makes a difference in your application. For me, I don’t seem to have a problem with flash drives, the iPhone, etc. I did notice my Canon TX1 was not recognized, but I don’t believe this to be a problem of the hub. (It was not recognized when plugged in to a direct port on the left side of the machine, either.)

iHome offers a limited lifetime warranty. There is a web site, and 877 number for technical support. It works with Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Windows XP and Vista. (I would be surprised if it doesn’t work with Windows 7, as well.)

iHome IH-U550FB 4-Port Hub

The main “calibre” page has a “Website usage statistics” link. I followed that and was intrigued. This reminded me of a statistics page (I don’t remember the software) from my old Windows 2000 server (may it RIP) and got me looking for a way to incorporate on my OS X Server.

So I set about to install the tool. Downloading the archive from AWStats was the easy part. I then set about trying find specific instructions for my Leopard Server installation. The first attempt, through DarwinPorts (MacPorts) failed when it was looking for a dependency on Apache 2. Hold on! I know Apple’s config is slightly less than generic, but I decided not to continue this route and really screw something up.

I searched for ‘manual instructions’ and came upon Galen Sprague’s blog. This looked to be just what I needed. But, while it got me started well along in the right direction, the step by step didn’t work in my case.

I certainly can’t blame Galen, for I fear I have probably more than likely in my ignorance and bliss severely misconfigured my Server over time. Sure, it works but when I run across these ‘simple’ things, they just never quite seem to work. “Stuff” isn’t found in the paths shown, commands don’t quite run as listed, etc., etc.

But today I was on a mission. I felt I was really close, but didn’t quite know where or how to proceed. More searching didn’t reveal any better information than Galen’s blog post.

After checking and rechecking, and hacking around, I finally got a page to display, albeit with no data. Continued to scrub the logs, and make tweaks here and there. Along the way, I tried the following:

• Set permissions to the awstats and betterawstats directories to www:www
• Rechecked the conf files
• Scrubbed the logs
• Rechecked the conf files
• Attempted to run the Perl script manually

Aha! I was on to something. The paths listed under /Library/WebServer didn’t want to play as they were indicated. However, if I changed to the directory of the awstats.pl file, and ran with the arguments it worked! Well, sort of…

I kept getting errors related to the format of the Apache log files. I did some searching and copied and edited a sample from Apache. It looks like this:

%h %l %u %t “%r” %>s %b “%{Referer}i” “%{User-agent}i”

It’s hard to tell, but it’s not quite the exact match as shown on Galen’s post. At that point, I re-ran the scripts and it appeared to work. I loaded my betterawstats page and it populated. Almost there… almost.

Galen provided information on another tool, Lingon, that I had never heard of before. (Fortunately it’s still available.) Looks interesting, since I am not a cron or launchd guru by any means.

Again, following Galen’s instructions I attempted to get AWStats/Betterawstats to work automatically and refresh at some interval. Foiled every step of the way… It just wouldn’t work, with any setting.

Back to the command line and I changed a few permissions, primarily I changed the owner of awstats.pl to root. That seemed to work, but the the script still would not load/refresh after the first run.

I got brave and created the entry as a Daemon as opposed to a User Agent. I cleaned everything up and rebooted. Lo and behold, not only did it launch at startup as evidenced by my betterawstats page, but also refreshed every 15 minutes as instructed.

My site doesn’t get any traffic, and is just a place for me to play and learn. I’ll set this to something more realistic and button up the hood.  Just another day…

So, after all this you may ask, just what is this after all?

Check out website statistics here.

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I suppose I could / should have done a full erase and clean install, and can always do that if I experience problems.  But I took the easy (read that, lazy) way out and just inserted the Install DVD and went to work.

It took just a bit over an hour.  Of course, on the surface I don’t see anything different, but will poke around and check out the subtle differences (if there is much to find.)

Bottom line, I started with an ‘older’ Developer Preview build; 10A421a.  I hadn’t applied the last couple of upgrades since that version was running fine.  The only other thing I checked was Safari, to see if there had been much (or any) change.  Before the installation, Safari reported 4.0.3, build 6531.7; after the install, build 6531.9.

Upon reboot, SnapzPro had an update available.  I also installed (my sorely missed) Server Admin Tools for 10.6.  I was pleasantly surprised to see there were no compatibility issues with the tools and my OS X Server,  a PPC running Server 10.5.8.  I had read a few articles where often the new tools don’t work with the “old” server operating system but that isn’t the case.

I’ll go through the rest of my installed software and check to see if anything else has a release to coincide with Snow Leopard.  To sum it up, Snow Leopard is an affordable upgrade ($29USD) and in addition to taking a considerably smaller footprint (about 3GB less) than Leopard 10.5, it is quite snappy and several new features under the hood.

Snow Leopard pre-order announcement

Ok, what we die hard Mac fans have been waiting for, the next release of OS X!  There was a reported leak on the UK Apple Store the other day that indicated Snow Leopard would be available, ahead of the announced “sometime in September” timeframe we had been hearing.  They pulled that, but it was spot on.

Today I received two emails, one directly from Apple this morning (Alaska time) and this afternoon from MacMall.  Both announced ‘pre-order now’ to get your copy on Friday the 28th.  Of course, I plopped down the $29 to Apple (which included shipping.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been running the Developer Preview for a while on my 17″ MBP.  It works great and I haven’t suffered too many issues with the beta.  For the most part, all my software runs fine.  There is the new release of Remote Desktop, and with the anticipated release of Server Admin Tools for 10.6, I will be all set.

Icing on the cake, in my small world, was the addition of the beta build of VMware.  I had been selected, but to date, hadn’t installed it.  Since the release version of Fusion doesn’t run with the 64-bit OS X kernel, I decided to see if this is addressed in the beta.  Sure enough, I started up VMware beta and it works great!  I loaded all my images, including 32 and 64-bit versions of XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Ubuntu.  Updated all the VM Tools and things are running stable.

So, run, don’t walk and pre-order your copy of 10.6.

I almost had success with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin (WPAU).  Everything seemed to work, right up to the point of putting the site in maintenance mode.  But try as I might, even with a manual “.maintenance” file it would always fail.  Searched high and low, and came across several folks having similar (and different) upgrade woes.  Some posts indicated the WPAU plugin was ‘outdated’ and no longer necessary since WordPress offers the functionality built-in.  But, previously that hadn’t worked for me.

I tried most of the solutions, which had varying levels of success for the folks posting to forums and blogs.  Finally came across one solution, which looked so simple, I couldn’t hurt by trying.  Check out Fred Palma’s easy solution. It simply entails changing the owner and group to be ‘owned’ by the web server itself.  On my server, I made one small change, that being that the owner and group are “www” instead of Fred’s “www-data” since I was familiar with that owner/group on installation.

Next, I had to figure out the correct settings for the WordPress routine.  There were only a few things to configure, but try as I might, using the server name (or variations) would always fail.  Searching for those failure messages landed me on a support forum post that indicated the individual had entered “localhost” as the server name.  Something obscure indicated the server couldn’t connect to itself and this might be a possible solution.  Sure enough, it worked, with the proper username/password credentials.

The update to 2.8.1 was painless, once everything was configured properly.  Now I have to go back and clean up file permissions and other messes I made. I’ll delete the WPAU plugin and perform a general review to make sure we’re all up and running properly, as well.

But in searching Google (thanks to folks that really know SEO) I was able to figure out a few little snippets that will hopefully help.  The first is an optimization that totally corrects the (what I will call a blatant) deficiency in the default setup of WordPress.  It’s unfortunate they choose the Permalink format they do.  But, I wonder if this is at the request of the search giants?  Huh, could it be…?  To lessen the traffic, or some other nonsense which I certainly don’t understand?

Anyway, I really mucked things up.  Links to every page were broken.  I don’t know if I “fixed” them, but it does appear I have Permalinks working now.  This was totally due to searching (again, SEO ‘wonderful’ links.  I was finally able to figure out why my .htaccess files on my self hosted Mac OS X (Leopard) Server were not working.  Check out this link to properly change your permalinks on OS X Server.

I think with Dean Lee’s highly touted Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin Version 1.0 finally working, and a good understanding of how to “manipulate” the Apache config with .htaccess files, I might be a step closer.

Time will tell…

So, after the WordPress.org “five minute installation” which has taken a couple of days, I am up and running.  To be fair, it really was simple, even for me.  But then I had to deal with PHP issues, and MySQL, and on and on.  But, wearing Google out the past couple of days has really paid off.  My PHP installation on Leopard Server 10.5.7 was crippled and Mark’s package added features and security. (Get Mark Liyanage’s excellent package here => Entropy PHP)

Still have a lot to figure out, and probably some configuration faux pas, but overall it really is simple to get something on the Internet.  There is a plethora of themes and widgets, or you can program your own code, although that’s a bit beyond my reach.  

Over time, I hope to refine the blog and maybe even write something every once in a while.  Found out how to post via email, so that should make mobile blogging fun.  Next challenge to master is the inclusion of images.  Haven’t been impressed with the initial efforts, but once I get that down, I hope to add gallery pages and more.  

This is definitely a work in progress.  Don’t be at all surprised to see it change over time.