Creating a PHP Contact Form

We had a some contact forms go down on a site we were hosting the other day. As a work around, I just put up the email address of the company and told customers to just contact them that way for now. Unfortunately, I know nothing about how the php form that I was using worked, I just treated it as a little plug-in into my site. Site 5, where the site was hosted, must have updated some server settings because I never changed anything and now it’s not working. So, I decided to try to learn how to build a contact form with everything I need in it by myself. I need it to be able to have not just a subject and message, but drop boxes, check boxes, and other input boxes. Lucky for me one of my favorite tutorial sites on the web tells you how to do this. I love Kirupa:

http://www.kirupa.com/web/php_contact_form.htm

Taking apart a macbook pro.

 Well it was definitely an interesting experience journeying into my 15″ core duo macbook pro. I replaced the default 120GB drive with a brand new 7200RPM 320GB Seagate drive. I’ve replaced numerous desktop PC parts and even the hard drive and memory on my old 13″ macbook, but to replace the hard drive of a macbook pro you actually have to take off the keyboard and trackpad to reveal the it.

 Taking off the keyboard was by far the most frightening part of the event. The back comes off really easily but when taking off the front, especially next to the trackpad, one really has to pop off certain clamps on the inside. So after I switched the hard drive and got everything back on I realized what I had done… the part of the aluminum case of the macbook pro that surrounds the CD/DVD player was bent down. Apparently I had bent the case down towards the opening of the CD/DVD opening when I was trying to pop the keyboard off. Fear instantly took over my body.

 

Bent Macbook Pro Case

 

 Alas, when I turned on the mac and inserted the Leopard installation DVD the laptop ate it and spit it back out just fine! Whew! Unfortunately, I still have not found a way to bend the aluminum case back up where it rests against the keyboard. So learn from my mistakes and go left to right while taking off the keyboard on a macbook pro, and be careful next to the CD/DVD drive! Also, let me know if any of you has an idea has to how to bend the aluminum casing back up to it’s resting place against the keyboard frame!

Adobe CS3 you frustrate me!

So our company has been trying to get Adobe CS3 Photoshop and Illustrator because we need updated versions to deal with customer’s artwork who are using newer versions. We have Macromedia Studio 8 which can upgrade to Adobe CS3 Design Premium, so I assumed I would be able to upgrade to a cheaper version such as Adobe CS3 Design Standard. Boy was I wrong! You cannot upgrade to Adobe CS3 Design Standard from Macromedia Studio 8, you can only upgrade to Adobe CS3 Design Premium! So, now we have this perfectly good Design Standard upgrade box just sitting on a desk waiting for us to purchase either CS1 or CS2 so we can instal it. What a waste of time and resources!

 Now, I do understand that the programs that are in Studio 8 are not in Design Standard, and that it’s a legit argument that I would not be able to upgrade. I just still think it is a little on the ridiculous side because it costs the same amount of money to upgrade from CS1, CS2, and Studio 8 to Design Premium, but only CS1 and CS2 can upgrade to Design Standard. Adobe, I appreciate all your doing for us with these wonderful programs, but I hate your policies. Especially when I paid for a good copy of CS3 and didn’t just Limewire it all.

 Turns out I’m not the only one with this problem. You can check out this guy on MacNN who had a similar problem.

Where does this go?

 

Ummmm...

 Today we had to move one of the computers to a different location in the building. Normally, this would be a simple task, but it was moving to a location that had never been a station before. So when I went to make sure the ethernet outlet had connectivity to the internet I discovered it did not. Oh what to do? Heading off to the server room I found the label marked for that outlet and saw that it was not connected to the hub where all of our cable comes from. So I simply plugged it in. I am so thankful for labels.

 We can apply the concept of marking cords for what they are and the changes we make to them to the way we log our orders for our company. Without the information being logged about a phone call where the customer wanted red material color on his name badges instead of blue, we would inevitably produce the wrong badges. So keep track of information no matter what you are doing. From wires coming out of holes in the wall to the current order awaiting fulfillment!

The iPhone is not all play!

Yes, yes, I went out and got one of the new iPhones. I definitely had to go for a white one too if I was going to get one! It’s pretty amazing to me to be able to have a small thin computer in your pocket ready to do a million different tasks. So I will share a few of the things I’ve been able to use the iPhone for.

 Yesterday, I was out of the office running around San Antonio doing things for a ministry I work with. Now I needed to communicate with someone at the office to let them know I wasn’t going to make it back anytime soon. So, I just opened up the iPhone by sliding my finger, click on the AIM application I downloaded, typed it all in. Done.

 Another cool feature is the VNC applications available. If you set up VNC on your computer you can VPN into your computers network from anywhere around town and VNC into your PC or Mac computer to do whatever you need to! The screen from the computer shows up right on your iPhone! Pretty spiffy huh? So if you ever need to view a file that is only on your work computer, you can access it with your phone from any location.

Canon PowerShot A640

So I started a new project today in which I will be using layers from photoshop to create a flash animation of how some new plastic fasteners will work on our lanyards. Lanyards with these fasteners will be great for hospitals, children, and chemical plants because they are not sharp or metallic in any way. I began by taking some macro (really close setting) pictures of all the fasteners with my Canon PowerShot A640 that I got about 8 months ago. I am extremely impressed with the quality images I got out of the camera! One can see the threads in the lanyard and the bumps on the plastic. I have always used this camera for outdoor shots, but I think I will be using it more for stock photography now! I always knew it took macro pictures, but I think I underestimated how it would handle in a studio type environment. I highly recommend this camera to anyone considering buying it for any purpose other then low lighting scenarios. Just to make things clear I wanted to let everyone know I did use Photoshop CS3′s Quick Mask tools to get the pictures as white as I could, although the Canon did good enough with it’s high shutter speed!

Fonts, Illustrator, and CorelDraw

While helping out with the layout department, I often receive artwork for badges and lanyards in bitmap images. We cannot use bitmap images for our printing processes so we normal try and see if we can get some vector art from the customer. Unfortunately, they do not always have their logo ready in high quality vector format. Lucky for us Illustrator and CorelDraw both have tracing abilities. Illustrator and CorelDraw do fairly well with re-creating shapes, but both seem to suffer when it comes to text. We usually end up manually going through each font in our database and comparing it to the font in the logo or one similar to it. I am a really big fan of Illustrator CS3 and use it for most of the shape re-creation, but CorelDraw has an awesome feature when it comes to the fonts. If I type out a word in the logo, select it, and then scroll through the fonts, the fonts I scroll through will have the text that I selected! Even still, we may not have a font even close to the one in the logo. So my conclusion is that Illustrator and CorelDraw are both great tracing tools for different purposes, but the search continues for the ultimate tracing software.

The World of Tech

 For a first post I thought a good place to start would be explaining how being a tech guy doesn’t necessarily mean sitting at a computer all day. I being in a general tech position requires one to learn all the angles of every machine he works with and what it’s function is or what it is suppose to produce. In my case here at Lonestar, it means working with lots of computer hardware and software, engraving machines, laser machines, sublimation machines, heat presses, printers, servers, and phones all for the purpose of delivering custom imprinted lanyards, name badges, and vinyl badge holders with quality service to our customers. Throughout these posts I will try and relate the problems I’ve had with different machines, the resulting products or services, and the solutions to my difficulties. Hopefully, it can be an assist to others having trouble with the hardware I’ve listed. I will also be including some resources for software such as Alti-Gen, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash CS3, Final Cut Express, Adobe Premier, CorelDraw, and Xenetech.