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Free Cisco VPN Client alternative for Windows 7 x64 (64 bit)

Installing the Win7 system on my ThinkPad, I had a problem, that many users will have switching from a Windows system with only 32bit. Connecting the network in my university and in my office, I need to establish a Cisco VPN connection. But unfortunately there is no Cisco VPN Client in a 64bit version for Windows 7 in the x64 version. Only for Windows XP, a Cisco Client is available.

After searching through some forums, I found various solutions for this issue. Some mentioned the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client. But this Client doesn’t support PCF profiles. But as I couldn’t wait for my university to offer an AnyConnect support, I needed another solution.

The Blog has a new domain!

Last weekend I succeeded to move my domain kau-boys.de to my ROOT server. Before doing so I used a frame redirect for this domain. But with a little extra fee and waiting for the term of notice I can now present you the blog with the desired domain.

All external links should still be working correctly as they are rewrited to the new domain. Therefore all of your bookmarks should still work. I hope that Google will soon recognize the moving of the domain and updates it’s results.

I hope that I will be able to provide you more regularly with useful tips in the future. At the moment my master study takes a lot of time and I don’t have the time to do something fun. And beside study I has to work a little as studying isn’t for free.

Now I wish you a lot of fun with my blog!

Bernhard

@My english readers: I am sorry that most of the last posts haven’t been translated, yet. Some of them are only interessting for German readers. And I don’t had the time to translate the longer ones, yet.

Big spelling reform in the WWW: HTML 5 is now HTML5

Some of you might not know, what this title means. But today the two internet organizations WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has agreed to a consitent name for the next HTML version.

The W3C used the spelling with a space and the WHATWG the spelling without the space. After the news has been published in some forums and news sites, the German Wikipedia article has been changed at 13:43 and even the W3C has updated his specification to HTML5.

For some of you, this might not be a big news, but now we finally know, how to write HTML5 correctly. I think the spelling without a space is more consequent, as e.g. CSS3 also has no space. But in the field of markup languages we still have XHTML 1.0 and others, which would look strange without a space. I still grieve for XHTML 2.0 which will no longer be focued on, in favor of HTML5. But I hope that the web developer will learn to write valid code using HTML5 in the future.

What do you think about it? Is this really a news, or do you think the W3C should focus on real issues? I would like them to complete the spedification for CCS3 so we can use nice things like border-radius or shadows.

Hidden BIOS Setting for USB power supply on a Thinkpad

Yesterday I found a relly cool functionality in my laptop BIOS. Everyone of you might know the problem, that the USB ports of laptops doesn’t provide a power supply. So I can’t charge my mouse battery or my MP3 player when the laptop is switched off.

I do have a cool 220V USB adapter, but I don’t take it with me all the time. But now I found this mentioned functionality in the BIOS that enables you to do that. The first problem was to figure out how to access the BIOS. As I administrate a lot of PCs and I even earned a lot over the years, I always forget which F-Key to press on which PC (or the Delete-Key).

Setting up the Plesk Backup Manager on a 1&1 Linux Root Server

On a server I have to administrate, I had some problems to set up the Backup Manager through the Plesk Panel. So I decided to write a small tutorial on how to set up the Backup Manager on a 1&1 Dedicated Server Linux. But it might the the same on many other servers as well.

The 1&1 Server uses Plesk version 9.2. The first step is to logon to the Plesk Panel. On the “Home” page you should find a button for the Backup Manager in the Server section:

Backup Manager

Google Maps Suggest – Address-Autocompletion with Scriptaculous

Many uses autocompletion on their website. It’s not only an impressiv but also a very user-friendly feature. It can also help to have valid data within a form. But you always have to validate the data on the server before saving them.

Today I want to show you, how easy you can create a autocompletion for Google-Maps-Addresses using Scriptaculous. As you can’t access an external website with an AJAX-Request, we have to use a small Skript as a gateway between Google Maps an your website. So let’s start with this server-side script this time:

Best practice for creating WordPress plugins

Now that I’ve already written three WordPress plugins, and even use many other plugins, I have noticed some things that should be considered when creating a plugin. Due to the fairly extensive WordPress Plugin API creating a plugin isn’t very complex, but unfortunately, most of the plugins lack quality. So everyone who wants to create a plugin should care about certain things.

Create something new

The hardest part is probably to find a good idea for a new plugin. The three plugins I have written were founded by a specific need. A certain feature wasn’t included in the main features of WordPress and there was no plugin in sight, that could offer this feature.

Transcending the boundries of frame redirects

Many hosters offer cheap domains without a webhosting package. Some of those hosters e.g. Strato only give you the option to use a frame redirect with this domains. But sometimes you can’t see that restriction when you order the domain.

Some might be happy, as they have a free hosting package with a very long URL, so they can use the frame redirect to only present a short URL to the visitors. But there’a a catch with frame redirects.

Kau-Boy’s Comment Notification Plugin

This plugin enables blog admins and editors to manage the notification of incomming comments. As WordPress only has the option to notify on every comment, the email account of the admin may recieve many email each day. Notification is also limited to the admin only, so only the admin user will recieve an email for incomming comments.

Using the plugin you can subscribe to a RSS feed that contains even comments that has to be moderated. Every feed entry has the links to delete a comment, mark a comment as spam or approve a comment, if the comment has to be moderated. If a comment has been marked as spam, it will no longer appear in the feed.

Install WordPress on a server with Plesk

My blog runs on a virtual server with plesk as administration tool. Installing the blog I had some issues with file permissions. On the wordpress website you can find a tutorial to change file permissions, but it doesn’t answer all problems with a system that has Plesk installed.

At first you have to decide where to install the blog. You can choose one of your domains or a subdomain. You might have to create it and activate the PHP support before.