Hence, this tutorial

First, you’ll need to download a form, that indicates the type of corporation you want to be. This is NOT to determine if you’re an S-Corp or C-Corp. The determination of S-Corp or C-Corp is done with the IRS. That determination is done later. For now, you’ll just need to decide which of the following you will be:

• Non-Profit Corporation – If you want to be a 501c3, this one is for you. (form here)
• Profit Corportation – S-Corp and C-Corp (form here)
• Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) – Typical LLC (form here)

The forms will outline the specifications for each of the types of incorporation. While each of the forms contains the necessary questionnaire, I don’t recommend just filling in the blanks. There are a large number of templates for this. Google searches typically will bring up something to work with. Here’s the one I did for Hacked For BBQ, Corp.

Once  you get something written up, mail off the package with money included. Once you’ve gotten this done, you’ll have to wait a couple weeks for the state to get back to you. If everything looks good, you’ll get a letter of confirmation regarding your corporation.

Once you have this letter of confirmation from the state of Florida, it’s time to get your FEIN number and file your corporation type with the IRS. I did this as an S-Corp, so my experience may be different than some of the rest of you.

Go to the IRS’s online application for obtaining an FEIN number at the current website for this : http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=102767,00.html. You’ll click a link that says ‘APPLY ONLINE NOW’. Afterwards you’ll be sent to a page giving you the instructions on how to complete the FEIN process. The process itself is fairly self-explanatory. Completing this process immediately provides you with an FEIN number, with which you can open a bank account and start doing some business.

To close, I’d like to point out how unnecessary services like company.com are. These services are overpriced, and often put people in difficult situations. DIY business starting isn’t nearly as bad as it might seem at first. As always, any feedback is certainly welcome.

SSH is one of the major tools in what I do. For any developers out there who don’t know about it, you’re missing out. Long gone are the days of requiring screen sharing or remote desktop to manage another computer. SSH is the bomb, and it’s been around for a long time.

Here’s how to use it, without needing to enter your password when you make a connection to a remote machine:

• On the computer you’re making a connection from (i.e. your home computer)
• • If you do not have a ~/.ssh folder already, create one.

  • ssh-keygen -t dsa -f ~/.ssh/id_dsa -P ''

  • scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub <username>@<servername>:~

  • Make an old-skool connection to the server you just copied your public key to (i.e. your public webhost)
• on that server:

• • cat id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

  • chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

That’s it. Keep in mind, that you’ll still need to specify your username when connecting to the host (if it’s different than your username on your local machine). If you want to get around that, you’ll need to setup an SSH config file (future tutorial?).

The boss’s computer would immediately log off after he tried to logon. While this might sound funny (in other circumstances, it really is), the client (who is a really cool guy, whom I respect a lot) did not think it was funny at all.

So, I dived into the Google to find out the issue. The short version; there was a bad registry setting. Basically, when this sort of thing happens, the first thing you should check is the registry. Now, you can’t connect to the registry locally, since you can’t logon to the computer with this issue.

So, the first thing you need to do, is logon to a computer on the same network as a user who has administrative rights on the computer concerned. Once you’ve gotten that far, you’ll need to open regedit. Something like this:

After that, you’ll need to connect to the computer in question. That’s easy, check the following pics:

then… 

The following key is what you should be looking for:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

That key should contain a string value for ‘Userinit’. If you’re confused, you should see something like the following:

Well, you probably shouldn’t see the green box, but you should see the string value for Userinit. If you don’t see that value in the root of key Winlogon, then you’ll need to create it. 

That’s not too bad either. First, right click the right hand pane of the registry editor:

Select the ‘String Value’ item in the right click menu. Once you’ve gotten that done, you’ll have a new string value in the right hand pane, awaiting you to name it. It’ll look something like: 

Name the string Userinit. After you’ve done that, right click the entry and select ‘Modify’. Make sure that the value for the key is:

c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe

Again, here’s a picture:

And that’s it. If you have any issues after you’ve gotten this done, I recommend an ERD disk or formatting your HD. Those are extreme options, I know. However, I don’t think you want to tool around with your computer for hours on end ( or maybe you do ).

Regardless, the first thing I always do, is check that the email address is valid. It might sound funny, but just like that hot girl might have given you a phony number, you might have the wrong email address. This happens a lot more often then you might think.

So, how do you check the email? Enter Telnet to the rescue. Don’t worry, Telnet is cross platform. If you have Linux, Mac, or Windows (geez), you can use Telnet to figure out if the e-mail address you’re trying to reach is valid. It’s one of the few things that seem to work on damn near any operating system you can think of.

Sooo go ahead and fire up Terminal (or Command Prompt). Once you’ve gotten that done, you’ll need to type in ‘telnet’. You’ll see a window, something similar to the one below:

Now, you’ll need to get the domain name of the mail server you’re trying to check the email address against. This is not as easy as just checking the domain name itself. Nearly always, the mail server for a domain is mail.domain.com. So, if you’re checking the valid email address for JoeBalls@physics.org, then the mail server is probably mail.physics.org. It’s a much bigger topic than I’ve got to cover here. I’ll get to that later. So let’s just say the right email server is mail.physics.org. 

So, type in ‘open mail.physics.org smtp’ in the command prompt. In case you’re a little confused, it should look like the following:

So, after you enter this, you’ll see the telnet program try to connect to an IP address. If it works, then you’ll get a message about an escape character, as well as the mail server’s welcome message. If you’ve gotten here, then pat yourself on the back. You’ve at least gotten a valid mail server. We’ll assume for now, it’s the right one.

The next thing to do, is type in the following command: ‘HELO mail.example.com’. It’s probably more effective to use a valid mail server for this, but this is supposed to be a simple tutorial. So anyways, after you type in ‘HELO …’, you’ll see something similar to the following:

This is kinda like saying ‘Hi, I’m Cory’. Ehh, don’t worry about it. Now, you’ll have to enter who this test email is from. Usually can use anything that looks like a valid email address. I usually use dude@example.com. So, here it is:

So, the way to check the validity of the email (That’s right, we’re at the climax …. drumroll please ….), is to type ‘RCPT TO:’ and the email address you want to check. I’m using Gmail as a mail proxy these days, so I don’t mind handing out my email address: corycollier@corycollier.com. Go ahead and spam me, I dare you.

Yeah, so go ahead and test that email. So, it looks like ‘RCPT TO: corycollier@corycoller.com’, and a visual representation looks like:

Wait, it didn’t tell me anything??!?

Ahhh, but yes it did. This mail server returned a number, before it returned anything else. That number, is ALWAYS a three digit number. 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx. 2xx indicates success. So, the 250 blah blah blah, basically means that the email address is valid. Sorta anti-climatic? Maybe, but what’s the end result? You’ve just made sure that an email address is valid. Give yourself another pat on the back.

So, just in case you were wondering, I wrote this tutorial on Melissa’s MacBook. Thanks honey for volunteering your computer long enough for me to write this. Then again, you’re watching American Idol, so I doubt you need the computer right now. And, since this is a tech tutorial, I doubt you’ve read this far.

Sound too good to be true? It’s available to you right now. Thanks god, errr…. google…..

Get Google To Store All Your Email

First, login to gmail (yeah, you have to login first :/ ). Next, find the ‘Settings’ link in the top right of your browser.

Once you’ve clicked on that, you’ll see the settings page, with some options in the top. You’ll want to click the ‘Accounts’ link in the top left

After you’ve gotten there, notice the region (towards the bottom of the page) that says ‘Get mail from other accounts’.

This is where you’ll add email accounts from. Go ahead and click the ‘Add account’ link. After you do this, you should be presented with a pop-up window that will ask you for the email address you wish to replicate on google. It looks like this:

Go ahead and enter whatever email address you want to use, and click ‘Next Step’. After you’ve gotten that accomplished, you’ll be presented with something slightly more involved. Don’t worry it’s not too tough to get through.

So, the first thing you enter is your username. Most of the time, that will be your full email address. Your password is, well, your password. The POP server is something for you to figure out. Usually, it’s mail.your-domain.com. So, if your email address is joeballs@physics.org, then the POP server is probably mail.physics.org. Sometimes it’s pop.physics.org, or pop3.physics.org.

Anyways, once you figure that out, and get it in there, you have a few choices to make.

The checkbox that allows you to leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server can be important. I think I speak for sys admins accross the internet when I say ‘Dont check this box!’. The reason: if you leave this box unchecked, google will remove a message from your server once google downloads it. That’s great for disk space, and since google seems to be growing hard drives on trees, they might as well do all the storing.

The next option you have, is to use SSL when connecting to your POP server. If your POP server supports this option, do it. While it’s not likely, it is possible for someone to see your emails as Google downloads them from your mail server. Since e-mail is usually personal, you probably don’t want this to happen.

After that, there’s the option to label incoming messages. I really recommend you do this, especially if you’re using more than one email account here. It really helps to distinguish which email was sent to which address.

Finally, you have the option to Archive incoming messages, so they never hit your inbox. I never use this option, so I can’t really speak to why you’d want to. I’m sure some of you have a reason, so try that one at your own leisure.

Get Google To Send Mail For You

Having Google store all of your mail is only half the battle. The next part, is having google send mail for you too. Back in the ‘Accounts’ tab of the ‘Settings’ page, find the area for ‘Send mail as:’

You have the option to add an email address here. Go ahead and click this. Once you do, another pop-up window will appear that will look like this:

You’ll be prompted for your name and email address. You even have the option to specifiy a different reply-to email address. Go ahead and fill those 2 fields out, then click ‘Next Step’. Then, you’ll be presented with another window :

This is a prompt to let you know an email will be sent to the email address you’re trying to send as. This helps prevent other people from sending mail on your behalf without you knowing about it. Go ahead and click the ‘Send Verification’ button. Google will now send you an email verifying that you actually have a right to send mail as that email. When you get the email, click the link in it, and you’re done.

Wrapping Up …

Google has an awesome ability to filter spam and viruses from email. Using Gmail as a proxy for your email cuts down on the spam you recieve, and the likelyhood you’ll get a virus from your buddy. Even better, you get to use gmail’s awesome web interface for all of your email.

Currently Gmail supports IMAP integration as well, so your email client (or iPhone) can use IMAP to replicate folders (labels) in GMail. I’ve heard that’s a little buggy right now, but I’m sure fixes are on the way.

For those of you unfamiliar with Trac, and / or what it’s about: Trac is a ticket management system well suited to SCRUM type software developement. Actually, Trac works well with any type of software development methodology, but it’s been a real boone for us using SCRUM.

Trac integrates with SVN, so your existing SVN login information can be used to log in to Trac. What’s more, all of your SVN changesets are logged in Trac and can be viewed as an RSS feed.

The point of this tutorial isn’t to get into a long discussion about Trac however. The point of all of this is to educate on how to get your eclipse installation to work directly with Trac.

First let’s start with getting a version of Eclipse that suits your needs. I’m a PHP guy, so I’m using Zend Studio for Eclipse. The current version at the time of this writing is (Neon beta). I’m pretty sure it’s free. However, even if it’s not, I still heavily recommend it. The download is pretty big (around 300MB) so be patient. Once you’ve got it downloaded, the installer is pretty self expanatory. If you’re not a PHP developer, I’m sure there’s some pre-made flavor of eclipse out there to suit your needs. You figure it out.

Once your Eclipse app is installed, you’ll want to get the Mylyn plugin. The Mylyn plugin is what handles the Trac connection and ticket synchronization. Anyways, you could download the package manually, but Eclipse’s managed installer works amazingly. So, we’ll use it.

First, fire up your Eclipse App. Then navigate to the following location:

Help / Software Updates / Find and Install

The install / update dialog window opens and you have the option to either update existing features, or search for new features to install. We’re installing new stuff, so selecte ‘Search for new features to install’ and click ‘Next’.

Next, you’ll get a window with a bunch of options. The checkboxes indicate existing features you already have in your Eclipse setup. We’re adding new stuff, so find and click the ‘New Remote Site…’ button in the upper right area of the window.

Here you’ll be prompted for an update site URL, and the name you wish to call it. The name you want to call it is irrelevant, but I’d stick to something that makes sense. The URL field is very important, so use the following url:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/eX.Y

Change the X.Y to whatever your version of Eclipse is. I’m using Eclipse 3.3, so I’d change the X.Y to 3.3.

Once you’ve got that much in there, go ahead and click ‘OK’. That closes the current window, and you’ll be back to the window with all of the options. Click ‘Finish’ and the Update Manager will attempt to contact the udpate site you’ve provided. If you’re provided the option, click the checkbox that says ‘Automatically Select Mirrors’. It just makes life a little easier.

Be careful when using this with some of the other plugins, as you can corrupt your Eclipse setup with some of the less well QA’d plugins out there. Mylyn is pretty stable, so you’ll be fine letting it do it’s thing.

Once the update manager finds everything, you’ll be prompted as to what you want to download and install. I’d use descretion here. You will require most of the packages listed. However, unless you really want Bugzilla integration (you might), I’d elect to leave that one alone.

After that, click ‘Next’ and go through the various prompts you’ll see. Basically, you’ll be prompted if you’re sure you want to install the packages, and yes, you are.

Congratulations! You’ve got Mylyn and Eclipse setup! Now, it’s time to get into how you actually use the stuff…

Click the following menu path: /Window / Show View / Other

Now, you’re going to see a new window prompting you for what type of view you’d like to see. Navigate to Mylyn / Task Repositories:

Once you’ve gotten that done, the Task Repository pane will appear (somewhere) in Eclipse. Now click the menu button in the upper right corner of the view, and select ‘Add Task Repository’

A new window will appear that prompts you for the type of task repository you want to connect to. It appears I wasn’t as judicious as I thought when I setup Mylyn myself (note that I have the option to add a bugzilla repository, which is useless for me). Anyways, select Trac, and click ‘Next’

Now you’ll be prompted for the URL of the repository and your login credentials. Go ahead and fill in the specifics of how you’re required to connect to your own Trac repository, and click ‘Finish’.

Now, you’ll want to go back to the show view menu. From there, select Mylyn / Task List.

After you’ve gotten that much done, the Task View will appear. From there, you’ll need to add a query, to get the tasks that are important to you.

To do this, you’ll need to right click somewhere in the whitespace of the task view, and select New / Query.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get a new window (the Query Window), and all of the options will be filled with the options and applicable answers provided by Trac.

Now, you’ll see a list of tasks in the task view provided by your Trac repository. Double click one of them to see it. You’ll have a few options available to you. The most important of those options is the activation option.

When you activate a task, all files you open afterward will be added to the ‘context’ of the active task. Another awesome feature here, is that your time on the task is monitored, which is great for reporting how long some impossible Trac ticket took you to finish.

Once of the real values to this setup, is SVN integration. Everytime you commit, or merge your files, the timeline of Trac is updated, and reflects your changes via Diff view. That’s a bit off topic, and I’ll save that lecture for some other time.

Anyways, in case you don’t know; a distribution list is a quick way to send an e-mail out to a bunch of people at one time, without having to put all of their names in the ‘To:’ fields of outlook. So, if you find yourself writing emails to the same people often, it’s a good idea to have a distribution list setup to make your life a little easier.

So, fire up Outlook 2003 and navigate to the ‘Contacts’ folder. Click the down arrow next to ‘New’ and find the menu item, ‘Distribution List’:

Select the ‘Distribution List’ option, which will give you a new window, which will be similar to the following:

Now, Click on the ‘Select Members…’ button. This should give you yet another window, which should look similar to the following:

Now, go through your contact list as you choose. It’s worth noting that the picture above shows that I was selecting contacts in the ‘Global Address List’. This is a list available throughout your network. It’s not important that you understand the concept of that, but it is important that you know you can change where you’re looking up people from.

If you select the drop down box that has ‘Global Address List’ in it, you will see other places for you to find contacts in. The most likely place you’re going to want to find other contacts is in YOUR contacts folder. So go ahead and select that, and find the ones you want. Just double click the names to add them to the list.

When your done, review your list of contacts, and give the list a name. I named min ‘Tutorial’. Here’s what I have:

Select ‘Save and Close’ and you’re done.

Keep in mind, all Distribution lists are saved in YOUR contact folder! So, in order to use them, you’ll have to find the contact in your contact folder. To illustrate this, write a new message, and select the ‘To:’ button. Then switch where you’re looking for contacts, to your ‘Contacts’ folder. Finally, find the name of the Distribution list you’re looking for. All distribution lists are bolded, which makes them a bit easier to find. Here’s mine:

And that’s it! As always, I welcome your comments!

Shadow Copy is a snapshot of a drive, at a particular moment in time. It’s comparable to incremental backups, kinda.

While Shadow Copy is not intended to replace regular backups, it’s a very handy tool to quickly find files that users lose all of the time. Note, this is only available on Windows Server machines. Your XP and Vista machines aren’t going to do this.

Heres how to use it:

First, make sure the Shadow Copy service is running in the services mmc. You’re looking for the service called ‘Volume Shadow Copy’. Make sure it’s started, and it’s set to Automatically start. Once you have that covered, you can move on.

On the server you wish to use Shadow Copy on, navigate to ‘My Computer’.

Right Click the Drive (usually ‘C:’) that you want to use Shadow Copy on.

Click Properties

Click the tab ‘Shadow Copies’

Click the enable button if it’s not grayed out. If the button is grayed out, then you’re already running Shadow Copy. We’ll assume you’re not, so at least pretend to click the enable button.

Now, click the ‘Settings’ button. You should see the following dialog box:

This is where you set the maxium size you want your shadow copy database to be. As a general rule of thumb, you should never use less than 10% of what your max storage capacity is.

You can also set how often you make Shadow Copies. Keep in mind that the more often you make a Shadow Copy, the more space you will need. The default settings are twice a day, at 7:00am, and 12:00pm. I’ve never found a reason to change this, but I’m sure some of you out there will find plenty of reasons.

Now that Shadow Copy is setup, it’s time to see it in action. Back in the first dialog box we saw , click the ‘Create Now’ button to manually create your first Shadow Copy. Don’t worry, you won’t have to do this again.

Now here’s the sort of tricky part. In order to access the shadow copies that have been created via file or folder, you have to view the folders via net connection.

You can either type in the UNC name of the server (i.e. \\YOUR-SERVER-NAME) and navigate to the folder or file you want, or you can view them over a mapped network drive

Once you do that, THEN you can right click your file, or folder, click on properties, and then click on the ‘Previous Versions’ tab.

From here, you can view a previous version, copy or restore. Usually, your best bet is to view the files you want to restore first. It doesn’t help anyone to restore old files that were wrong to begin with. Get someone else’s (think management) OK before restoring files.

For a PC, You’ll need to know the name of the server that has the files you’re looking for. If you don’t know the name of the server, the IP address will suffice.

Open ‘My Computer’

You should something similiar to the above picture. The details will differ with your computer. They’ll look quite different if you’re using Vista.

OK, Now click the ‘Tools’ Menu and click ‘Map Network Drive’

Select the drive letter you wish to map, then type 2 backslashes and the folder name in the folder textbox. You should follow that with the path to the folder you want mapped. If you don’t know, you can click the browse button, and locate it.

You should see something like the following by now.

That’s all there is to it. It’s pretty much the same for Vista, though the location of the ‘Map Network Drive’ is more direct. Just look in the toolbar of your explorer.