Yesterday, I ran across an article over at Cents to Share explaining how you can set up a budget in Excel (or any other spreadsheet application). I’m a Mac user, and although Microsoft Excel is available for Mac, I prefer Numbers, part of Apple’s iWork suite.

To follow along with the article, you’ll need a basic understanding of spreadsheets, cells, and how to reference cells in formulas. Just understanding the concept is fine – the article explains the formulas in great detail, although the formulas themselves are not complex in the least. That said, I’d like to stress again that although the article is written about and references Excel, the formulas will be identical in any spreadsheet application I’m aware of – it only uses simple =SUM(CELL:CELL) formulas.

I ran across the article, and it looked like a simple task. The hardest part was categorizing everything I have expenses for – the rest was simply following the instructions and logic of how the spreadsheet was structured. Once you have that, it’s a breeze.

I encourage everyone to go take a look at the article. I plan for this to be a simple, but effective financial tool for my wife and me to use to better manage our finances. I even added a chart to give me a picture of how our income looks, compared to our accounts and expenses.

When you’re finished, you’ll have a result that looks something like the following (taken from the linked article – the numbers are not real..oh, and click for full size):

My ‘working’ includes things outside of my normal job. I recently revamped the church website. I personally think it looks a lot better (But I’m a bit biased.. I did the last one, too, however). I’d love any feedback any of you would be willing to give. I am planning on adding a guestbook back to the site, as well as adding all of the audio sermons back to it, plus some special singing at the church.

Another thing I spent quite a bit of time on was moving all my websites to a ‘real’ host. Up until yesterday, all of my sites were being hosted on a server I have in my house, all running on a DSL internet connection. Needless to say, it was a little slow, especially if more than one person was on at a time. I have this blog, a more ‘serious’ blog, a tech blog, a Facebook-type site for Christians, and a couple of test sites I’m working on for others. They don’t generate all that much traffic, but I was ready to free my home DSL from the extra traffic. I also wanted to save some money. Yes, I’m paying for the web hosting, but I can shut off that server at home now which should save me at least as much (likely more) on my power bill. I’m looking forward to that.

A little while back, I also procured an out-of-warranty Google mini appliance with a bad hard drive. I have a few drives lying around at home, so I slapped one in there and built it to be used as my phone soft-switch. Yes, I’m so geeky that my phones run through a computer. The little appliance is about the size of a medium pizza box from Pizza Hut, replacing a more standard-sized computer that happened to die during a power outage at home recently.

So that’s a lot of what’s been taking up my time recently. We’re also gearing up for the Christmas play at church, so that’ll be taking even more time. I’ll come back up for more air in January.

I’m about to go geeky on you, so just bear with me.

I love WordPress. There’s a social plugin called BuddyPress that I really, really wanted to use. It’s lightweight, fast and pretty configurable. It looks somewhat like Facebook, so it would be familiar to those who moved over (or at least used both).

A couple weeks into it, I found it wasn’t going to cut it. I’d been trying to get a real-time chat script to work on it, but ran into a wall. Several times. then I found JomSocial. This is a social layer built on top of a powerful CMS called Joomla. I’ve actually tried Joomla before, but it was a long time ago and it was way over my head. I’ve learned a little bit about web stuff since then, and it actually makes sense (mostly) to me now.

JomSocial had a lot of the stuff I already wanted – photos, videos, walls, activity feeds, friends, groups…you get the picture. It didn’t have chat built in though. I tried the same script on this software, and voila! It just worked! So far, everything I’ve tried to do with this software has worked, and worked well.

Now that you’ve gotten through the geeky stuff, you may be wondering what this Christian website is? It’s called Friends of Faith. Feel free to go take a visit and sign up. It’s still growing, and things are changing, but that’s half the fun!

One thing I’ve been working on is a social website for Christians. It is still in its infancy right now. I’m getting some help from a group, mostly from my church, to get things set up for it, select a name as well as the initial features the site should have. My goal is to have all of that finished before it goes live and is opened up to the rest of the ‘world’. Hopefully it will be ready within another couple of weeks. Stay tuned for an update.

This month has been Youth Month at our church. So far, I’ve had the privilege to preach twice. We’ve had two Youth Sundays, and I’ve preached both Sunday mornings. We also had Benjamin Cooley for the first one, and Jeremiah Cooley for the second. For those of you who don’t know them, they are twin brothers who are great young men that serve God. We also had Seth Stewart from Redemption Baptist Church. He is 13 years old and has announced his call to preach. They all 3 did a great job and preached messages that encouraged, strengthened and charged me.

I look forward to this Sunday, when Breaking Ground will be with us. They are a group of young men (The oldest is 26 I believe) who sing bluegrass Gospel music and preach. One of their wives also sings with the group. All of the guys preach, and preach well. I’m looking forward to all of it.

We’re also having a youth revival the week of March 1st through the 5th. Nick Sorrell and myself will be preaching that revival. We’re looking for the Lord to do some great things in all our hearts and lives.

So again, this has been a busy month, and it isn’t quite over yet. I’ll do my best to keep this blog updated a little better so that you, my loyal readers, will have something to read.

I did have a twitter feed on this site back in the day when it was known as jdsnow.net, but had removed it until recent days.

One of the reasons I’ve gotten interested in it again is because there are a ton of iPhone Twitter apps. I’ve found one, Schmap GeoTweeter (iTunes Link), that will post a short URL which maps your location on a Google map. It gathers the information from the GPS locater in the phone.

If you look to the right of my page, you’ll see 4 posts from my recent tweets. Starting now, if I update from my iPhone, you’ll see a link (like this one: http://schmap.me/xkq3yy/) that if you click on, you’ll see my location at the time of the update.

Pretty cool, eh?

One thing I learned a lot about was the networking portion of it.  One of the instructors showed the class a live VMware implementation (It may have been one that he has at home) and gave me an idea.  He had his ‘production’ network, his ‘internet’, or public, network, and a ‘DMZ’ network.  All of these were attached to physical NICs on his ESX host, but during the lecture we were told that a physical connection isn’t necessarily required.  So that gave me an idea.

I have a web server, database server, and file server.  My web server, of course, serves web sites and other miscellaneous web stuff.  For my more robust websites, it connects to my database server for data storage.  My file server is where I keep all my photos and application install files and things.  I’ve always known that any public-facing server (i.e., my web server which is accessible from the Internet) should be in a DMZ with its access to other parts of the network restricted.  It’s just simple security practice.  But I didn’t have a way to do it on my ESXi host.  Or so I thought.

I configured my virtual networking so that I had an Internet connection on one virtual switch (we’ll call them vSwitches) attached to my first NIC, my internal servers on another vSwitch using the other NIC (I only have the two NICs), and another vSwitch that is completely internal to the ESXi host.  It isn’t attached to any NIC or external switch or anything.  My Internet vSwitch is connected to my DSL router.  That’s the only thing on that vSwitch.  My internal vSwitch has all my servers on it.  Except for one.  My web server is on my DMZ vSwitch.

I’ve always liked the SmoothWall product (the free one – I don’t like paying for things I don’t have to).  Now I like it even more, because it does exactly what I want it to in this setup.  For my new firewall, I connected 3 virtual NICs to it, and put one NIC on each vSwitch.  I have a GREEN interface (my internal network), an ORANGE interface (My DMZ) and a RED interface (attached to the Internet).  Because the firewall is a virtual machine, that is all I need to be able to access my totally virtualized DMZ network.  Pretty clever.

To the left is a diagram of what my virtual network looks like. (Click it to see the full size screenshot)  For any of you that have had the pleasure of configuring or managing a virtual network, it should make total sense to you.  To anyone that is curious, drop me a line and I’ll explain in more detail if I can.

So Jacobs paid upwards of $3,000 for me to take this class so I could learn this simple (but clever) network strategy.

Yep, I’m a geek.  I’m fine with it though – I don’t have to ask for help with electronic stuff.

I’ve been playing around with iPhoto for the last few days, and it is actually fun to use rather than tedious like other photo management apps I’ve used. You can geotag photos and display a map with all of the places you’ve taken your photos. You can also use iPhoto’s built-in facial recognition and tag people’s faces in photos, sort of like Facebook’s photo tagging, but better. It recognizes the same faces in other photos and tags them appropriately.

The feature I want to talk about here, though, is iPhoto’s Flickr integration. As I understand it, it’s been an included feature in iPhoto for a while. But since this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned, it’s new to me.

I’ve played around with Flickr before, but never really gotten into it for different reasons at different times. I used to host my own gallery using Coppermine Photo Gallery, but didn’t keep up with it very well. It has great features, but it was another place I had to keep up with photos.

With iPhoto’s flickr integration, you can publish an album or set right from iPhoto. All in one place. Nice.

And others have said I needed more photos on my blog. Well, I’ve killed two birds with, well, 1 1/2 stones anyway. I added a Flickr widget to my sidebar over there on the right. So as I take more photos and import them into iPhoto for organization, I’ll publish them to Flickr as well for your viewing pleasure – they’ll show right up in my sidebar. Spring’s arrival has inspired me to get the camera out a little more than I have in the past, so I’ve added a few photos in the past few days.

Clicking on one of the thumbnails in my sidebar will open it up on my Flickr page. There you’ll be able to browse all of my uploaded photos.

So, for those of you who like my geeky posts, head on over and check it out!  I don’t have much content yet, but that will be added as time allows.  I have a few topics in mind, I just need to take the time to test what I’m planning to write about before I write anything on it.

Ubuntu is sporting a fresh new look on its front page as well.  Well, it has a nice little flash animation anyway.  It’s explaining all of the bigger features in the new release.  Go ahead and download – I’m sure you won’t be sorry.

— UPDATE

I now have a fully functioning Ubuntu 8.10 system.  Once word got out that it was ready, everybody began downloading and started slowing down all of the circuits.  But I finally got it, and installed it.  Installing the handful of security fixes that are already out takes a little bit of time because of how saturated the circuits are, but it works.  Installing new software using the Add/Remove utility on the Applications menu is the same – slow, but working.  I imagine it will take a few days to sort out while everyone downloads their copy.

I have, however, managed to get everything I need to get going.  I installed the 3D drivers for my nVidia card, and my 3D desktop is all working.  I installed the Advanced Desktop Effects Settings utility and tweaked them to my heart’s content.  I also installed Synergy from the Ubuntu repositories so that I could control my XP laptop from this machine as well.

So far everything is working completely as expected – flawless.  Unless, again, you count slow speeds at Ubuntu’s repositories to be flawed.  Don’t worry – that’ll settle down soon.

My only disappointment is that OpenOffice.org 3 wasn’t included.  2.4 is here, but 3 has been out for a few weeks now.  I suppose I understand, though – they didn’t want to introduce last-minute changes.  It is available for install, however, so I’m sure I’ll be remedying that in the not-so-distant future.

At that point, I tried several different systems, everywhere from simple Postfix IMAP/POP servers, to full-blown groupware suites.  I won’t take the time to list them all.  Some of them are free, some of them are not.

I decided that since I was able to use virtual machines (VMware has a free server product in case you’ve been living under a rock), it was time for me to implement a simple ActiveDirectory at home.  Just because I could.  It seemed logical to try out Exchange in this little lab of mine.  It worked well.  But as I moved my desktop/laptops over to Ubuntu, I needed something better than OWA through Firefox – OWA is no good without Microsoft’s junky ActiveX in case you’ve never tried it.

Here is where Zimbra comes in.  It was previously one of the systems I’d tried, and I liked it really well.  In fact, it may have been what I replaced when I installed Exchange.  I honestly can’t remember, but I can’t think of any other reason why I would’ve ditched it.  It’s that good – to me.

It offers pretty much everything Exchange/Outlook does, and it does it very smoothly, efficiently and prettily, if that’s a word.

Zimbra runs on Linux, which is a huge plus for me.  It was actually my main requirement for finding a new email system.  They offer a completely free, open-source version (which is what I’m using) which includes most, if not all, of the common features needed by pretty much anybody.  The Network Edition, which costs real money, offers things like Outlook integration, and Mac integration with utilities like iCal.  The Network Edition also includes features like over-the-air sync for most mobile devices.  For me, those would be cool to have, but I doubt I’ll be paying for their Network Edition any time soon.  The only thing that would be nice to have is a supported backup solution, but that are a couple of tried & tested methods to back up and restore the open source version, so I should still be covered there.

The web interface is all that I use now.  It beats Exchange OWA hands-down as far as the interface goes.  Functionality wins as well in my book – it has everything OWA has (Mail (duh), Address book, calendar, tasks, documents (replacement for notes)), but it also has what’s called a briefcase.  I didn’t think much about it until I had everything installed and running.  I looked at the briefcase and noticed I could upload pretty much any type of file that I wanted to.  It makes a great repository for files that I need available from wherever I’m at.  And this is all for free.

The best thing, to me, about Zimbra is that its web interface is completely AJAXified.  No ActiveX garbage, no browser-proprietary stuff, just plain, simple AJAX and solid HTML/Javascript.  This means it all looks the same no matter which browser you use.  I will say, that in my Firefox installs, I have most if not all of my ‘extra’ javascript stuff disabled in the settings.  It still all works great.  Oh, if you don’t know what AJAX is, it basically means the interface is much quicker and much, much more smooth.  You can almost forget you’re using a web browser for your email!

So if you host your own email and you’re looking for a system that handles it very well, Zimbra is definitely worth a look.

–UPDATE–

I forgot to mention that Zimbra has a pretty impressive list of not-so-small companies and organizations that use their suite either as an ISP’s email solution for its customers, or a company’s in-house email solution.