All posts by Jack Kozik

St Petersburg Waterfront Walk

January 30, 2013Jack's Travel2013, Florida, St. Petersburg, Waterfront WalkJack Kozik

I had business meetings in St Petersburg, Florida, staying at the Vinoy Renaissance Hotel. After my first full day of meetings, I went for a stroll along the St Petersburg Waterfront Walk.

I started walking South on Bay Shore Dr, then I turned left onto 2nd Ave and followed the street out onto the St Petersburg Pier. I had a light dinner on the 5th floor of the landmark inverted pyramid-shaped building. I took some nice twilight city scape photos, then walked back.

Along the way, I walked by Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of History, The Dali Museum, and the Chihuly Museum — the St Petersburg Waterfront Walk features the arts.

At The Pier restaurant, the server told me about how it’s going to be shut down any day. The city is doing major construction, closing The Pier until 2015. Checking the city web site, The Pier will stay open through May.

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Consumer Electronics Show 2013 / CES2013

January 18, 2013Jack's Travel2013, CES, Consumer Electronics Show, Las VegasJack Kozik

My company had a large booth at the the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. I was honored to be invited to attend as a Subject Matter Expert for some of my companies products. Many of our customers were at CES2013, and I was part of scheduled and impromptu meetings.

I stayed at the Palazzo Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. It was very nice, high-end luxury hotel. My company booked me in a high-end suite. I am sure we must have gotten a good discount — because normally, this hotel would be way too fancy for our normal business trips.

The Palazzo is new to me. It is located adjacent to and behind the famous Venetian Hotel located on the Las Vegas Strip. Once you enter the hotel, the two hotels appear to seamlessly tie together. Really very nice.

The tradeshow was huge. Over 150,000 attendees. I was last in Las Vegas a few years ago at the CTIA (Wireless Industry) tradeshow. It had 50,000 attendees. I thought CTIA was big; CES is huge! The biggest challenge for attendees is getting from one building to another; the bus system worked pretty well, expect for the first day, when a traffic accident made a 15 minute bus ride into a 45 traffic jam.

Samsung’s CES2013 Trade Show Booth — Huge!!

Since I was mostly in meetings, I didn’t get a chance to see much of the CES show. The biggest buzz was around 4K TVs (OLED w/4times the resolution of today’s HD TVs). The consumer businesses had the biggest booth, and I was really impressed by the size of Samsung’s. Also, to their credit, both INTEL and Qualcomm had excellent booths, even though they are just integrated circuit chip company’s… all the new mobile phones have Qualcomm chips inside, and everything else has INTEL.

As an amateur photographer, I loved seeing all of the Nikkor lens on display at the Nikon booth. Everything in their portfolio was there and they had a really nice setup to let you test shoot the telephoto lens.

Install Apache web server on Windows 7 with php

December 11, 2012Web ProgrammingApache, httpd, php, Windows 7Jack Kozik

Here’s the steps I followed to install Apache web server on Windows 7 with php.

I have been running an application on a Windows XP PC for years. The application was web enabled on top of Apache for Windows. This note captures the steps to move my application over to my Win7 PC; since I’ve done this before, this should be easy. Well no, I had some bumps and these notes are to help me for next time.

For starters, I decided to follow the nice how-to found at Badprog.

1. Install Apache httpd.

Download from here
For Network Domain, I entered my domain name.
For Server Name, I entered my private IP address, 192.168.x.x
I verified my setup, by trying http://192.168.x.x. Look for “It Works!”

.2. Install PHP

Download from here. I used VC9 x86 Thread Safe (2012-Nov-21 21:22:38), v5.4.9
unzip and copy to C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP
rename folder to php-5.4.9

3. Configure

C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf

 LoadModule php5_module "C:/Program files (x86)/\
 PHP/php-5.4.9/php5apache2_2.dll"
 LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so
 LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
 AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
 # for .htaccess
 AllowOverride All
 # for dir_module
 DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
 <Directory "C:/public_html">
 Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf
 # at end of file:
 PHPIniDir "C:/Program Files (x86)/PHP/php-5.4.9"

In same directory create a .htpasswd file
In c:\public_html, create file phptest.php

 <?php
 phpinfo();
 ?>

create file .htaccess

AuthUserFile "C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/.htpasswd"
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName EnterPassword
AuthType Basic require user j****k

verify http://192.168.100.153/phptest.php
C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php-5.4.9:
- rename php.ini-development -> php.ini

 date.timezone = "America/Chicago"
 ForceType application/x-httpd-php

Key stuck point for me when setting up my Apache Web Server on Windows 7:

Remember: restart httpd with “Run as Administrator” !!

Whenever the httpd.conf file is changed you need to restart the Apache web server. Just selecting and running Restart doesn’t work, except if you run it as an Administrator. From the Start menu, find Restart, the right-mouse click it, and select “Run as Administrator.” It took me two hours to figure this out. Since my old installation was on Windows XP, I never had this issue.

4. Configure SSL

edit file: “C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.con”

 DocumentRoot "c:/public_html"
 Servername cisco163.kozikfamily.net:443
 SSLCertificateFile "C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/cisco163_kozikfamily_net.crt"
 SSLCertificateKeyFile "C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/cisco163.kozikfamily.net.key"
 SSLCertificateChainFile "C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/cisco163_kozikfamily_net.ca-bundle"

#Because of syntax error on Windows:
SSLSessionCache "shmcb:C:/Progra\~2/Zend/Apache2/logs/ssl_scache(512000)"

Walk Jackson Capitol area – State House, Governor’s Mansion, War Memorial

December 8, 2012Jack's Travel2012, Jackson, Mississippi, MS, WalkingJack Kozik

I was in Jackson on business. This was my first visit to the state of Mississippi, and I was looking forward to walk Jackson Capitol area.

I parked at the State Capitol, I walked around the grounds, I then made my way over to the Old State Capitol, now a museum, then walked a little further to the Governor’s Mansion, then headed back. The Jackson Capitol Area is a nice compact area in the historic downtown section of Jackson.

Jackson Capitol Area Sites

On my walk, I saw the following: USS Mississippi. Figurehead of Battleship, Sillers Building, Carroll Gartin Justice Building (Supreme Court), Mississippi Veterans Monument, State of Mississippi Medal of Honor Recipients, Veterans Monument, Secretary of State Office, …

And, the Liberty Bell replica, Memorial to the Women of the Confederacy, Lamar Life Building, War Memorial Building, Old Capitol Museum, Confederate Monument, St. Andrews Episcopal Cathedral, Mississippi Governor’s Mansion, Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle, and more.

At this time of day, the downtown area appeared to be pretty empty. There were cars at the capitol area and near some law offices, but for the most part, restaurants, shopping, and other tourist type activities were found in other parts of town. This area is historic and architecturally interesting and I recommend a short visit.

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