a picture is worth more then 300 words

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, music, semi-legal

My very good friend Steve Berg, challenged me to find a pre-release of Judas Priest’s new album,  Nostradamus, in under an hour.  The wager was simple, a 300 word or more post on the losers blog in honor of the winner. After searching high and low on the underside of the web, my usual music download locations were fruitless. I accept my lose Steve. Epic records has thwarted my efforts… this time.

Steve, we both agree that pictures are worth more then words, so I present the following picture in your honor.

LOLz!

Mac on my PC – LEO4ALL

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, internet, iPhone, iPod, Josh's Rambling, mac, semi-legal, software, tutorials

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.

The reason I back up my data

By Josh Highland in hardware, Josh's Rambling, software

Yesterday was one of those days. I woke up and turned on my Vista powered computer and I saw a blue screen of death staring back at me. I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach, and I knew this wasn’t going to be pretty.

I rebooted the machine and was greeted with a no “no system disk found” error. Awesome.

After about 20 minutes messing around in the BIOS, switching drives, cables and power around, I concluded that the Boot drive of my computer was dead. The BIOS wouldn’t even see it at all. DEAD. KAPUT. FIN.

The drive that died was a Western Digital Raptor, 10000 RPM, 74 GB drive. It’s an expensive drive to replace so I’m glad is was covered under warranty.

For most people, losing a hard drive is a devastating experience. For me, its an inconvenience.

A little background. I build this computer in december of 2006 in preparation for windows vista. All the drives are SATA, and the system was designed with data back up and redundancy in mind, I’ve blogged about it has save my ass before.

The redundancy starts with the machines architecture:

The boot drive (C:) is a small, and fast drive. The operating system and applications are installed on this drive. No working data or documents are ever stored on this drive.

For data storage, I use 2 large drives mirrored together using raid 1. This means that the computer only sees one drive (D:), but all activity happens to both drives. If one of the drives crashes, the other one is there as an instant back up with no loss. Its an expensive solution backup, but is critical in my opinion. All data is stored here. I have the systems users file (my documents, etc) set to use this drive.

External Back Up Drive 1 (X:) uses syncback to pull data from the Data drive (D:) every night at 3am, creating a recovery in case files get deleted from the data drive (D:) during the work day.

External Back Up Drive 2 (Y:) uses syncback to pull data from the Data drive (D:) every third night at 5am. This acts as a recovery drive for D: and X:. Drive X: also backs up my iTunes Catalog every night

To top is all off, I use a service called carbonite to create a real time back up of my data over the internet. At $50 a year, its worth it. If my house burns down, or my equipment is stolen, no amount of drives will keep my data save. Off site is the way to go.

So yes, losing the system drive (C:) means I will have to reinstall the Operating System, and my applications, but at the same time, I haven’t lost anything except the time with will take to get things up and running again.

In the mean time I’m going to try and get apple OS X Leopard running on my PC!

LifeStreaming Is Simple As Pie

By Josh Highland in internet, Josh's Rambling, php, software, tutorials, web 2.0

Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related.

I’m not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

Previously I had been using a tool called Last RSS, but I found that Last RSS could not handle ATOM feeds.

Digging into how SimplePie works, I found that I could merge several feeds together, sorted by post time, my first thought was to use this to aggregate and cache all the different music related news feeds that and going to add content to notpopular.com v2.5 (when ever I finish it). I started thinking about it a bit more and thought it would be cool to use SimplePie to mash together all of the different RSS feeds from the different social networks I am on.

It wasn’t that hard to use SimplePie and the various social networks to make something really cool.


//establish the feeds
$pownce = new SimplePie("$pownceRSS_url");
$flickr = new SimplePie("$flickrRSS_url");
$twitter = new SimplePie("$twitterRSS_url");
$digg = new SimplePie("$diggRSS_url");
$youtube = new SimplePie("$youtubeRSS_url");


//merge them all together!
$merged = SimplePie::merge_items(array($pownce, $flickr, $twitter, $digg, $youtube));

Then all you have to do is look over each item in $merged, and output the appropriate info you want.

You can see what I built over at www.JoshHighland.com

One thing I really found great was the API that was on the SimplePie site.

After I put this all together, I found out that there is a term for what I had just built. People are calling them “LifeStreams“, which is a very appropriate term. I thought I had invented something, but guess LifeStreaming is like fire or a spear, given enough time people all over the place will discover it on their own.

I encourage you do set up a LifeStream for yourself and post the URL in the comments below. It’s fun!

My LifeStream: www.JoshHighland.com

UPDATE (10/29/08) :
I was having trouble with my feed from twitter dying after a while. It would only fetch it once, then nothing.I found the answer to my problem on the simplePie blog, http://simplepie.org/blog/2008/08/16/twitter-bug/. I followed the instructions and commented out the If statement on lines 1583-1586, and the twitter feed started to work again. I hope that twitter updates their RSS service so hacks like this aren’t needed.