Server hosting
We have put an offer on another house. I am trying to figure out what to do about my server. We currently host our mail server and web server at our house. When we sell our house, and move in to the new house, I am thinking that there will be some time before we have the phone line and DSL installed. So I am trying to think of what to do about these servers. I was thinking that there are three options.
- Turn off the servers for the duration of the transition.
- Move the server to a co-location facility
- Move only the mail and web server to a VPS
Sereniti Home Networking
I saw a review of Sereniti Home Networking in the January 2006 Popular Mechanics. From the brief review, it looks like it is a standard broadband router, but they also charge users a monthly or yearly fee to keep the rules up to date.
The description of many of the security features looks like it depends on some software running on the PCs on the local network. Since it seems that all of this functionality is pretty standard, I wonder if they are just licensing some others companies software suite.
BetterSearch
I just installed the BetterSearch Firefox pluginextension. This is a pretty cool pluginextension, that enhances the results page from various search engines. Some of the features are:
- Displaying a small preview image of the page in the search results page.
- Adding a “Open in new Window” link
- And a “Wayback Machine” link
The one feature that I think is most interesting is the “Quick Preview” feature. This will show you the page in an iframe of the search results page.
[via Razvan Antonescu]
Technorati Tags: BetterSearch, Firefox
Blog Mad
Blog Mad is a new way to get traffic to your blog. It sounds like it will be similar to BlogExplosion where you can surf other blogs or play games to earn credits to increase the traffic for your blog.
Right now they are taking pre-launch signups for this, where they are giving credits for referrals and just signing up.
Technorati Tags: Blog Mad
V Cast Video
Since I enabled V Cast on my phone, so I don’t have to pay for data access when I use my phone as a bluetooth modem, I wanted to check out what content was available with V Cast. In their video selection, they have clips from several different news networks. Also they have some clips from The Daily Show. Our kids love the clips from Sesame Street.
I did find a “bug” if you use a bluetooth headset, you can not get the audio played through the headset. It will only play through the internal speaker. I have not tried a wired headset.
OGMT
In this post, I mentioned a java application that would create a audio profile of your iTunes. OGMT (OmniGraffle Musical Taste) is an applescript that will create a OmniGraffle document that represnt your musical taste.
Here is the the image from my iTunes library
[via TUAW]
Technorati Tags: AppleScript, iTunes, OGMT
Weblog API Primer
This post has a great description on the different XML-RPC APIs available for posting to blogging systems.
Technorati Tags: metaWeblog, MovableType, xmlrpc
Classic in .Mac
Installing the games on the kid’s computer this weekend was the first time that I had to run Classic in a long time. Since on all of other computers, I had deleted the Mac OS 9 system folder, I had to go and find one of my old Mac OS 9 CDs.
This was a pain, as I hadn’t used these CDs in several years, so it took me a while to find them. Also when I did find them, it was a pain to install it as I had to reboot the computer while booted from the CD and do a clean install.
I think that Apple should make a disk image available to their .Mac subscribers. This disk image would contain a Mac OS 9 system folder. It would only need to contain enough to allow Classic to run, but wouldn’t need to be able to boot a computer. This could be another benefit of being a .Mac subscriber, and to justify the $99/year cost.
Technorati Tags: .Mac, Classic
Simple Finder
When I set up the iMac for our kids, I wanted to use Simple Finder, to make it easier for the kids to use the computer. (And hopefully will prevent them from changing the configuration.) I noticed some interesting behavior.
- In Simple Finder Mode, you can not add items to the Dock. There is a Folder that is in the Dock named “My Applications” that contain aliases to the applications that the user has permission to run.
- I wasn’t able to give the user access to more than one of these AppleScript applications. I assume that this is caused because the application have the same creator code, and the preference screen is remember this, and not the location of the application.
I ended up just using a normal mode and added the AppleScripts to the Dock. I then disabled modification of the Dock.
Technorati Tags: Mac OS X
Playing games without CDs
Our kids got a refurbished iMac for Christmas. I also got them Didi & Ditto and a Reader Rabbit game. Both of these games require the CD to be mounted for them to be played.
I didn’t want to have to deal with CDs, as it always seems that CDs that the kids have access to end up getting scratched. So I created disk images from each of these CDs, and put them in a place where all users can have access to. Then I wanted to make sure that when the applications are launched the disk images were mounted.
