Category computers

Somewhere around two weeks from now I am going to be replacing my webserver. I will be moving from the current machine^† bornslippy.nuxx.net to the shiny, mostly-new^‡ rez.nuxx.net.

Because I will have both servers in place for the time being, I hope to make this transition as smooth as possible. If things go as planned, I will be able to move things over bit by bit without anyone really noticing. As usual, notifications about such work will be posted here, and anyone who I’m hosting should know how to get a hold of me outside of LJ if anything really bad crops up.

With any luck, the new server will provide enough of a performance boost that I’ll be able to run v2 of my favorite Gallery software and that image transformations and such will happen much more quickly. Not to mention SpamAssassin filtering and random DB stuff…

Anyway, yeah. I’m excited. Now I need to get the basement clean so I can get it back on the bench and finish testing it. Right now it’s in the rack burning in…

^† Pentium II 450, 384MB RAM, 2x 80GB disks (mirrored), Intel EtherExpress Pro 100 NIC
^‡ Dual Pentium III 1 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 2x 120GB disks (mirrored root), 4x 120GB disks (RAID0+1 data volume), Broadcom 5701-based NIC which hands off IP/TCP/UDP checksumming to hardware.

[Cross posted to and …]

So I’ve got some ideas about migrating my parents from Windows XP to OS X, specifically on a Mac mini. I’m really thinking there might be some issues here, so I was wondering how people here would address such problems:

· First, I’m thinking that a Mac mini with all options except a DVD writer would be purchased, and 1GB of RAM installed. With US Student discount, this would run about $1K. Price isn’t huge here…

· I feel that OS X requires a user to have a greater understanding of the concept of filesystems, directory hierarchy, and how to manage storage of things. For example, under XP users typically only have to save things where they default to (eg: My Documents, My Pictures, etc). Under OS X, defaults are often the last folder viewed.

· Installing applications on OS X isn’t as simple as it typically is on Windows. For most applications a user has to just pop in the CD, click through the buttons, and then look for the application somewhere under Start. On OS X a user often has to drag the application to the Applications folder — and the right one at that.

· OS X is (obviously) non-MDI. For those most familiar with a typically MDI environment such as Windows, this is often a huge slap-in-the-face change. However, for someone such as my parents (who this machine would be for) who normally run Windows applications maximized, with the single menu bar at the top which changes with app focus, this might not be such a big deal.

So, yeah, I am babbling a lot here, but I’m really wondering how easy the transition would be. Additionally, I’m trying to determine if there would be any benefit to purchasing a Mac mini for them. I can see the iPhoto integration and such being a good thing, along with the quiet machine and the nice hardware warranty. But the retraining issues outweigh the benefits?

Hopefully someone here who does a lot more professional photography than me can answer this.

In short, how do you archive your digital originals? Currently I upload them to a photo gallery which keeps original copies, then just back that up. However, I find that sometimes I may take ten or fifteen shots and only want to upload three. I’m thinking that it would be prudent to start saving all images, just in case some may come in handy down the line.

So, how do you do it? I’m thinking that maybe using a directory structure with all photos taken in a particular month dropped in there. Then all I need to remember is the month if I want to dig something up.

I’ve also been thinking about is captioning all photos and embedding this data in either a EXIF or IPTC header. The problem I’ll have is that I’ll need to somehow re-caption around 7000 images in order to bring things up to date. However, this would ensure that as long as the original image is kept intact, the caption won’t be lost.

So, what do you do?

[Cross posted to and …]

Anyone want to chip in some advice on this weird problem? It seems that for the last while, each time I wake my PowerMac^† from sleep, it plays some jazz. Good jazz, but unknown jazz.

And yes, I’m serious.

What happens is that a few seconds after waking up I start hearing some quality jazz being played out of the normal audio out. Then, just about 10 seconds of music play before it suddenly stops and the machine functions as normal.

Because I’m so confused / flabbergasted by the problem, I made a video of it happening. Feel free to download the video from here. It’s a 5.9MB h.264 video just simply dumped from my camera then encoded…

Running apps that could maybe do this are iTunes (it’s not playing, and there is a different kind of music currently queued), QuickTime (nothing open), iChat, and some Vidi (TV tuner app, but the audio isn’t the currently tuned channel on the external tuner).

I’m going to go attempt to nail down what it is, just because I’m really, really confused. Google’s turning up nothing, and I don’t have a single piece of music that is the same as what’s being played.

^†Original Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5 / 2x 160GB disks / 1.5GB RAM / OS X 10.4.1

UPDATE: Problem solved. It seems that RabbitRadio, a poorly functioning Dashboard widget for streaming NPR stations, was the cause. See, I installed RabbitRadio and had some issues with it not working for more than a brief period of time. Well, it seems that each time I wake my machine from sleep, it (while running in Dashboard) was firing up and playing my selected NPR station (WDET) until it crapped out — for right about 10 seconds.

Conveniently when I was doing the sleep-wake-sleep-wake cycles and killing off apps, one of the periods of audio happened to be Ed Love‘s (scroll down) distinctive voice, whom I immediately recognized from WDET. It just so happens that the times when I wake my computer since installing RabbitRadio have happened to all be after 7pm on weeknights, during Mr. Love’s show.

I still don’t know why RabbitRadio doesn’t work right for me, nor why it would actually start playing whenever I woke my Mac, but the problem has at least been solved. Part of me is rather disappointed, though. I was sort of hoping there was some deep mystery or easter egg which caused my Mac to spout forth really quality music. Ah well.

I don’t know if anyone who reads this actually cares, but while I was initially taken back* by vinum‘s non-functionality on FreeBSD 5.4, it turns out that gmirror is quite a bit snazzier and thus far seems far, far easier to use. I’m also looking forward to combining it with gstripe to do RAID0+1 once I have the ability to hook four large disks up to this machine all at once.

gvinum exists as a replacement for vinum which hooks into geom, but it isn’t documented very well yet, and (at least in this case) I can’t see a reason to use it.

If anyone is interested in giving it a try, this simple series of steps shows just how easy it is to get a geom/gvinum-based mirrored root disk is. Gone are the days of installing to one disk then using this to bootstrap two more with vinum, a faked disk label with an ‘a’ partition that overlapped the vinum partition, etc.

After this finishes writing the mirror to the second disk I might try the standard tests… Pulling a disk, bringing it back into a sync’d mirror, etc. Or maybe I’ll go to bed.

At least this is getting done.

* I gave up on things for almost a week, thinking I had some weird hardware quirkyness because every other time I’d do a ‘vinum start’ the machine would dump core.

If there is anyone who reads this who knows anything about writing widgets for OS X’s Dashboard, could you take a look at this widget and let me know why it’s not working?

I really, really just don’t know why.

Or, I guess if you just want to try it and see what happens, that wouldn’t be a bad idea either… For me it just.doesn’t.work.

Thanks!

http://www.nuxx.net/files/Liz%20and%20Steve.wdgt.zip

Yeah, I forgot how long it takes to upgrade the package database on a FreeBSD box.

This also means that I can’t do *anything* towards getting IMAP working right now. Guh.

And for some reason courierlogger didn’t compile/install before, so courier wouldn’t start.

Eh, I’ll just keep hammering on it.