I’m going to hold off from posting a review of Media Temple’s (dv) (VPS) plan for another date, probably after I’m completely happy with the setup and I have some more experience with how they handle support and uptime.
So far the support has been outstanding. Currently I’m on the base dedicated virtual plan that (mt) offers but without Plesk. This was a major requirement for me in moving to (mt). Thanks to their awesome support they provisioned my system fairly quickly, considering it’s out of the ordinary option for their plans.
Right now I’m learning from a mistake I made when I first setup the box. I should have not rushed off of Spry (even though they were breaking at the time) and instead took my time to upgrade to CentOS 5 because of some issues with the older release.
MediaTemple right now is shining, they’ve given me another (dv) to setup and upgrade “correctly” and then I’ll be able to cancel my current (dv) after I migrate over to the new one.
This time around I’ll hopefully documenting a lot more, so here come the CentOS how-tos for Media Temple dvs
One of the first things I did on my Media Tempe (dv) was install webmin because I’m a huge fan of easy it let’s you manage your web/server, e.g. web interface to quickly change config files or restart particular services without having to login through SSH.
A more official description:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.
Add the following section to /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Install GPG key/signature by running
# rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
Run
# yum install webmin
Your webmin should now be available at
http://your.ip.address:10000/
or
https://your.ip.address:10000/
and you can login using your root account.
I would highly recommend the stressfree theme for webmin, it makes it much easier to navigate. Also, Virtualmin is a must if you manage a lot of domains, it “supports the creation and management of Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS domains, MySQL databases, and mailboxes and aliases with Sendmail or Postfix”.
We’ve had the Tivo HD for a few weeks now and this post has waited just as long. I initially wanted to post about the unpacking, setup and all it’s features; like a real review. Instead I’m going to make this short since the Tivo HD has been exhaustively reviewed around the web already.
Setup:
In order to get HD you’ll either need an OTA HD tuner or HD cable cards from your cable provider. I called our cable provider shortly after the online order and they stated all I needed to do was pick the two cards up from the local store, and as expected that was completely wrong. TW requires that someone to come out and spend about 1.5 hours sitting there waiting for the cards to activate after spending the first five minutes inserting the cards into the TivoHD and calling “home base”.
The experience of the cable card install wasn’t the best through Time Warner, especially since I had to call twice for them to reset the cards which resolved one card from not picking up our premium channels but we then had to have another tech come out in between sunrise and sunset to do nothing but call and get the second card to reset so the channels would show.
It also turns out that the techs for TW in our area do not work for TW directly, they’re just on contract with the company. I found this out because initially they said they don’t install cable cards on anything but TV sets. The guys were nice so they went ahead but I could see this being a huge problem since TW is required to provide cable cards but the contracted companies have policies of their own.
Luckily our cards are not Scientific America cable cards since a lot of people are having issues with artifacts and blocking. Time Warner gave us motorolla cards.
Use:
It’s a Tivo and that’s why I bought it. It’s very easy to use and very responsive. The only thing I wish they would add is PIP for the Tivo menu, that’s something I miss on the old TW moxi box and it’s just annoying to leave a show in order to get a season pass setup. With that aside it’s wonderful, did I mention it’s easy to use. The ease of use can be contributed not only by it’s navigation or season passes but it’s other features, e.g. suggestions.
I’m very surprised with the capacity the 160GB drive can hold, we have 98 suggested shows that Tivo has recorded for us and another 4 hours of HD content. It’s not like we’ll ever watch that much but the wonderful thing is if we sat down to watch TV and we had nothing pre-recorded the chances are we’re going to find something we like. Even a show we’ve never heard of could be suggested and it would turn out great.
Tivo Tranfers:
One of the best features, that we’re using a lot of since we have our Apple TV, is the ability to transfer the recordings to a computer and then export them for “archival” or playback on other devices, like an iPod. We use this a lot for Avery’s shows, this way she’s able to watch he show while I’m on the computer with her. It works on the mac BTW.
Conclusion:
If you want a PVR and you have HD I would strongly recommend a Tivo HD. The cable boxes I’ve dealt with in the past are slow and very clunky. The cost is of the box is $299 msrp but just a few days after the release I was able to purchase mine through Circuit city at $260 so I’m sure they’ll be lower this holiday. The one thing you need to expect is the subscription cost, it’s about the price of the HD box rental from your cable company (about $13). For us since we already have a Tivo the second is discounted to $7 a month (our first was already specially discounted so we’re not paying more then $15 a month).
Tivo is also actively developing new features through it’s beta programs, which I may or may not be a part of.
After finally setting up Trac and SVN on my new server I’ve moved all my projects off Google Code hosting. But instead of checking in all of the code to the new repositories I updated all of the theme and plugin pages. So the problem, you’ll not be able to download anything until tonight when I get around to updating the repositories. Unless you just want to head over to GCode (link above) where all the latest versions are, plugins don’t count.
Currently I’m planning to keep all of my plugins on extend but if it’s a major plugin like Search Everything I’m making a trac project to make it easier to manage. I’ll be able to do betas there too. Linking plugins to wordpress.org’s extend is almost a requirement now if you want any kind of good exposure or you want to be involved with automatic plugin updates whenever wordpress roles that feature out.
All of my themes will have it’s very own trac project, e.g. iScattered. I had thought Google Code was going to work best but after all the work of getting trac and svn installed and thinking about manageability of two project homes I deleted had to break off of GC.
This whole week I wanted to post about each theme; describing what changed or didn’t change, a showcase almost while updating their project homes and pages at the same time but it didn’t work out since I had to migrate servers Tuesday. I’m going to push it off, hopefully next week will work out but either way the code will be up soon and if you can’t wait just go here.
I’d recommend reading this illogical post from Duncan at Techcrunch and then rally around Matt in the comments section.
After reading all of Duncan’s and Matt’s comments I had to throw my two-cents in,
Duncan: I don’t see your point. You mention that Matt can’t have it both ways but by writing this article and placing *your* issues into a “gray area” you’re rewarding your terms with two-ways to lean; neither for or against, making you’re actually opinion irrelevant. And isn’t this just an opinion piece? I don’t see any facts–that are correct–, it’s all lambasting for self-promotion, similar to your friends at Vallywag.
No matter how many times you’ll be told that your statements are false and irrational you’ll always be clinging to that “gray area” message.
In your response to the question you pose to Matt, “WTF did someone do to you BTW? Where did this hatred come from?”. What exactly made you criticize Matt–and by association the entire wordpress community of developers and supporters–? All without one ounce of research of how to properly run a business through OSS, the business model of automattic and how Matt runs it, the history of wordpress or even get to know how spam works? Instead of reporting you glued your self-important thoughts together and lambasted the very person AND the community that built the infrastructure for you to get paid from.
I find this post so disturbing as D’s trying to associate taking advantage users by placing paid text ads on released code is the same as Matt providing a service through Wordpress.com and Akismet. He really needs to step back and learn a few things, specifically:
The Blogroll: it’s there as an example for users, is easily managable and provides a credit to the hard 
working developer community. Since Matt works very hard at wordpress.org he deserves it like the others. Lastly how does he make money off of those links again?
Akismet: Is entirely a service. Yes the free Akismet users contribute to the whole but they also benefit is the entire community. Matt is not holding back the perfect solution to stop all spam for every wordpress user, he’s just providing an added value to the paid users of Akismet because it includes a service level that the free addition could not support.
Wordpress.com: Charging for an extra service level through Wordpress.com doesn’t leverage the community nor the code-base. It’s a service level agreement that you’re paying for, similar to Akismet.
Update: Another comment.
I’m officially on mediatemple now and after getting my VPS or (dv) cleansed of plesk I noticed Yum was not installed. I’m planning on doing a full writeup after a few days but for now I’ll get this tutorial on how to install Yum on CentOS 4 out of the way.
First off you’ll need to install a key from the centos mirrors,
# rpm –import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
Next let’s start installing yum,
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
Retrieving http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
libxml2-python is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
python-elementtree is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
python-sqlite is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
rpm-python is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
urlgrabber is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
As you can tell there are a few dependencies that need to be installed first. If you’re going to copy and paste these commands be careful,
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-python-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/rpm-python-4.3.3-22_nonptl.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
Wow that was a lot, now finally yum,
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
And you should now have yum installed and ready to run. I won’t tell you how to use yum but the first thing I did was run,
# yum update
Purchased the ATH-ANC7s a couple weeks back and they’re the first pair of “real” headphones I’ve ever purchased over $40. At first I was looking at the Bose QC headphones but I couldn’t rationalize a $300 purchase. Instead I bought some Sony headphones a year ago and they’ve suited me enough to not really care too much. Now, work has been a little loud and it’s only going to get more chatery around my office so I started looking again only to be convinced that $300 is just too much for headphones–again–, even if I’m going to have them on for 6 hours a day x 5 days a week.
Then I read an article in Wired magazine reviewing noise canceling headphones and they rated the Bose QC 2s at 8/10 and their pick for best noise canceling headphones was these Audio-Techincas at $240 list. Soon after reading I went straight to Amazon and noticed the $130 tag, then eBay and found Amazon’s deal was huge so I ordered them through Prime.
After 2 weeks of using them I’m loving them. The sound is crisp and powerful, they sound so good that every other stereo that before sounded okay now sounds like crap.
The set is very comfortable. The design makes you want to put the headset on backwards but after putting them on I had to think the unique design contributed to comfortableness. The cups fit perfectly over my ears and the padding never irritates, they do make a suction after a long time of wear (if you have very short hair on the sides).
The quality of the headphones are notable. It comes with a great soft/hard case, especially if you’re planning to using them for travel. My one complaint, the cord it comes with is too short, at only 6 feet (standard) I’m in the need of buying a longer one. But with the set having a jack it allows for getting a male-male cord for use and let’s you use the noise canceling without any cord.
The Noise Canceling is good. I had wanted it to work perfect, not allowing anything in but as expected only the consistent ambient noise was canceled out. Something I didn’t expect was, voices actually sound crisper. At first I thought these were a waste because of the noises and voices I still heard but I found myself trying to listen for noise rather then just using them. So after a few hours I was comfortable enough to the point that I couldn’t even hear the phone sitting next to me with just some light music playing.
Overall, the phones are great. Wired rated them at 9/10 and I’d have to agree although I’m completely biased. And at such a large price discount they’re definitely worth it. I’ve already purchased a set for a fellow employee and I’d suggest anyone thinking of noise canceling headphones to get these now while you can.
I just finished updating all of my classic and K2 themes, what a chore. I’m looking to release them this week; hopefully tomorrow. The reason for not releasing them now: I need to post about the changes, get the word out through some posts and setup repos.
I’m going to have to decide tomorrow if I want to continue with Google code for all of my themes (I already have a few there now) or wait until I get my new server up and running. Either way I’ll zip them up if I plan to wait.
One thing I will be doing is depracating Sca4ered.2, I like the theme but it’s a mess of code. I saw a lot of code that wasn’t clean in all of my themes, remnants of the early years, but this theme stood out like a sore thumb. Don’t look it’s bad, and instead of cleaning it up I’m just going to let it die, maybe Google code could salvage it if anyone wanted to contribute–but I highly doubt it–.
It looks like it will be 1.5 week, since I’ve versioned all of my themes to 1.5 and it turns out a few of my plugins last week reached the 1.5 milestone too.
Turns out that the older iDVD themes aren’t compatible with the new iDVD and since I had every version of iDVD it was causing iDVD to just show a splash screen an then shutdown. In order to fix the issue you need to clear out the old themes and then trash an application support folder in your user directory.
Step 1) Delete all old themes. Themes are located in your system’s library folder-
/Library/Application Support/iDVD/Themes
Only theme folders iDVD 1, iDVD 2, and iDVD 4 need to be deleted.
Step 2) Delete the ‘Installed Themes’ directory here,
username/library/application support/idvd
Step 3) Start iDVD.
To continue on with yesterday’s post about creating a tumbleblog with Google Reader I decided there’s other ways to aggregate my shared items so just now I just created what I’m calling a my Web Mix Tape, it’s simply a Yahoo pipe that aggregates all of my feeds and throws them into one RSS tumbleblog.
At the same time I thought it was appropriate that I added the feed generated for the pipe to my site and I’m using my latest plugin Add RSS for browser detection.
So go check out Web Mix Tape, I know it’s supposed to be cheesy.
And while you’re at it try to fix the issue of the pipe taking out the embed tags for video. I might switch feeds if I can’t figure it out because right now I wouldn’t read that feed when I could just read my shared items which embeds video perfectly.
