WTWD Blog


Drupal Camp
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Sat, November 21st
tagged with: austin, drupal

I went to DrupalCamp Austin this past week, and let me just say... awesome. There were some great speeches, some cool tools, and some awesome learning going on.

My two favorite classes were the keynote speeches by far. Saturday's keynote gave an interesting viewpoint on finding your Drupal-based niche within business. Using examples like lullabots, Volacci, and Mustard Seed Media, Ben Finklea spoke about how finding a niche is what makes a business hit their growth spurts, especially if you are the first or best to do it. Sunday's keynote was given on cloud computing,...  read more...

Selling Out
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Sat, November 21st
tagged with: apple, iphone, mobile

Ok, so I finally have an iPhone. After using the broken/spare 2G iPhone for a weekend, I saw that there was more functionality in that non-working-as-a-phone iPhone than both my Windows Mobile phones put together.

The app store is a truly amazing feat, not because it has tons of apps, but because no one else has done it this well. Windows Mobile (as of this writing) does not have an app store. The carriers (Sprint, AT&T, etc.) have their own "stores" setup, but the apps in there are useless. With WinMo your options are either find the app somewhere on the net, or go without. This is what makes the iPhone a compelling device- not because of the speed or design of the phone (which is better), but because this is no longer a...  read more...

Getting U-Verse? Don't.
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Wed, May 20th
tagged with: at&t, dsl, internet, u-verse

I was browsing AT&T's site the other day after a salesman came to my door asking if I was interested in U-Verse now that it was available in my area. The cost for internet was too good to pass up- $35/mo for 6Mbit/1Mbit (even though the salesman sold it as 6Mbit/3Mbit).

Two days before the installation is to take place, I received a phone call from a woman who speaks extremely broken English telling me the install cannot be done for another week. Fine. I'll wait.

On the day of the installation, there was no tech in sight during the installation window of 2-4pm. I had received no word except an automated "We hope you enjoy your new service" call shortly after the window. I waited an hour to give him the benefit of the...  read more...

Server Design & Setup
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Tue, May 12th
tagged with: Linux, LVM, RAID, server, ubuntu

There was an interesting question posed on Slashdot today, about internal hard drives and storage. This one simple question poses a plethora of other questions, mainly about the best way to retain data and access it in an efficient manor.

Before I give an answer, I should first disclose my own setup. In my server (Dual 800MHz P3 w/ 3GB RAM), I have five drives installed: one 40GB, two 500GB, and two 1TB's. The 40GB drive is currently the system drive, which does little more than temporary storage and system/home folders.

The two 500GB drives are setup as a RAID1 set, which means the drives mirror each other. Because the PCI SATA controller...  read more...

The Real Meaning of Free
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Thu, April 30th

Free. It's something we see everyday, whether it's buy-one-get-one free, free samples, free with purchase, etc.

Today, Microsoft announced that they would be giving Windows 7 away free for the first year.

This, in my opinion, is disturbing. What this tells me is that Vista (the successor to XP) is an absolute and utter flop, and Microsoft knows people are starting to look elsewhere for their operating system.

Personally, I run both Ubuntu and Linux Mint for my main machines, Windows XP for my media centers (running MediaPortal...  read more...

The iPhone
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Tue, April 21st

The iPhone. Now that my wife has one, I can really see why Apple turned the mobile phone market upside down.

The device really is a good product. The touch screen is absolutely light years ahead of anything HTC has put out, and the OS that it runs is worlds better than Windows Mobile.

I just have one problem with the devices, and that is iTunes. Apple's iTunes is quite possibly the most annoying, bloated, resource-hogging excuse for a media player.

In addition, I have had to reset the iPhone configuration once, losing all of the apps that were installed on the phone. I can re-download these and not pay any more (since they are already tied to the account), but there is no clear way to re-download all of the apps...  read more...

Syncing Calendars
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Tue, April 21st

Two weeks ago my wife received an iPhone as a gift from my folks. Now that my wife has essentially entered the smartphone realm of mobile phones, it was time that she takes advantage of having the features and a data plan.

My wife set up her e-mails with no problem. The iPhone has a lot of built-in connectors to the popular web-based e-mail systems. However, web-based calendar systems seem to be... less popular. Personally, I find Google Calendar to be the best solution out there, as it has support for multiple calendars, a great AJAX interface, and the ability to connect and sync your...  read more...

OpenOffice.org
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Tue, April 21st

If you haven't used it, OpenOffice.org is a great product. For me, it has completely replaced MS Office, and is more familiar than MS Office 2007. What makes the product so great is the value/cost ratio. Using OO.o, I can view, edit , and save Excel and Word files, as well as many other formats. But the cost? $0. Free. Zip. Nada.

How is this possible? How is the software free without pirating it? Well, OO.o is released under a license that allows for you, the end user, to have the source code for the software to modify as you please.

There will be some naysayers that throw up the "support" argument: who do you call when you need support for an open source software? My answer? Google. When I used MS products I called MS...  read more...

Blogs
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Mon, April 20th
tagged with: blogs, content, drupal

Looking to setup a blog? Here are some things to consider:

What do you want it to look like?
You can use your current Facebook or MySpace page, but there will be little control over how the pages look. Similarly, you can use Blogger or Wordpress.com to setup a blog, but there are limited templates you can use to setup how the blog looks. Alternatively, you can use Drupal, Joomla!, or Wordpress (the software) and make the site look exactly like you want. But there are downsides to this...

Who controls the content?
Do you really want Facebook or MySpace having control over your content (i.e. pictures, posts, video, etc.)? I know I don't. Blogger and Wordpress.com will offer a better term of service, but how much...  read more...

Media Centers
    Posted by Posted by steve on on Fri, April 3rd

     I've been doing a great deal with media centers the past few weeks, and I've come to one conclusion: they all need a better networked database setup. In my opinion, Mediaportal does it best. MP unfortunately runs on Windows, but it runs extremely well and there is an excellent community that develops skins and plugins for it. My two favorite plugins are the MP-TVSeries and Moving Pictures.

     MP-TVSeries allows you to select certain folders on your local machine or network that contain TV shows. If they are named in a coherent manner (i.e. [series name].S[season number]E[episode number] or [series name] - S[season number]E[episode number] ), MP-TVSeries will grab a...  read more...

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