We’ve got a bunch of USB hard disks at home that are used for backup and media storage. I’m fairly good about plugging them in and running backup utilities (rsync and SyncToy, mostly) but it is a bit of a pain. So I spent an hour looking at options for network addressable storage.
You can now buy a USB to Ethernet dongle that shares disks over the network. They come in a variety of flavours: feature-low Newlink [£26] which says Windows only; Addonics [£37] which has a load of extra features such as BitTorrent, iTunes, SMB/Samba, XBox media (great review at crunchgear.com). I’m not sure if you can put a USB hub on either of these and access multiple drives.
Another alternative would be to take the drives out of their USB enclosures (they’re usually just laptop or 3.5″ drives) and put them into a NAS enclosure. I found these enclosures on ebay for as low as £13. Again, prices and features vary for them — the Newlink offering at Amazon gets decent reviews for the price [£27].
The final goal is to create a multi-disk box with RAID on an Ubuntu Server. I’ll use that for all backups, media and remote storage. By setting up port forwarding on a home router I’ll be able to access them from anywhere in the world. I’ll wait until we’ve moved into our new home before working on that.
I’ve just figured out how to post from my shared items in Google Reader (and this blog) to my Facebook profile. Log in to Facebook and click on the profile tab. Under the “share” button is a “settings” link. Click on that link and you should see the Google Reader option there (and Digg, Pandora, Blog/RSS, Flickr, Picasa, and much more).
Reflecting on people and places I’ve visited the home desktop PC seems to be a thing of the past. Now you can buy tricked out consoles for gaming, e-readers, lightweight netbooks and smart phones for connectivity on the move. Why would we want desktops in our homes?
This morning I was listening to a discussion with Leo Laport on the TWiT podcast [from 3 May] in which they were discussing Apple’s aquisition of chip designer P.A. Semi and what this meant. On the Apple jobs site a quick search for hardware turns up a bunch of new posts for hardware engineering positions so there is movement in that space. I subscribe to the theory that Apple will start designing their own chips for mobile devices with the longer term view of dropping desktops and eventually laptops (they just started with Intel chips in desktops/laptops so I don’t think they’ll design for those).
What the TWiT podcasters didn’t pursue was where the long view of this takes us. Underlying the chat of so long to the desktops are the first trickles of pervasive and ubiquitous computing. To paraphrase Mark Weiser, it is certain that computational machinery is disappearing into the fabric of everyday life. That is now never a question. Yet we’re still a long way from the ubiquitous support system envisaged as omnipresent smart dust that unobtrusively manipulates our world in our benefit.
It will take a whole new set of standards and technologies in spaces such as location, context, communications, and human understanding before we can start to see this next generation of technology in everyday life. The reason that Apple may have a big advantatge here is that they like to live in a closed world of machines, networking, peripherals and storage. This means that their systems can work together right out the box. All-Apple environments can safely rely on homogeneous hardware and software in which to operate.
So what about Windows? After the Vista debacle it is likely that Windows 7 will be the penultimate desktop OS from Microsoft. Their research labs already host world-class minds who are working towards the Weiser-world.
I’ve been setting up my development environment for building PHP based web applications. Since I’m an Eclipse geek I decided to try out the Aptana suite. I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts.
The installation of Aptana is through the Eclipse update manager. Simple stuff. After you reload the IDE you’re presented with the Aptana home page. From here you can install the extra plugin for PHP (or others). More clicks. Simple again.
What I like: the code tab has a set of preview tabs next to it. You can load up your page in any of your installed browsers and check that it works. This is awesome for checking cross-browser compatibility. The debugging of PHP is excellent. Being able to step through as the page renders makes bug tracking so much simpler.
My Aptana experience has not been all plain sailing. For some reason my call to mysql_connect would only work if I pass in params for dbuser, dbpasswd etc. AND had to repeat them in the php.ini file (you edit this under the Aptana section in the workspace preferences dialog). I’m still not sure why this is happening but it works for now.
gd (graphics manipulation) support didn’t work out the box. The default install of Aptana included a gd.so file but Eclipse told me that it was missing libpng.so (go into window -> prefs -> Aptana -> PHP Interpreters and Edit then click verify). I copied the gd.so file from my Ubuntu PHP install into the ext dir for the Aptana CGI PHP interpreter [.eclipse/org.eclipse.sdk.ide/updates/eclipse/plugins/com.aptana.ide.php.interpreters.linux.x86_5.3.16.v20081209/resources/php5/ext/], overwriting the default, and that fixed it.
My latest weirdness was that the internal Jaxer HTTP server wouldn’t serve out new/uploaded files. The fix for this is to refresh the workspace view in Eclipse. Jaxer must use the Eclipse workspace config file to decide what it will serve out as web pages.
If you are interested in more then the screencast intro to PHP is a good starting point. Next I’m going too try out PHPUnit with Eclipse and Aptana.
I’ve finally updated my publications page. I’ve been using the bib2html plugin for wordpress. It does a rather good job but if you’ve advice on a better option I’d love it hear it.
I’ve been a tweeter on twitter since May 2007 (signed up during a slow conference session). It started as a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues in remote places; now it is kind of a habit. Since my tweets go out on the public timeline I am mildly considerate about what I post (avoid exact addresses, names of non-tweeting friends, personal info, etc.). But to some extent I bask in the anonymity of being an e-needle in a large e-haystack.
As part of my geeking out I follow internet celebrities on twitter. Last week Leo Laporte got all excited about his 100,000th follower. These celebs use twitter as another buoyancy aid to float above the rest of the web and maintain their e-status. But they’re nothing compared with the old school celebrity.
Stephen Fry has over 300,000 followers. It is fantastically fascinatingly voyeuristic to read his posts (he often sounds like characters in his TV shows — “oh, poopy poppycock and a thousand flaming arses…[lord blackadder?]“). Since Christmas he has jetted through New Zealand, London, South America, USA and Singapore. With his trusty iPhone he tweets a dozen times a day and posts pictures of his life. The most recent set showed off his first class private cabin (complete with personal widescreen tv and poopy poppycock colour schemes). It is a life most of us will never encounter but now we can peek directly in. Day-by-day, picture-by-picture, bit-by-bit.
So this morning I opened up twhirl (my currently preferred twitter client) and checked on the tweeters I follow. Stephen (we’re on first name terms now that I know everything he does) updated to say Eddie Izzard had twitter.com ban a fake-Eddie account so he can start tweeting too.
In 20 hours with 17 updates Eddie has almost 20,000 followers. He posted a picture of himself to prove he is the real EZ in which you can see his iPhone and scruffy beard. Eddie is currently alone in a hotel in north London and appears to struggle a bit with technology.
I’ve been messing with my domain registration and sites on webfaction. One update nuked my wordpress install. I spotted that loading www.steveneely.org was also hitting other domains I own.
The problem was that my domain updates had somehow altered the URLs that wordpress stores in its database (hyperlinks on blog pages were wrong and the template wouldn’t load).
A quick fix was to alter the active template’s functions.php file and directly after the <?php directive insert:
As our RTW trip comes to an end I thought I’d document how I’ve stayed connected to my life in the e-world. These things are my sanity ties back to regular living:
Google Reader: blogs from friends, colleagues, ACM/IEEE publications and fun sites like PhD Comics
I was just trying to upgrade WP 2.7 to 2.7.1 and got this error:
“Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip
Unpacking the core update Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction() (previously declared in /home/sneely/webapps/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/lib/pclzip.lib.php:5421)”
It turns out that the problem was from the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. Ryan posts that this is because WP 2.7 has its own autoupgrade included so we no longer needed WPAU.
If you get the same error just deactivate the automatic upgrades plugin and try again.
Clearly travelling and updating this blog are not compatible. To increase the activity here at steveneely.org I’ve installed http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/ to display my recent tweets. It was a simple download and unzip to wp-content/themes task.
I had to update my WP theme as the old one didn’t support widgets properly, so we’ve got a new look and feel thrown in too.
heading to bed. Short drive to Hastings tomorrow to see @mattstabeler & @littlefink get married. Wonder if the vows are limited to 140 chars 3 hours ago
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