There’s lots of documents on the web that show how to move “My Documents” to another drive, so I won’t bother show how here. One step I found missing however was brought on by my use of Linux. Whenever you move a directory to a bigger drive, I just symlink it so I don’t have to reconfigure anything that doesn’t follow along. Granted, Windows management of “My Documents” is a little more internal than just a directory (or folder in this case), so most everything followed along. Except for Google Desktop. It actually created it’s own folder in “C:\Documents and Settings\
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Moving “My Documents” with an extra step.
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Developing with VMWare
Friday, October 31st, 2008I got the itch recently to do some PHP developing for some photo site needs I have. Opted to try my hand with AJAX and jQuery libs while I was at it. I also wanted to use an IDE of some form, and found PHPDesigner to be a nice one. My problem is that I live in Windows these days, even though I have a hosted server running Linux. VIM is fine for quick bug fixes and changes, but this was ground-up work and not my specialty. I could have used WAMP or even cygwin, but each seems like so much work. Having played around in VMWare recently, I decided to just install Ubuntu and see if I could use that. Still had the problem of it being “remote” however. In comes the features of VMWare with it’s shared folders. The HGFS modules compiled fine in Ubuntu. I created my project files and shared them with Ubuntu. Then configured Apache inside the VM to use that share as the docroot. This way, any changes I made to the project, were already in place on the server, which is very similar to that of my hosted server.
I just feel so much more comfortable using Linux for hosted needs and using Windows as desktop needs. Silly that way I guess.
Dlink DSM-G600 “Review”
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Having recently left the hussle and/or hassle of working from an office full of people, and into my own home office hundreds of kilometers away, I found I needed a few more network supplies than I used to require. During this transition, I also migrated away from running my own server and into a hosted environment. This left me with only my desktop PC and my work Thinkpad running, which means I couldn’t use my server for backups anymore. After many minutes of searching, I came upon the Dlink DSM-G600 NAS device, which ran Linux, and used Samba for network shares, and came at a decent price. I just bought a Dlink Gamer Lounge gigabit wireless router, I figured another Dlink would make an excellent choice. I wasn’t totally wrong.
I ordered a 500G drive to put inside it, thinking I could use the 2 USB2.0 ports for expansion later if I needed it. The setup software went through alright and I had it up and running in no time. Loading up the web interface, I wondered if this was made by the same company as the Gamer Lounge. It’s just terrible. Nothing is where you think it should be, and it’s all very basic stuff. Looking for the share configuration, I wasn’t impressed to see a full share of the entire drive open read/write to everyone. A quick firmware upgrade, just cause I like doing that, and I set out to start copying data over. Using the network shares first, from my WinXPsp2 desktop, I found the share quickly. My data transfer ran about 6-7M/s according to gkrellm. Not exactly the gigabit performance I was looking for. Trying FTP instead (cause it’s a bad idea to copy 50G+ over a network share), I hoped for faster speeds, but was disappointed again. 6-7M/s. This is barely 100M network speeds.
I was pleased to see I could create email alerts, but was disappointed to see I couldn’t change the SMTP port, which I have to do on Bell Sympatico, since I use my hosted server for a mail server. Suppose I could try and figure out Bell’s mail servers, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
Despite all these negatives, I’m going to keep it, and hope firmware updates will make things better. If not, there’s always a few hacking projects out there that may eventually provide a decent software base for it. I’m not running it as a media centre storage (though you can), I’m just rysncing my pictures to it every now and then.
A lesson learned.
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006So, Adobe buys Pixmantec’s technologies (as if the significance matters), and the world ends in a fireball. Well, not quite, but the net would have you believe so. Adobe is the devil and owns all that is evil. Anyways, the up and comer that is Bibblelabs takes advantage of the situation and offers RSP licensed users a discounted upgrade to Bibble Pro. “Good for them!” I thought. Smart play all around. I used to use Bibble Lite back in the Linux desktop days and was happy with what I saw, but annoyed that I couldn’t migrate that license to Windows, so I went elsewhere. A lot has changed since then, not the least of which is Bibble now includes Noise Ninja, a software package I was going to purchase anyways! Heck, might has well give them a try again, even go the Pro line.
It took about 20 seconds after installing to find it was worthless to me. Doesn’t support DNG RAW files. Cruel irony. I’ve converted all my Pentax PEF files to DNG and deleted the originals, thinking it was a clear choice, given the ease of support and the 50% disk space savings. No such luck converting DNG back to PEF either, why the hell would anyone want to do that? Showed them.
If anyone’s reading this, and would like Bibblelabs to support DNG files in their products, please, let them know it. Enough requests and they’ll do it.
The virtues of rsync
Thursday, October 27th, 2005For those that don’t know, rsync rules. My photography workflow starts with a script I wrote to copy the files from my memory card (I use Linux here) to a directory structure on my local box. That script then rsyncs that directory structure over to my server as a backup, in case I lose the drive. Later, I burn a DVD or two.
Recently, I put some Windows XP on my machine to check out the latest graphics tools offered there. A friend of mine had expressed an interest in a particular photo, so I was going to try giving it a nice edit job and print him off a copy. So I mounted my backup drive via Samba and went searching for it within Picasa and RawShooter Essentials. I found the series of photos quickly, but the particular one I wanted wasn’t there. Strange I thought, there aren’t even any missing files. The sequence is complete.
Back into Linux to get the exact file name from my Working directory. That same filename existed on my backup server, but was a totally different image. Checking closer, I found another file with the same name, but with a ~ on the end. (This is why Picasa and RSE didn’t see it, wrong extension). I renamed it in a temp directory and sure enough, it was the photo I was looking for. This image did NOT exist on my local drive in it’s original RAW form, and only existed in my backup set because rsync made a backup of the original before it copied over top of it. For some reason, my camera had decided to not count 4 shots I had taken and used the filenames over again, even though the shots were fine. I suspect I had battery troubles around this time.
So, lesson learned. Rsync kicks ass.
“Free” Nero for Linux
Monday, March 14th, 2005Caught this at a number of different sources over the weekend and today. Nero Burning Rom, one of the best CD/DVD burning suites in Windows, has released a package for Linux. Normally, I would applaud this and say “Welcome to my desktop.”, but that’s not the case. Apparently, the only way to get a copy of this free download, all you have to do is register your purchased retail or downloaded copy, which is only available for Windows. Let me say it differently. You purchase a retail or download copy of the Win32 version of Nero, register it with Ahead, and then you can download the free Linux client. Free (with purchase). Free (with purchase).
SunRay demo.
Friday, February 11th, 2005I haven’t updated this in a while, so I thought I would share a few words about the SunRay demo I’m currently going through. First off, a couple of suggestions for anyone considering SunRay’s.
Once you get to what I would consider a usable X Session (meaning, one running Linux), its just like a regular desktop, except much sexier. I don’t have time to test the Linux server I’m afraid, but I can make some assumptions as to its performance and usability, and those assumptions are that it will be good. Being able to install Win4Lin in Linux, and allowing each user to run their own Win98 session seems like a good thing to me as well.
We have had some problems with the systems locking up with a Panic displayed on the screen. Not sure what its all about, but you have to pull the power to fix it, but I guess that’s because there’s no power button on these things. The great part is that once you log back in, you get your old session back, just the way you left it when it locked up.
All in all, these are pretty nice systems. Something I would consider when building a network for developers, or even making a kiosk or for home use. One of these in the kitchen or dining room with a decent USB keyboard would make a nice terminal as well, especially since they’re silent.
A Screenshot Review?
Wednesday, October 13th, 2004Caught this link on Slashdot today. I don’t know about anyone else, but seeing some screen shots of an OS, especially a Linux OS, doesn’t tell me a damn thing about. My Gentoo desktop looks exactly like that XFCE desktop there. Switch to KDE and I got that too. Its all the same. Maybe they added some logos or new fonts or something. Don’t even start on the layout of that page. 120 shots in a row of links without a single attempt to categorize them? As pointless as Fedora itself. 
Linux on the Desktop
Monday, May 17th, 2004I’ve read many articles on the reasons Linux isn’t running on everyone’s desktop yet. From “too much time spent just making it all work”, to “it doesn’t support the applications I need”. Whatever the reason, Linux indeed isn’t on everyone’s desktop yet, that much has become obvious. What hasn’t become obvious, to me anyways, is why did these people switch in the first place? Were they unable to get work done in Windows? Was there something they needed that only ran on a Linux desktop? Without questioning each person, my guess is their answer will be: “Because I read about it in some article.”, or “This geek at work brags about it all the time.”
I started using Linux because I wanted to learn about the Unix environment, and being a college student meant I couldn’t buy a million dollars worth of hardware. I could however, dig up a stack of floppies and install Slackware 2.3 on my system. I did it for the pure enjoyment of it, and to broaden my scope of potential careers. I stay in Linux because I like it, and given my type of work (Unix Admin), I’m able to get it done so much faster. I run Gentoo Linux on my work laptop, personal desktop at home, and file server at home. OpenBSD runs my firewall and Linux even runs my PDA. It’s what I do.
So why, for example, would someone that browses the web, gets email, and plays solitaire, want to use Linux? Certainly Windows is perfectly capable of doing those things. Was it too insecure, leading to privacy concerns? Was it too expensive or just plain full of bugs? Something happened to suggest changing OS’s, and I have to wonder, was it worth it? If they tried Linux to learn something, then I have to think it was a success. If they tried it because someone said it was more secure, then I again have to think it was a success. If they tried Linux because they were just plain tired of the way Windows did things, but felt Linux was too complex for them, well, what options do they have left? Learn to live with the Windows way, or learn to change Linux to suit your needs. (Yes, you could buy a Mac, which I think is a great option as well, but I’m leaving out the “Buy new hardware.” option on purpose.) I’m not saying Linux isn’t hard to use, or that it doesn’t require a pretty good understanding of what’s going on in the background. What I am saying is: What’s the solution worth to you?