iTunes from anywhere February 5th, 2007

I recently had the opportunity to reinstall OSX on my laptop. After doing this I decided to move more of my files over to my server. This included about 20+ gigabytes of music. Luckily for me there are some nice open source applications that interface well with iTunes. For my particular situation I decided to go with Firefly Media Server. I use Debian at home on my server so it was very easy to install.

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Goodbye Microsoft? February 1st, 2007

Not too long ago the only Operating System I used was Linux. I used it on my laptop and on my desktop. I haven’t run a Windows OS in quite some time now. However, a lot of my friends and all of my family run Windows. There really is no way around it. People become familiar with a product and get comfortable so they stay, even if it isn’t the easiest or the best for them.

I stopped trying to get people to use Linux years ago, simply because I didn’t want to support everyone who I converted. I know this sounds selfish, but try supporting a couple friends who don’t like to read documentation. Some people don’t know how to download an ISO and burn them, so live CD’s become a problem.

A co-worker sent me an email with a .exe that allows you to install Debian from within Windows. The install doesn’t damage Windows or change your settings, it simply installs Debian next to Windows and allows you to choose which one you want to boot into at start-up. This is very similar to an older application that I tried many years ago called Winlinux2000. The concept was the same, except it wasn’t Debian. If you are interested, here is the site which has some screenshots and the download link. I have the file up for download, but their url is much cooler… :D

OSX vs. Linux February 1st, 2007

So I’ve been using OSX now for about three and a half months. Before that I was running Debian Linux on my work laptop. I decided to switch when I left my last job and had to return my laptop. So when I went out looking for a new one, I decided on the MacBook because it was small enough to be portable, yet powerful enough with all the features I wanted.

For the most part OSX has been great. Microsofts Windows has nothing on OSX, even Vista which was just released a couple days ago pales in comparison to OSX. Leopard is supposed to be released soon which will give it more features that us Linux users have taken for granted.

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Ruby on Rails / Apache 2 / Mongrel January 31st, 2007

Ok, so as I explained in my last post I found this nice blogging app thats written in Ruby on Rails. I learned a lot about deploying Ruby on Rails applications in a couple short hours. One of my biggest problems was with Apache 2 and fcgid. All of the docs I found said to use either fastcgi or fcgid. Fcgid is broken in Debian Etch as of right now, and fastcgi was giving me nothing but header errors. I tried mod_ruby and received a security error every time.

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