Josh Highland’s Blog

I have blogged about it before, I have a HTPC (home theatre pc) running in my living room, hooked to my TV. I started off with MythTV, but settled on Window Media Center 2005.

When I first built the Media Center machine, I had basic cable, with no DVR, so I let the media center handle all of that. Now I have Verizon FIOS with HD, and one of their HD DVR Boxes, and I rarely use my media center pc, but its always nice to be able to flip the input over to it and watch youtube and browse the web. I also like the fact that I can download all sorts of movies and tv from the darkside of the web and watch them on the tv. That was a huge plus.

For a while now, the Media Center has been acting funny. I built it on a shoe string budget with some questionable parts I had laying around, so I didn’t expect it to live forever. The other day it stopped working all together.

Today I took it apart to see what the problem was. After some investigation, I found the cheap power supply was dead, and it took the mother board/processor with it. FAIL!

Well, here I am at a cross roads. Before it was a matter of software, now I need new hardware. What do you think I should build or buy?

The main things I’m looking for in a HTPC

• Ability to browse the web
• Watch Videos I download form the internet, mostly divX files
• Small form factor
• Doesn’t really look like a computer
• Blu-ray is a bonus

Should I build another Window xp MCE machine, Windows Vista Ultimate, mac Mini, apple TV, myth TV? I don’t even know where to start.

I’ll blog my research as I go. Lets see what you think I should do.

If you know me, you know I love my iPhone. I have had it for a year now, and it’s the best portable device that I have ever owned.

Last week Apple announced that they were going to launch a new iPhone on July 11, 2008. I am going to buy one of these new iPhones. Simple math tell us that if I own an iPhone and buy the iPhone 3G, I will have 2 iPhones, that is why I am giving away my iPhone.

Give away your iPhone? Thats right. my iPhone that I love can become yours. It works great, and has been in a hard protective case since that day I got it. It has served me well.

How to enter of the give away:

1. Join twitter.com if you don’t already have an account
   (twitter is a free micro-blogging site you can update via txt message. I cant get enough of it!)
2. Follow me on twitter.com, my profile is at http://twitter.com/JoshHighland

Thats it!

on July 11th, after I receive my iPhone 3G, I will randomly pick one of the people following me on twitter as the winner of the contest.

The only catch is I have to have at least 1500 1000 followers on twitter, so tell your friends to follow me. If I don’t have over 1500 1000 followers on July 15th, I will give away a $50 AMERICAN CASH DOLLARS .

also, let it be known that unlocked iPhones sell for more then $300 on ebay! what are you waiting for, follow me on twitter.com today!

If you have any questions, my email address is:
JoshHighland at gmail dot com

My very good friend Steve Berg, challenged me to find a pre-release of Judas Priest’s new album,  Nostradamus, in under an hour.  The wager was simple, a 300 word or more post on the losers blog in honor of the winner. After searching high and low on the underside of the web, my usual music download locations were fruitless. I accept my lose Steve. Epic records has thwarted my efforts… this time.

Steve, we both agree that pictures are worth more then words, so I present the following picture in your honor.

LOLz!

If you have been following my blog, you an read that my PC died, and for a moment, I installed OS X Leopard on it. Well, my new drive from western digital arrived, and I am back working in Vista now (I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not!).

Parallels makes it easy to run Windows inside of Mac, but I haven’t found a good way to run Mac inside of windows. Previously, I used a project called “LEO4ALL” to install Leopard on my PC. A little bit of Googeling around after I installed Vista, I found “LEO4VMWARE”

LEO4VMWARE is a pre-packaged and running distribution of OS X Leopard for the vmware, a virtual machine software. You can download the vmware payer here http://vmware.com/download/player.

Side Note: I’m going to be honest here, you are going to want to get vmware workstation, so you can tweak the performance settings. If you are looking at virtually putting OS X on your pc, you have enough smarts to download vmware desktop for free, and then find a serial number.

What this all means is all you have to do is download LEO4VMWARE and install vmware and you are off and running!

I have gotten it to work (not well, but it worked) on a pentium 4 3 ghz windows xp computer with 3 gigs of ram. On my intel core 2 duo, 3ghz, 4 gigs of ram running vista to work great! Check out the picture below.

Getting networking can be tricky, so read the posts on how to do it here

Downloads for LEO4VMWARE can be found by going here http://www.mediafire.com/?ggkr1obgrft, downloading the zip and looking at the links inside. I personally suggest buying a month of rapid share and downloading for there. LEO4VMWARE is about 3 gigs, and rapidshare offers amazing download speeds.

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.

Yesterday was one of those days. I woke up and turned on my Vista powered computer and I saw a blue screen of death staring back at me. I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach, and I knew this wasn’t going to be pretty.

I rebooted the machine and was greeted with a no “no system disk found” error. Awesome.

After about 20 minutes messing around in the BIOS, switching drives, cables and power around, I concluded that the Boot drive of my computer was dead. The BIOS wouldn’t even see it at all. DEAD. KAPUT. FIN.

The drive that died was a Western Digital Raptor, 10000 RPM, 74 GB drive. It’s an expensive drive to replace so I’m glad is was covered under warranty.

For most people, losing a hard drive is a devastating experience. For me, its an inconvenience.

A little background. I build this computer in december of 2006 in preparation for windows vista. All the drives are SATA, and the system was designed with data back up and redundancy in mind, I’ve blogged about it has save my ass before.

The redundancy starts with the machines architecture:

The boot drive (C:) is a small, and fast drive. The operating system and applications are installed on this drive. No working data or documents are ever stored on this drive.

For data storage, I use 2 large drives mirrored together using raid 1. This means that the computer only sees one drive (D:), but all activity happens to both drives. If one of the drives crashes, the other one is there as an instant back up with no loss. Its an expensive solution backup, but is critical in my opinion. All data is stored here. I have the systems users file (my documents, etc) set to use this drive.

External Back Up Drive 1 (X:) uses syncback to pull data from the Data drive (D:) every night at 3am, creating a recovery in case files get deleted from the data drive (D:) during the work day.

External Back Up Drive 2 (Y:) uses syncback to pull data from the Data drive (D:) every third night at 5am. This acts as a recovery drive for D: and X:. Drive X: also backs up my iTunes Catalog every night

To top is all off, I use a service called carbonite to create a real time back up of my data over the internet. At $50 a year, its worth it. If my house burns down, or my equipment is stolen, no amount of drives will keep my data save. Off site is the way to go.

So yes, losing the system drive (C:) means I will have to reinstall the Operating System, and my applications, but at the same time, I haven’t lost anything except the time with will take to get things up and running again.

In the mean time I’m going to try and get apple OS X Leopard running on my PC!

If you have ever worked with an MVC framework for web developent, you know that the “V” stands for “view”.

At work, I program in coldfusion, and use the coldbox framework, and I love it. At home, I write PHP code, with the codeigniter framework.

I love codeigniter, but I think that its biggest weakness is the view handeling, all thought codeigniter had taken strides to improve it. At the time of writing this, codeigniter is at version 1.6.1, and allows multiple views to be loaded at one time.

example:


<?php

}
?>


This is great with one exception, codeigniter simple builds a stack of the view results, appending them to each other.

This means that in header.php, loaded at the start of the view sequence, we would have to opening tags, such as <body>, and then in the last view, footer, we have to close the tags we opened in header.php, in this case, </body>

I don’t know about you, but opening tags in open file, and depending on another file to close them is not a good practice. Using a MVC setup and then doing something like this is very counter intuitive.

To fix this, codeigniter needs to support layouts, as well as views.

A layout is a file that contains the framework for a page, and the views are included and rendered inside the layout. basically filling out the content of the page. This also leaves your code the ability to be more flexible. Your views are pluggable components that don’t care about the layout at all.

One of the reasons I love open source software is the fact that the community will fix weaknesses is the software. Looking at the codeigniter wiki, I came across the “view object” (http://codeigniter.com/wiki/View_Object/)

The view object is a great solution for adding layouts to the codeigniter framework.
Here is a code sample of how to use the view object in a controller:

$this->load->library('view');         // or autoload

$this->view->render();               // create the view or


inside the layout file (admin/layout.php)


<? $header->render(); ?>

<? $footer->render(); ?>


You can see that the layout file contains the framework of the page, freeing up the views to be individual pluggable items that can be used across your codeigniter application.

I hope that the codeigniter team takes note of the view object and adds it to the core for codeignier 1.7 or maybe even sooner!

Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related.

I’m not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

Previously I had been using a tool called Last RSS, but I found that Last RSS could not handle ATOM feeds.

Digging into how SimplePie works, I found that I could merge several feeds together, sorted by post time, my first thought was to use this to aggregate and cache all the different music related news feeds that and going to add content to notpopular.com v2.5 (when ever I finish it). I started thinking about it a bit more and thought it would be cool to use SimplePie to mash together all of the different RSS feeds from the different social networks I am on.

It wasn’t that hard to use SimplePie and the various social networks to make something really cool.


//establish the feeds
$pownce = new SimplePie("$pownceRSS_url");
$flickr = new SimplePie("$flickrRSS_url");
$twitter = new SimplePie("$twitterRSS_url");
$digg = new SimplePie("$diggRSS_url");
$youtube = new SimplePie("$youtubeRSS_url");


//merge them all together!
$merged = SimplePie::merge_items(array($pownce, $flickr, $twitter, $digg, $youtube));


Then all you have to do is look over each item in $merged, and output the appropriate info you want.

You can see what I built over at www.JoshHighland.com

One thing I really found great was the API that was on the SimplePie site.

After I put this all together, I found out that there is a term for what I had just built. People are calling them “LifeStreams“, which is a very appropriate term. I thought I had invented something, but guess LifeStreaming is like fire or a spear, given enough time people all over the place will discover it on their own.

I encourage you do set up a LifeStream for yourself and post the URL in the comments below. It’s fun!

My LifeStream: www.JoshHighland.com

This afternoon I upgraded my blog to the latest version of wordpress, 2.5. The install went great and it was simple to do. I didn’t realize that I had any problems until I went to make a blog post and upload an image. When I tried to upload, I was greeted with the following:

Something was for sure messed it. I tried it in several browsers, but had the same results. no luck. I started to go some searching online but since wordpress 2.5 is so new, there was little info to be found. After about an hour of stumbeling around I came across a post on a forum where someone said they got the image upload to work by adjusting their .htaccess file on thier site with the following code.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

I made the change to my .htaccess file, and like magic the image upload feature started to work again!

I am making this post in the hopes that other people with similar problems will stumble across this post and be able to fix their problem with out having to wade through all the pages of people trying to diagnose what the problem is when the solution is super easy.

Why do I have to magically fit all of the geek stereo types? So what if I like MySpace more then any other social network, I adore my iPhone, and I own a social network!

Something must have worked though, because I was able to land an awesome wife!