Conner's Blog

I announced on Twitter today that I had ordered a MacBook Pro. It wasn’t too long after that that I started getting some responses telling me I just spent a lot of money on something that wasn’t worth it*. I’ve ran into this more than once since I decided to save money so I could buy a MacBook Pro. It seems that many people are under the perception that the cost of the MacBook isn’t worth it. So I decided to document my reasoning for purchasing a MacBook instead of a PC (Windows or Linux based).

Construction – What other company touts a nicer looking notebook that’s built like that. Sure, you can buy heavy-duty laptops, but for general usage nothing quite seems up to the task like the aluminum uni-body of a MacBook.

Looks – As I stated above the MacBook just looks good. Granted that doesn’t actually mean anything performance wise, but it doesn’t hurt.

OS X – Say what you want about Windows 7, but Mac OS has been ahead of the curve for years. Not only that but it’s built on UNIX so you get the benefits of the a very stable OS without the hassles of the UNIX/BSD/Linux desktop.

Ease of use – I’ve been using friend’s Macs a lot more often lately and once I got over the bump of a learning curve I started to find the OS more intuitive than any others I’ve used. I’ll have to relearn a few habits, like the positioning of the close button on windows, but I think I can manage.

Service – What other computer manufacturer has multiple stores around the metro staffed with eager techs willing to help you out.  With Mac, you have someone willing to help you a short drive/bus ride away if something goes wrong.

Family and Friends – I’ll still be using Windows and Linux frequently, but as more and more of my friends and family purchase Macs I find myself less able to sit down and help them out. In addition, knowing enough about Mac OS to answer question on Twitter and other social networks doesn’t exactly hurt my ability to build goodwill.

Apps – Windows may have a larger selection of applications, but Mac OS tends to get some high quality exclusives that Windows will never see. I can’t count the number of Twitter links I’ve hit only to sigh and turn away because the software can only run on a Mac. That list includes Tweetie, TextMate, and Quicksilver.

Community – The Mac community is incredibly helpful and loyal. In fact when I finally decided to buy my Mac Book a lot of people wanted to come with me when I bought it. Who would ever come with me when I went to pick up my Acer laptop from Best Buy?

Let’s see, what else swayed me

• Magsafe power connector
• Multi-touch Touchpad
• The ability to run Keynote
• Time Machine
• Unix command line
• Dock
• Battery Life
• Environmentally sensitive

Of course, it’s not all roses on the Mac side of the world, there are a few things I really wish I wasn’t going to have to deal with.

• Mini-DVI Port – It’s annoying that I have to buy a connector for my monitor and TV
• The fact that the built in battery isn’t user replaceable
• Hard Drive Space – Compared to some of the PC offerings out there, the MacBook Pro is a little lacking

So yeah, I bought a Mac. It just made sense for me, especially as a notebook. Would I have made the same decision if I were buying a desktop computer? Probably not, but I went with a MacBook for the same reason I went with the iPhone, it met my needs with minor fuss better than other products available.

* It should be noted that I used to be dumbfounded as to why anyone would want to buy a Mac. The cost seemed crazy. My mind slowly changed the more I worked on friends Macs and the more research I did.

I’m a guy who has been running Linux on some machine in one form or another for over 10 years. I usually have multiple OSs installed on my main desktop and have been running a Linux media/web/whatever server non-stop for 2+ years. I’ve built the last 4 computers that I’ve owned as well. I’m not scared to get my hand dirty and troubleshoot a problem when things go wrong. The PC model has always worked for me, and I still think it’s the best method for innovation.

I believe in openness, but I also realize that the Apple formula for computing just works. It might not be as customizable or inexpensive as other options but when it comes to getting stuff done, Mac has it down.

Edit: I added the community section seconds after hitting publish.

Well, it’s back! It took me a bit but I managed to resurrect this site from the demons of technology. Turns out that my power supply went bad, frying my motherboard and/or CPU. Luckily it appears to have left my hard drive functioning so after purchasing new parts and putting things back together, spending two days troubleshooting what I thought was a bad hard drive, and finally fixing the problem, I have my server back. It’s also lower power in comparison, running a 35W Celeron as opposed to the 65W amd processor I was using before.

Other technology things that have me pulling my hair out.

• My main desktop PC is acting up, nothing I can’t fix but still annoying
• I dropped my iPhone and broke the screen, thankfully  it still works
• My wireless router that is my backup to my server is worthless when being used as a router. Luckily I was able to borrow a router from my neighbor so I wasn’t without the internet for a week.

On the positive side I have a Macbook Pro on the way. Nothing quite like a new toy to make me giddy.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me while I was offline for a week. I’ll be writing a bit more now that I have things working again.

Dear Facebook,  your suggest a friend feature is the most worthless thing ever.

Here is the deal, when I first joined Facebook, which was quite a while ago, I was friended by some random girl in Memphis.  At the time I wasn’t picky about who I accepted friend requests from, so I accepted her request and we have been friends ever sense.  Occasionally I consider removing her as a friend, but really I see no reason to. She doesn’t interact with me, and doesn’t post annoying things so I just let it be.

Recently though, being friends with her has given me some insight.  Basically it is that Facebook’s suggest a friend feature is worthless.  For some reason Facebook insists on showing me people that she is friends with.  This makes no sense.  For one thing, I have no mutual friends with her.  Wouldn’t that put her pretty low on the list of people whose friends I know.  Additionally, she isn’t geographically close to me, we’ve never interacted, never lived within 100 miles of each other, and never attended the same schools. If you were going to choose someone on my friend list to use for that feature, she would be the last one on the list.

So Facebook, here is my challenge to you, write a decent algorithm that keeps stupidity like this from happening.  You try hard to sell yourself as a valuable platform, but nonsense like this doesn’t help your sales pitch.

Would a pause button be a great feature on some webapps?  RSS readers would greatly benefit from this.  As I’m writing this post there is currently a Woot Off in progress.  This means that my RSS feed from Woot gets about 30-40 items every 4-5 hours.  It would be great if I could just hit pause and then it skips the items that occur during the time period I specify.  

Twitter would also benefit from this. I follow many people who live twitter confences and other events that do not interest me.  This information fills up my Twitter client and I sometimes miss other tweets that interest me.  The only solution I have is to unfollow the offending party and then remember to follow them again the next day.  This is clunky and the ability to skip updates from individual users for a period of time would be a great feature. 

Any other web applications that could use a pause button?

The Internet is a wondeful thing.  Everyday, millions of people launch a web browser, go online and consume information in vast amounts.  They socialize using e-mail and post to their friends walls on Facebook.  But the web is becoming so much more and I want to point out a few tools and site than everyone should use.

The point of these sites is to utilize the web as a social medium instead of a consumable product.  Learning to comment, communicate, and participate is not only fun, but you will get a much deeper experience every time you log on.

Let’s start with my current favorite web app, Twitter.  When you first sign up, you are presented with a box asking the question “What are you doing?”.  Looking at this you would think Twitter is like Facebook status messages.  It is so much more than that though.  The best way to learn about Twitter is to watch this video. I use Twitter for many things: I keep up on the latest news, discover interesting websites, follow games, get fantasy football advice, connect with people who share my interests, and get questions answered.

To get started with Twitter, sign up, and start looking for people to follow.  Start with me first.  I go by the name sloped on Twitter.  View to my profile and click follow.  Now you can see my updates on the public tab.  I also recommend doing a search for your location using the search box on top of the page.  It’s a good way to find local users to follow and befriend.  The last place I am going to recommend is twitterholic.  This site shows the top users on Twitter by follower.  There is a good chance that if someone has many followers they are doing something interesting.  Try following a few of them and see what you think, you can always unfollow if you aren’t happy with their tweets. .

The next app that I am going to recommend is Google Reader.  GoogleReader is an RSS reader.  View a quick introduction to Google Reader here.  For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, this video is a must see.  What RSS does is allows you to pull content from a variety of sources across the web.  There are many different readers available, but the benefit of Google Reader is the ability to share items you find interesting.  This allows you to push items to your friends using RSS to, allowing them to read them at their leisure.  It is a much more productive way of dealing with information then emailing your friends and family links.  To subscribe to my shared items on Google Reader go here.

The final social service that I want to talk about is actually a service many of you probably already use.  During the recent site redesign, Facebook released a great new featured called import.  Import allows you to take your activity across the web and put it on your wall easily.  As you can see you have a variety of options as to what you can import.  I currently import my flickr photos, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, last.fm songs, and google reader shared items.  This is a great way to keep your friends and family up to date on what you are currently interested in.

This feature is what convinced me that I liked the new Facebook design.  Though it is different, I think the inclusion of options like this allows you to share more with your friends and family. 

The beauty of these tools is that the more you use them the more content you start to get from other users.  I have cut down my feeds in GoogleReader as I use Twitter more. I find more interesting content from the people I follow.  As more of you friends on Facebook begin to share more content you discover more information, more songs, and see more of their photos.  Add in the multitude of discussions you can have and suddenly you are not only more informed but you are finding out things about people you never would have before.

Designing the perfect Linux Server isn’t difficult, it can be time consuming but with a plan, you should be able to get everything running quickly.  This post will lay out the groundwork of what services the server should provide and how we divide it up among our virtual machines.

The main services that I want the server to provide are web, ssh, mail transport, dns-caching, and file serving. Some additional, but non-essential tasks could be bittorrent, ftp, streaming media, and VPN.  Of course their are a ton of things you could add to this list, but these are the services I feel are the most useful.

The next step is to list the applications that we will need to run to accomplish these tasks.

• Web Server
  • Apache
  • Mysql or other database is usually necessary
  • PHP
• SSH Access
  • open-ssh
• Mail Transport
  • I use Qmail, but there are many options
• Dns Caching
  • I prefer Tiny-DNS, Bind is also a good choice
• File Server
  • Samba
• Bittorrent
  • rtorrent
• FTP
  • I use SSH for file transfers and you should to
• Streaming Media
  • Lots of options, ampache and Jinzora are who popular ones.
• VPN
  • OpenVPN

Some other services that I install to keep an eye on things

• Munin
• Nagios

So how do we divide these systems up.  The choice is yours, but for this tutorial I am going to use the following setup.

• Zeus: Domain0.  This is the top level system that all other servers run on top of
  • Xen
  • Qmail-send
  • Munin-node
  • SSH
• Pegasus: Web Server
  • Apache
  • PHP5
  • Mysql-Server
  • Qmail-send
  • Munin-node
  • SSH
• Hades: File Server
  • Samba
  • rtorrent – This makes the most sense here as we will want to access the files downloaded from other systems
  • Qmail-send
  • Munin-node
  • SSH
• Athena: Monitoring and support services
  • Tiny-DNS
  • Apache – To allow for remote viewing of system status
  • Munin
  • Munin-node
  • Nagios
  • Qmail-send
  • OpenVPN

A few things that I need to point out in regards to this list.  First, I actually installed Samba on Pegasus(Web Server) so I can edit my development files dirctly.  You could host things on Hades and just mount the share under your web root if you wished.  It also would make sense to do all development on a seperate server, I don’t due to the limitations of having one IP address.

A few other points, I don’t actually run an SMTP server on any of my servers.  I use Google apps to receive and store my mail.  Qmail is only installed to send mail from the servers.  It is trivial to install qmail-smtp to allow you to receive mail.  Another change that I would make if I had better hardware would be to seperate the system running apache from the system running MySQL.  This is mainly a security enhancement but is not extremely important.

This site is run out of a server that sits in my basement.  I used to host my websites on a shared web host like GoDaddy, but after spending almost $100 a year and having very little control over my hosting service, I decided that I could run most of my sites from my home.  Of course I don’t get a lot of traffic so this is possible.

Recently however I started to attract some extra traffic here and there.  Nothing major, maybe an extra 25-50 hits a day, but it got me thinking about what would happen if I happened to claw my way to the front page of Digg .  A massive spike in traffic would most likely result in my site crashing.  I can protect myself from this the best I can; tune apache, setup opt-caching, setup caching on WordPress, and other modifications.  Unfortunately, these can only help so much though when my server has a Sempron 2800+ with less than a GB  of memory.

So I decided that something had to be done, I considered a few alternatives, but as I looked over the software and hardware landscape, I decided to focus on virtualization.  I decided to purchase some additional memory and setup a Xen hypervisor.  There are several benefits to this.

1. If my server was brought to it’s knees, I am be able to ssh into my system and hard reboot remotely.
2. Improved security as I currently run numerous services on my server.  I can isolate my internal services from the external services.
3. I can setup monitoring, and receive alerts if a service or host fails.  Without Xen, if my host failed I wouldn’t receive alerts as the monitoring system was down.
4. A great learning opportunity and a chance to write about it.
5. It makes sense financially. I spent $50 on memory, which is cheaper than most hosting programs.

For those of you who don’t know, Xen is a virtualization technology that allows you to host “Guest” operating systems on a single piece of hardware.  You have your initial OS that you boot into as you normally would, then you can boot additional systems on top of the original system that independently.  These systems are fully operational and can do pretty much anything a non Guest OS can do.  The systems share the available hardware resources but the performance hit is minimal.

Throughout the next few weeks I will be putting up a series of posts that will describe the steps it takes to create what in my opinion is the ultimate Linux server.

Sorry for writing another Twitter post, but it’s currently my favorite application.  I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to find the best Twitter client.  As I run an AMD64 version of Ubuntu, many of the great Adobe Air client’s are not available to me.  And to be honest, the Twitter clients that are available for Linux just aren’t that great.

I fought with Adobe Air for a while but finally gave up.  Hopefully Adobe releases a 64bit version of Air soon because I would love to try out some of the apps on that platform.  In the meantime I discovered a wonderful way to use Twitter in Firefox.  I started using Hahlo last week.  I also have Twitterbar installed in Firefox.  Until today I was using Hahlo in a tab, but I realized today that this website was a perfect candidate for being loaded in the sidebar.  How do you do this you may be asking.  First add Hahlo as a bookmark.  Then go to the bookmark and right click and choose properties.  You will see an option on the bottom of the screen saying “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”.  Check that box, load the bookmark, and you have the result on the right.

Now Hahlo is great, it has a few small issues, but nothing major.  For some reason whenever I start following someone in Hahlo device updates get turned on.  But for following your twitter storylines it rocks.  You can tweet in Hahlo but I don’t really like the interface for some reason.  To remedy this I installed Twitterbar.  This extension allows you to post to Twitter using your address bar in Firefox.  Just type your tweet into the address bar and hold your mouse over the dot on the right side.  You will get feedback on how many characters you have left.  Click the dot and it posts to Twitter.  This makes more sense than it sounds I promise.  Give it a try, you might like it.

Oh and follow me at Twitter http://twitter.com/sloped

Funny story, as I started writing this post I tried to go to Twitter and guess what, Fail Whale. You can’t make this stuff up.

Yes, the Fail Whale is irritating, but Twitter is the best thing to happen to the web in a long time.  In fact it got me interested in the Web, when for a long time I had no interest in anything other than reading the news and mindlessly perusing the top stories on Digg.

Not that I “got” Twitter at first, in first actual tweet was on May 6th of 2008, but I signed up in July of 2007 to utilize a web service that interfaced with Twitter.  Then Twitter got big, at least around the tech world.  For a while it was all you heard about, so I decided that maybe using Twitter would be a good idea.  So I started following some of the more prominent twitterers.  Suddenly I started so see the usefulness of Twitter along with the fun in Twitter.

How cool was it that I could sms a message to Twitter and get an answer from the cloud, of course for this to work I had to build my network.  To build my network I had to make some connections, so I started using Twitter on a weekly, then daily, and then sometimes hourly basis.  Sometimes it was to post link I found interesting, other times pointless observations, or maybe to microblog a Twins game.

So my network started to grow, I now have 33 followers, and have updated almost 200 times.  The funny thing is that as I started using Twitter I found it easier to blog, and then I started to participate in online discussion more frequently.  One thing led to another and soon I’m participating in the web instead of just observering.  And it all started with a simple service that let you post short messages.  Now I participate in numerous networks including Linkedin, Digg, Flickr, and Facebook.  I hope someday this pays off in some useful way, but for now I am glad I’m actually participating instead of just consuming content.

I just discovered this wonderful conky tutorial at Linux Owns.  I am planning on writing up a tutorial combining this one and my Compiz tutorial so it works well in Compiz.  Of course if you don’t use different wallpapers on each desktop, linuxown’s tutorial is a good starting point.

Linux Owns – Create a Custom Conky Setup