Project Gutenberg

If you are a commuter and have an IPod or Zune, I recommend that you checkout Project Gutenberg for a bunch of free audiobooks. They have books that have gone into the 'public domain' (as I understand it, the copyright wears out on a publication after 100 years or something). At any rate, there are a ton of classics on there that are worth the time. Check it out:

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Currently reading Adam Smith's classic economic treatise 'The Wealth of Nations'.

Windows Home Server

 More than a year ago if I recall correctly, I signed up for the 120-day trial of Microsoft's new 'Windows Home Server'. At that time the deal was, you give them $7.95 for shipping and they send you a couple DVDs with the goods. Anyway, after going through the order process, giving my credit card number, and getting excited - they canceled it a couple days later with no explaination. Well, recently I signed up again and this time they sent me the goods ... for free. That's the new deal. I think the first time I ordered it they were still grappling with whether or not to allow individuals (non-OEMs) to purchase the software to install on whatever. Around that time they were pitching the MediaSmart Server from Hewlett Packard which was specially designed for the job. From what I've subsequently read thats a really nice little machine. There was some talk that you needed certain hardware to do the job well and that they weren't sure hobbyists or whatever could put something together that would cut the mustard. Glad they got over that! 

So when I got the software in the mail, I applied a tower that I had sitting around - and some drives I was repurposing from my NetGear SC100 (little toaster looking network attached storage (NAS) device that was literally toasting my drives). The tower is probably overkill for the job but it was the only suitable machine I had free. It's a 3GHz P4 Extreme with Hyperthreading. Yeah, overkill... Anyway, the install was relatively painless except for the cheap RAID (ITE8212) card that I unfortunately left in the machine for the first install attempt. I got a corrupted install the first time but, realizing that the card might have put the kibosh on the install, I removed it and tried again sucessfully. From there you just add drives, nothing fancy or complicated - the server just picks them up and adds them to your 'storage pool'. It allows you to specify what stuff needs to be duplicated for safety in the case of a drive failure - then it just handles it for you. You can see my setup below:

Once you've got your drives in there and the machine is stablized, you can install the 'Home Server Connector' software on up to ten machines (XP, VISTA) in your household and then the server will work with your machines to make sure they are backed up. This part is seamless. Another great feature of this software is that it implements the 'Media Connect' protocol which means it was picked up my my D-LINK Medialounge and the XBOX in the house. Once you put your home videos and picture collection on the server it will make them available in the living room via a remote control or XBOX controller.

The server also allows you to remotely access the files on your machine, and remote desktop into the machine(s) themselves from anywhere in the world via some nifty magic (port forwarding and DNS tricks). You get a name like <myservername>.homeserver.com that you, or family members, can easily from any web browser. So cool.

I'm sure I'll have some more posts on this stellar product shortly (I haven't even touched on the addins or the developer API). Further, I'm sure that with PDC rapidly approaching we'll see some very cool new things, maybe some cloud services integration with Live Mesh or something. (You can currently do offsite backup for things like your photo collection or whatever, but its pretty expensive.) Here's a link to a Channel9 video about this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Rory/Windows-Home-Server/

and Microsoft's official site on it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

Nice show WHS team, keep it coming.

Web Host's Server Blew Up

So sometime in late August I noticed this site was down. (I hadn't found time to post much during the summer.) So anyway, at that time I try to log into the control panel for the site to see what the scoop was - and of course that was down too. So I contacted the hosting company, and they informed me that my box had blown up or something and they were transistioning everyone's stuff over to a new box - that it would be a couple days, perhaps, until everyone was up again. Well, either when the old box blew up, or when the transition happened, my MySQL databases got corrupted. They came over to the new box in a corrupted state.

Luckily I had taken some backups at some point (not as often as I should have, or will in the future). LONG STORY short, after MUCH back and forth with the hosting company I was finally able to get them to delete my databases so I could rebuild. (For some reason I could do nothing to the corrupted ones that were in place, not even delete them.) Consequently, the site has been down for quite a while. Moral of the story is backup your hosted stuff often!

Trek through Europe

I just got back from a two week trek through Europe - traveling with my wife and another couple. We started in Frankfurt, stopped for a night in the beautiful 'olde town' part of Heidlberg.

From there we headed off to the Czech Republic, to one of my previous favorite spots, Prague. Unfortunately, Prague has become a little more touristy than I remembered it..and with that, more expensive. It is no longer insanely inexpensive - bummer. It still has the Eastern European feel that you don't get in many major cities any longer - but it has lost something in my mind. From CZ we headed source to Austria stopping for an evening in Linz before getting on an overnight train to Venice. Spending a full day (not night) in Venice is great. I felt like we saw everything we needed to before heading down to a smaller city on the easter Italian coast called Rimini. From what I can tell, Rimini is a hopping place in the summer - its on the sea - and there are a bunch of oceanfront-resort-looking stuff three. It was too cold for the water however.

We treked next to Rome, a great place for sightseeing - so much history. From there we headed into Tuscany, stopping at a neat town, somewhat off the beaten path, called Lucca. Oh, did I mention the great vino in Italy... After Lucca, we stopped in Florence for dinner and briefly checked out the sights. There is more to Florence than I gave it credit for last time. Next on to Switzerland - overnight from Florence - to Lucerne. Beautiful place, and I was really struck by how orderly and clean everything was. Lucerne has a bunch of history too, we visited a ver cool (high tech too) museum there. Then on to Paris for a couple days. Paris is great, and I think it has gotten better since I was there some years ago. This time, the line for the Lourve was non-existant which was great. More on Europe later maybe.

Microsoft Downloads Notifications

A while back through my MSDN account or some similiar type of thing I signed up for Microsoft Download Notifications. This 'service' claimed to shoot me an email every once in a while when something new and exciting was available for download. I got an email today about something real exciting. Apparently I should get busy downloading something called 'Windows XP Service Pack 2' - have your heard of this yet? Apparently it is supposed to 'Help protect your computer against viruses, hackers, and worms.' That sounds important, I should probably get that. Does that work with Vista Ultimate (which I am currently running on my main dev machine)? Seriously ... it's October of 2007.