Josh Highland’s Blog

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!

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

UPDATE (10/29/08) :
I was having trouble with my feed from twitter dying after a while. It would only fetch it once, then nothing.I found the answer to my problem on the simplePie blog, http://simplepie.org/blog/2008/08/16/twitter-bug/. I followed the instructions and commented out the If statement on lines 1583-1586, and the twitter feed started to work again. I hope that twitter updates their RSS service so hacks like this aren’t needed.

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!

I am not a huge fan of windows, but it the operating system I have been running for the past 14 years (if you dont count college, or my current laptop… both were/are linux based). I have Windows Vista at home, and I have to use Windows XP at work.

Over the years, I have found programs that have worked for me. They have worked well, and helped me to get things done. I decided to make a list of the applications that I use on a rather regular basis. These are the things that I would for sure reinstall if my computer was to die tonight. Most of the software is free, and open source. As a result, many of the programs I am about to list also are available for Linux and Apple OSX. So here is the list of windows program that I love, in no particular order (expect Firefox, its at the top of the list)

Web Browsing:

• Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com)
  Sooooo much better then internet explorer SO USE IT!

File Searching:

• Agent Ransack (http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack)
  Soooo much better/faster then the built in windows file search

File Comparison:

• Compare It (http://www.grigsoft.com)
  Great tool for doing differences in files. helpful for programmers.

Text Editor:

• notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net)
  Simple and fast text editor

Sound Editing:

• audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net)
  no frills audio editing.

Windows Enhancements:

• taskbar shuffle ( http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm)
  use this tool to reorder the running programs in the windows taskbar. super light weight

Instant Messaging:

• pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im)
• GoogleTalk (http://www.google.com/talk)

CD Burning:

• infraRecorder (http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net)
  awesome open source/free cd burner. The only one I use now

Anti-virus:

• AVG 7.5 Free (http://free.grisoft.com/doc/downloads-products/us/frt/0?prd=aff)
  Norton can suck it

Spyware:

• adaware (http://www.lavasoft.de/support/download)
• spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html)

Image sharing/hosting:

• Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)
  the place I host my pics

• Flickr Uploadr (http://www.flickr.com/tools)
  how I upload my pics

• FlickrDown (http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm)
  how I leech my friends pics

VOIP:

• skype (http://www.skype.com)
  cool tool for talking to people

• prettymay (http://www.prettymay.net)
  answering machine for skype! record/download mp3 copies of things

P2P:

• soulseek (http://www.slsknet.org)
  awesome application for finding full albums of music

• utorrent (http://www.utorrent.com)
  my favorite torrent client, use with piratebay and isohunt FTW!

Backup:

• syncback (http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html)
  an application that will copy your files to a removable hard drive on a scheduled basis. great tool.

• carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com)
  $50 a year for unlimited off site backup? you better believe i use this. you should also!

Blogging:

• Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org)
  if you have your own server, use this! if not, wordpress.com is for you

Programming:

• Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org)
  I love this IDE, I do all my development in it now. These plugins really help get things done.
  • cfeclipse (http://www.cfeclipse.org)
  • phpeclipse (http://phpeclipse.sourceforge.com)
  • subversive (subversion control) (http://www.eclipse.org/subversive)
  • esftp (sftp control) (http://www.antimatter-studios.co.uk/sites/chris/projects/esftp)

SSH:

• putty (http://www.putty.org)
  simple and sweet ssh client

RSS Reader:

• Feedreader (http://www.feedreader.com)
  one of the best desktop news readers I have used

FTP:

• Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org)
  so much better then cuteftp

Key Logging:

• BFK (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bfk)
  this came in handy when the guy installing FIOS had to use my computer to “configure” the modem/router. pwned!

I have started a new site, iPhone Developer Network. The vision of the site is to create a place where people interested in creating iPhone applications can get together and share knowledge.

I actually started making posts back in August, but stopped shortly there after. With the looming release of the official iPhone SDK, I feel that its a good time to start getting the word out about the iPhone Developer Network.

Come join us!

In keeping in step with my new found love of StarCraft, I wanted to play it on my laptop. One problem… my laptop doesn’t run on windows or mac, its powered by UBUNTU!

I love running Ubuntu, and I have never found a reason why I would need windows on my laptop. Ubuntu does everything I need it to, that is until I wanted to play a PC based game on it.

I did a little google searching and I found out that WINE on Ubuntu will play StarCraft perfectly! I gave it a go, and was surprised at how easy it was, and how well it all worked together.

Here are the steps I took:

• Open a terminal and run sudo apt-get install wine to get wine.
• After that finishes, insert the StarCraft CD into the computer
• In the terminal cd to whatever cdrom drive you put the cd in (under the /media/ directory). Mine was /media/cdrom0
• Use Wine to setup StarCraft with wine setup.exe. You’ll get the install screen for SC - enter your CD key and install the software. StarCraft will be installed under the path of
  ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
• In the terminal, run winecfg and go to the Audio tab. Set Hardware Acceleration to Emulation.
• What is StarcCaft without the Broodwar expantion? I eject the Starcraft CD and insert the Broodwar expantion CD.
  cd to the appropriate /media/ directory and run wine setup.exe.
• To play StarCraft, run wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
  I was also able to find a link to it from the Applications menu in Ubuntu.
• Lastly, I downloaded the latest patch to BroodWar from blizzard.com, and ran that with no problem.

There it was, a fully patched and running copy of StarCraft on my Ubuntu laptop. Can life get sweeter? I submit that it can not!

I have known about the tv-b-gone for some time now. If you don’t, its basically a small device that will turn off any tv in a matter of seconds, from over 200 feet away.

Earlier this week I saw one of the coolest/most screwed up things I have seen in a while. One of the guys form gizmodo took a tv-b-gone device into CES (consumer electronics show in las vegas)and wrecked the place. Here is the video http://youtube.com/watch?v=ICpM3ItIhI0

After seeing it, I had to build one for myself. $20 and 4 days later I had the kit in hand. It took me a bit to make it, as I have never soldered anything this small. I got it put together, and it works. All the TVs die the second i press the on button and aim this thing.

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of my new best friends. Just holding it makes me want to go play some pranks! I will be posting some pictures and videos later on for sure.

UPDATE!
My favorite web comic, toothpaste for dinner recently ran this…

I found an interesting article from a while back. I guess people who work in the IT industry are twice as likely to wear a heavy metal t-shirt as their non-IT counterparts.

If I was to be given the survey, i would have answered yes to it. I wear heavy metal/hardcore shirts EVERY DAY to work, I just wear them under a button up shirt. I’m undercover I guess.

The study also showed that black jeans are 63% more popular among IT types than other workers (yes i wear black jeans some times), and IT people are 34% more likely to sport a ponytail (I cut mine off a few months ago!)

I wonder what the statistics on tattoos and piercings are?

Either way, a mildly interesting read that I thought was funny
http://www.intermedia.net/about-us/news/2006/IT-people-are-different.asp