Josh Highland’s Blog

Oh man! I’m really excited about this. Last time I was behind a mic was a long time ago (unless you count my podcast).

My friend James Johnson runs the .NET User Group for the Inland Empire. He was having a special program to showcase some of the most valuable members of the .NET community in the Inland Empire. It was a pretty big deal, where were over $40,000 in prizes being given away to the winners.

TechZulu.com, a great site that covers tech events in Southern California, were going to be at the awards filming interviews with the participants and sponsors. One snag, all of their corespondents for TechZulu were on assignment. James hit me up and asked me if I could fill in and be a guest correspondent for TechZulu. He didn’t have to ask me twice (James blogged about it here).

The people that we interviewed at the event were very cooperative and had a lot of good things to say,  Efren from TechZulu is a great guy, and way fun to hang out with. I’m excited about the type of things he is doing to bring attention to tech in so. cal. Im glad I got to help contribute to their efforts. I’m going to try to make it to some of the event they have on their calendar

I was also very impressed by the .NET user group itself. It was great to see that many developers in the Inland Empire coming together to build a strong community. I was born in the Inland Empire, and have lived here all my life, and worked as a developer here. I think that the IE has a wealth of tech resources, so it makes me happy to see people like James Johnson and Efren of TechZulu taking the time to bring attention to developers in the IE.

Watch the interviews from the Inland Empire MVM Awards on TechZulu.com

It finally happened after I added the new Anniversary album, I have over 100 Gigs of music in my iTunes!

I’m very strick when it comes to my music. Minimum 192 kbps. I’ve made posts before about how to create good mp3 files through iTunes.

I’m just excited to break the 100 gig mark. My iPhone only holds 16 gig, but it’s nice to know I can listen to music for over 45 days and never hear the same song twice!

Excess, what’s that!

damn I cant wait until friday…

Sometimes I do my best programming when I’m tired. Don’t ask me why, I just do. It’s a skill I picked up in college.

Being tired and producing good code wasn’t the case last night. I was trying to use the sprintf PHP function with a SQL “Like” statement. I made some dumb mistakes that tripped me up for a while. Hopefully someone out there will find this post and help them not make the problems I made, sleepy or not!

Normally the LIKE is used in mysql like this:
SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE 'J%';

That would get all names including: Josh, Jason, Jimi, etc.
In a SQL Like statement the % is a wild card, so the command is to match everything starting with “J”

Now when you use the sprintf() function it looks kind like this:
$query = sprintf("SELECT name FROM users WHERE name='%s'", $searchString);
The %s will be replaced with the value of $searchString

Trying to combined them is where I had some problems….

At first I tried to do something like this:
$query = sprintf(”SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE’%s’”, $searchString);
didnt return what I was looking for at all, it had no wild cards in it!

Then I tried this:
$query = sprintf("SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE'%s%'", $searchString);
didnt work either, this time it threw errors

But this worked great
$query =sprintf("SELECT name FROM users WHERE name LIKE '%s'", $searchString . "%");

So the moral of the story is, if you want to use a SQL Like statement, appent the wildcard for the Like statement to the string to be inserted by the sprintf funtion.

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!