andersonfam.org

(disclaimer: the geek quotient of this post is going to be a bit higher then usual)

It’s about time. As of last night around 8:30 or so, we’re now completely exchange 5.5-free at work. After migrating everything over to the exchange 2k3 server a few weeks ago, we decided to keep the 5.5 server running for a bit just to make sure everything was working okay. So we’re now running on a single exchange 2003 server in native mode, which I’m extremely excited. No more will I have to deal with the Active Directory Connector crap, nor will I have to constantly restart IIS (like I had to on the exchange 5.5 box) due to it losing its head. So for the time being, hopefully I won’t have to deal with mail issues. Hopefully.

In other news, I ordered three new 140GB scsi drives that will be put into the old mail server. That box will turn into our new cvs server. The current cvs box is nearly full, and it would be a really bad thing if the cvs server filled up, as that would prevent 75% of the company from doing any productive work. So that means that I need to get this new server up and running, samba/winbind installed, added to Active Directory, and the current 24GB cvs repository moved over in the next, oh, two weeks or so. So that’ll make my life interesting for the near future. I’m actually really glad that I work for a company that is so F/OSS-friendly. If I were stuck in a job (like my last job) where FUD forced us (the IS department) to use only windows, I think I’d go insane.

Well I finally caved in and picked up a Roku SoundBridge last night. A few of my co-workers have them and have been raving about them for a few months. I picked it up at Best Buy, and upon arriving home, it took me all of 5 minutes to get it powered up, connected to my wifi, firmware upgraded, and playing music. Awesome.

I installed mt-daapd on my old-school Pentium Pro 180 MHz file server in the basement a week ago or so. Mt-daapd enables you to share out to iTunes clients from a linux box. The soundbridge is made to discover, via mdns, iTunes and other uPnP shares on the network, so it instantly detected my mt-daapd server. Another plus is that the Soundbridge has an optical digital out, which I put into good use immeadiately. It’s amazing how much better the audio quality is using the digital interconnects versus analog.

Anyways – you’ll all have to come over to check it out. Have a good hump day, y’all.

Google succeeds in blowing their competitors out of the water. See here.

Not only does the map look a ton nicer than what’s currently available from mapquest/yahoo maps/etc, but you can click and drag the map around. Simply brilliant.

Well – Jed already noticed, but in case you haven’t, I just got a “Now Playing” thingy working so that y’all can see what I have playing in my iTunes. Not all that exciting, I know…

I’ll be working on the formatting over the next few days. Currently, it’s just sitting in an iframe that reloads every minute or so…