The other night, I noticed that updates for my Fedora 8 home server were no longer available through yum.  It must have reached its end-of-life.  That’s not surprising since Fedora 11 recently came out.  It was time to upgrade.

I’ve been meaning to try out Ubuntu for a while now, so I decided to download 9.04 server and give it a try.  I’d been a strong Fedora (and Red Hat before that!) supporter for years, but for the most part, Linux is Linux, so how difficult could it be to switch.

Well, it was a painless process installing.  It took only about 15 minutes on my ancient AMD box.  But, I ran into a snag when I tried to boot.  All I got was the word GRUB repeating across the screen to infinity.  After some troubleshooting, I managed boot to the command line (the server version doesn’t come with a GUI).  I ended up having to remove all but the main drive from the server, and mess round with Grub to get it to boot without the install CD.

I thought everything was fine until I added in the other 4 drives. Then I had the same problem.  I figure somehow I ended up with a master boot record on a different drive (I have a PCI controller card that I think contributed to that problem).  When I added in the data drives, things got confusing.

It was then that I remember having similar issues the last time I rebuilt the server.  Enough was enough.  I was tired of managing 5 drives + 2 external drives on 8 year old hardware.  So, I went to Newegg.ca and ordered some new hardware.  I got a 2GHz dual core Celeron processor, a Gigabyte mother board with gigabit ethernet and onboard video, 4 GB ram, and 2 1TB hard drives.  I figure that ought to last me another 5 years or so.

Now I just have to make due without TV because I cancelled my satellite subscription a couple months ago.  Everything should be here by Monday though.  I guess I’ll just have to read a book, or take some pictures, or something like that.

I’m a software pirate. Yup, that’s me.  I’m a bad guy, right?

I have a jailbroken iPhone, and I use appulo.us to download pirated apps.  I’ve downloaded dozens of pirated apps, and I don’t feel the least bit guilty.  As I write this article, there are only 2 pirated apps on my iPhone.  The others I’ve either paid for or deleted because they were terrible, or I didn’t use them.

Right now Apple is counting their way toward 1 billion apps downloaded from their app store, and a significant number of those are free apps.  But, of the paid apps, I’m willing to bet that most of those are not in use by their buyers for the same reasons I delete most of my pirated apps.

The app store thrives on the impulse-style marketing found at grocery store check-outs everywhere.  Most apps are only a buck or two, so most people don’t take the time to think about whether they really want or need that iFart Mobile app. They just buy it and delete it in a few days because they realize it’s crap (no pun).

When I download a pirated app, I do so for evaluation purposes…really, I do.  I’ll use if for a while and see if it suits my purpose.  If it doesn’t, I delete it.  If it does, I buy it.  Simple as that.  Too bad more people don’t operate that way.

Let me put this question to you:  Given my previous statement that most iPhone apps are purchased and never really used is true, does the developer lose out on revenue when his apps are pirated?  If his app wasn’t available to download as a pirated app, would it appear on as many iPhones?  I say no.  In fact I think that that developer probably sold more copies as a result.  And if not, then either the software provides no real value, or it doesn’t fit at its current price point.

As for the 2 pirated apps I have on my iPhone…I just bought one, and deleted another. I think that developers should get paid for their work, but I don’t want to buy crap, and I think a solution to appulo.us would be a 14 day trial system for apps that aren’t games.  That way I can make sure it fits my needs.

I love Twitter.  Let’s get that out of the way right now.  I think it’s a great way to share information, and keep up with friends, family, and people with shared interests.

Despite all the benefits to Twitter, there are a number of things that irritate me, and take away from the ideal user experience, and I thought I’d share them with you.

First of all, and probably the most irksome of Twitter’s flaws isn’t with the service itself, but in how people use it.  Some people are obsessed about the number of followers they have.  Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) recently put out a call for more Twitter followers in a bid to reach 1 000 000 in order to surpass CNN.  So, he wants publicity.  Fine.  What about all the non-celebrity Twitter users out there who spend all there energy getting followers?  What’s the point?

And then there are the people who follow thousands of other people.  How could you possibly keep track of everything all of these people have to say?  I look at my Twitter stream, and I see that half of the tweets are replies to people I don’t know.  I follow 40 people.  I can’t imagine trying to weed through tweets from a couple hundred people, let alone a couple thousands. The signal to noise ration is just way to high on Twitter.

Next, I really can’t stand it when all people tweet about is Twitter.  I was following they guy in my area who would tweet something like this: “@soandso Thanks for the follow” every time he got a new follower.  Since he was getting quite a few new followers every day, this became essentially spam.  I had to unfollow him for my own sanity.

Then there’s #followfriday, which I think is great.  The idea here is that you both follow people and have followers with similar interests.  If this is the case, it makes sense that some of your followers might find somebody you follow to be interesting.  So, on Fridays, you recommend a person or two that you follow to your followers by tweeting something like this: “#followfriday #topic_of_interest @soandso, @someotherguy”. So, those of your followers who are interested in #topic_of_interest may want to check out @soandso and @someotherguy. Simple.

The problem comes from those obsessed people in my first point who want to follow and be followed by as many people as possible.  Sometimes you’ll see tweets from them recommending dozens of people at a time.  This kind of defeats the purpose of #followfriday.  When I see this, I just ignore it because it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

And finally, I despise services like Mr. Tweet and Tweetmeme that flood your twitter stream with automated garbage. I also find it irritating when people automatically cross-post from other social networking services like Facebook or Blip.fm.  Why do you think that your twitter followers want to know about every song you think is great on Blip.fm?  If you want your followers to know about your newest blog post, that’s fine, but your facebook status?  I don’t get it.

Feel free to post this on all your social networks, and follow me everywhere

I had a chance to play with my Rokinon 500mm f/6.3 lens on the weekend, and I took some test shots of the sunset from my deck.  It’s definitely a difficult lens to use, but you can get some pretty cool shots if you keep at it.

Sunset Over Kelly Creek

For this shot, I used the 2x teleconverter for an effective focal length of 1500mm (I have a D80 with a crop sensor).  The hardest part of taking this shot wasn’t actually the focus, although as you can see, I didn’t quite nail that either.  The most difficult thing was positioning the camera on the tripod so that the sunset was in the frame correctly.  Even the slightest movement caused the sun to jump out of frame, and as we all know the sun sets very fast.  So, that’s why I only got the tail end of this one.

I think I had to take about 20 shots to get this, and even then I had to straighten it because I couldn’t get the camera positioned properly before the sun went down.

Sunset Behind Tower

I wasn’t going to attempt another shot like this so soon, but I took this one yesterday because the clouds were just breaking at sunset and the way they were sitting before the sun was awesome.  I had to give it a try, but I knew from the other day that I didn’t have time to mess with the tripod.

Normally the rule of thumb is that you can hand-hold the camera if your shutter speed is greater than your focal length.  So in my case where the focal length was 1000mm I would need to use a 1/1000th sec shutter speed.  At sunset, with an aperture of f/6.3 – 2 stops for the 2x teleconverter, that wasn’t going to do me any good.  Because this is a mirror lens, I was able to get away with 1/200th of a second if I held my breath while shooting.

I really can’t wait for the snow to melt so I can get out there and experiment a little more with this lens.  Knowing that I can hand hold it is giving me an itchy shutter release finger.

I had a little time this week, so I decided to rewrite my WordPress template. I liked the overall look of it, but I just customized somebody else’s work, and things were just a little off.

I’d never written a template for WordPress from scratch before, but it turns out to be pretty easy. I used the Blueprint CSS framework because I’ve really come to love using it, and I added a graphical logo to the header instead of plain text.

I also made changes to the categories.  I felt there were way to many, so I consolidated them into 5 areas.  After that, I think that it’s important to utilize tags instead of categories.  As a result, those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed probably saw a lot of old posts show up.  Sorry about that.  Wordpress automatically adds an edited post to the feed.

So, let me know what you think works, or doesn’t work.  If there’s a problem in a particular browser/OS, let me know that too.