Lame MacBook DVD drive

Maybe that's too harsh. It works great. It's a wonderful drive. I've never had a problem doing what it's supposed to do.

But, doing "other things"... that's another story. I was trying to make a perfectly legal backup of one of my DVD's, "NH", and I found that I couldn't rip it using MacTheRipper nor convert it using Handbreak. I can't give it another shot, because someone else is borrowing it right now, but I was just thinking that the drive might be too finiky to handle CSS decryption. I remember reading that it was impossible to remove the region encoding on the drives, hypothetically of course, as I had hypothetically done with my old PowerBook G4.

It seems that the PB has a much more flexible, albeit ancient, drive as I recall only having problems ripping one or two DVD's in the past.

Oh, well. I just have to remember to make my legal backups using my PB.

iPod in the house

Well, not really my house... the dept. scored a 30GB iPod, much to Katya's doing, this past month. It came from unspent budget money and we've already been putting it to good use, and there were those who said we wouldn't use it. Damn, all the teachers should have their own. Dubhgan has been showing in-class video projects, Katya and I have been playing sound files through the classroom TV's... the iPod kicks butt. We have it on manual updating so that we can share it between all of the computers. It's easier than erasing the thing each time. Making me drool over one for myself. I'm holding out for a large screen, high capacity model. Think 80GB iPod + iPhone.

Can't move blog to another account!

Looks like I'm not the only one who's had problems. This sucks. I wish Blogger warned us about this and updated their damn website. Now I'm stuck with two accounts unless I cut-and-paste all of the old posts into my new account.

phpMyAdmin

I got phpMyAdmin running on my server the other night. It was my second attempt to get it running. I had problems configuring it to work since the scripts couldn't connect to mysql even thought it was already running. I thought it was a problem with the sockets, but it was the "localhost" string. Apparently with my server, I need to use 127.0.0.1 whenever installation directions call for "localhost". Once I did that it fired up with out a hitch.

The second problem I ran into was an authentication issue. The database user that I defined wasn't able to connect to mysql via the script. When I removed the password for the user in the script, phpMyAdmin worked well enough. I didn't like the idea of running the scripts without password verification, so I took it off line temporarily until I figure out what's going on.

It's always best if I jam on a problem for a while, then leave it and come back to it later. The fresh perspective always helps me to see a different solution. I almost get frustrated at the things I missed the previous attempts, but I'm usually just happy that I figured out the solution.

Upgraded Blogger

I gotta say, this so-called Beta version of Blogger really kicks butt. I was hesitant to upgrade this particular account since I had done a fair amount of code hacking. I'll have go back in and add some JavaScript to make collapsible in-line comments, but I'm not too worried about that. The benefits of easy customization out weigh the re-coding.

PHP bulletin board

Now, I'm getting greedy. I want my own BB!
Dunno what I'll use it for... just to have one to play around with will be enough. I wonder if I can just use my moodle... this is just too fun. Too bad I have to work too.

Expanding FTP options

I've been running Mac OS X Server Tiger for a couple of months now with great success. One of the services I've configured and use quite a bit is FTP.

I've been trying to make the process as easy as possible for any user I would authorize to use my service (i.e. my students). I think our network is behind a firewall that prevents us from using WS_FTP. I use FireFTP over FireFox all the time from my laptop here at work, so I know the service is working from here.

I've tried two PHP options: phpwebftp and mywebftp both of which haven't worked. phpwebftp wasn't too hard to get up and running. I had a problen when I configured the default language as "english", but once I removed that, it would start properly in the browser. Then I tried to configure the default to "binary" and was able to do that after searching both of their forums. Finally, I was stalled at "Directory emtpy..." or some hogwash. I can't get phpwebftp to properly display directories and their contents. mywebftp failed even earlier for me. I couldn't install the scripts. I ran the setup.php and things didn't install properly, so I'm not even going to bother.

I found another service, net2ftp and I hope that I can get that running this evening. I've been using their interface for class and we had some problems, but I don't think it was due to the FTP client software. I think my G4 laptop choked while transferring zipped archives over to it from school. Oh well. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Been gone, but busy...

Well, I'm back to bloggin. Since my last post I've:

1. Converted my G4 laptop into a server running Mac OS X Server Tiger
2. Installed two moodles - one running on Tiger client and the other on the new server
3. Switched to Parallels for running Windows XP on my MacBook
4. Changed the network entirely utilizing my new server's capabilities
5. Wiped and reinstalled HJ's laptop with an English version of Windows XP instead of her original Windows 2000 Korean version