A few days ago, I decided to take the e-plunge, and install the next version of Ubuntu. I always dread the upgrade, because the update manager always makes you choose if you want to keep your current configuration or install the package maintainers configuration. This is troublesome because I always wonder how much the config has changed, and if it warrants me dumping my current one for a new, blank one. At least the update manager shows you a diff between the files, that way you can make a more educated decision. Anyhow, after installing Hardy, Apache didn’t want to serve pages anymore to the outside world, which kind of defeats the purpose. After playing with the sites files and the httpd.conf file for about 4 hours, I finally fixed. (Not sure how…)

Today, however, I couldn’t access my site. I figured, maybe Apache was being temperamental, since I had restarted sometime yesterday. So I ssh’d into my box and looked around, but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Later this evening, after trying for several hours to make it work again, I concluded the server was working fine, but port 80 was mysteriously being blocked somewhere outside my network. Since we have Time Warner’s Road Runner service, I immediately figured they were blocking it on their end, which wouldn’t be the first time they had pulled some jack-assery of that type. So i got on the live chat and asked them. They stated that they NEVER block ports on their end, which I just assumed was a bold faced lie. After playing with port settings and a few other things, still no luck, I decided to reboot the router. BINGO. Working website. Maybe running the release candidate of DD-WRT isn’t the most stable thing for the network that I always trust to “just work”.

Besides that issue, I started summer school a few weeks ago. It’s ok, I suppose. I’m still trying to recall how to write good VHDL code, since it’s been about 2 years since I’ve even looked at VHDL. Vacation to Myrtle Beach starts this Friday, and I’m missing the first week of my 5 week Latin Civilization class. Alwell, I haven’t been on a vacation in years, and I think it’s a well deserved break.

So that’s about all that I can think of that is new right now. Hopefully summer class ends well and I can glide right into fall semester.

Yesterday the snow began to fall and as of today, there will be upwards of 16″ of snow on the ground. This has caused a lot of problems on the roads and a lot of delays around the area. Today is definitely a “sit-at-home-and-relax” day.

Besides the snow, a lot else has happened in the last few months. I finished my co-oping period with ABB in December. It was an enjoyable and valuable experience. It does feel good to be back in school though, I was really starting to miss the academic environment that has become so familiar to me over the last few years. Christmas break was pleasant, we spent some time with family, saw some friends, and burned up a lot of time playing Rock Band and other video games.

Now I’m back in school, and back to the grind. This semester I only have four classes, but they’re all engineering courses, so it’s a very difficult semester. I am taking VLSI, Operating System Concepts, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Communications & Signal Processing. Over the summer I’ll have to take a few more courses to make sure I can graduate next spring.

Other than that, the last few months have kind of buzzed by. Tim is looking at colleges to attend in the fall and head to France after he graduates in June. Mike is not currently attending school, and is trying to find a job (which he is finding out is very difficult in today’s job market) . I spent some time with Nick Koehler over his winter quarter break a couple of weeks ago. Nick will graduate this spring and start working at AEP in Gahanna, OH this summer. Also, Tom Downerd will get married to Ashli Litten this April. Exciting times for all, that’s for sure!

Anyways, that’s pretty much all for right now. Hopefully I will be able find some time to blog a little bit more often than once every 3 months!

No, thats not my age! Today my blog celebrates it’s Two-Year Old Birthday. It happened to be by pure virtue that I was browsing in my archives today, and noticed that my first real post (besides test posts which I should delete) was on December 19th 2005.

HISTORY OF MY BLOG/SERVER
My first post was actually written back when I had a Blogspot account, which is now owned by Google, and renamed to Blogger. These posts were then carried over onto a new install of Wordpress on my first server. The specs for that machine were: AMD K62 @ 400MHz, 92MB RAM, Windows 2000 Pro and XAMPP for the web services. There were a few other things that my server was doing for me, like running HoTTProxy and VibeStreamer, but all in all, everything was it slow and not very pleasant to use… Once I decided to take the plunge into Linux, the experience was a whole lot better. Basically from this point onward, I have loved my Linux experiences. I make reference in a post about how the server just performs better with Linux, and it is so true! Fast forward a bit, last November I got a new server, since Lake Twp. was going to auction off some old PCs. This machine has really helped me out a lot. It now has a 500GB RAID1 storage array for music, movies, games, and backups of my laptop. Its a torrent box, uPnP server (for getting media to the 360), web server, phone proxy, and probably a couple other things I forgot. There are a few choice pieces of software I miss that are Windows only, but both of them have plans in the future to release Linux versions.

It’s crazy to think that just 2 years ago, I didn’t know anything about Linux, let alone hosting a website. I will have to say, that my experiences with my Linux server are invaluable to me. I have learned so much about so many different things; from troubleshooting system problems and software problems to writing shell scripts to automate tasks. The whole concept of being thrown into an OS with no idea how anything works is now tolerable for me. Anyways, Happy Birthday Blog and Merry Christmas to all!

P.S. Special thanks to Ben for helping to introduce me to Linux. You really helped me a lot Ben. Thanks!

A couple weeks ago Greenpeace had a naming contest name a whale. Well of-course the internet being what it is, tubes and pictures of cats with ill-formed grammatical statements, there was an overwhelming push to have the whale named “Mr. Splashy Pants”. And after the final voting, out of 30 possible names and 150,000 votes, Mr. Splashy Pants took home 78% of the vote.

Now since the internet has chosen a name for the whale, it is time to save him. So lets in an effort to try to keep the Japanese from hunting and killing these amazing creatures, sign the petition, and donate a little money if you support the cause.

Ruckus, a music service that universities and colleges are starting to use to try to keep their students out of hot water with the RIAA. Students of participating institution can sign up with their school provided e-mail address and download music for “free”. The ability for it to be free, includes tight licensing for the downloaded music courtesy of Microsoft’s WMA DRM.

Ruckus is pretty cool, the quality is acceptable, and you can’t really beat “free”, but… as soon as you leave the institution providing the service, the licenses that allow you to play the DRM‘d WMA files will expire, and you will have lots of unplayable music files. Along with that, DRM‘d WMA files can not be converted to be used on iPods or some other portable media players, and if you use OSX or Linux, your also out of luck. If none of these things bother you, you can stop reading here, otherwise keep reading…

Now the solution kind of goes into a gray area, at least with Ruckus, DRM, and the concept of Fair Use. The real thought behind Fair Use is you have already bought the license to the media, now you are trying to unprotect it so that you can use it in other ways, i.e. Putting a copy protected DVD, that you bought, onto your iPod. The gray area you run into is, with Ruckus, you never really paid for the media, at least not directly. So do you really own the same rights to it that you would if you directly paid for it or not? I don’t really know… What I do know is how to get rid of the DRM that your music is infested with.

Keep in mind, as with all things, someone has to pay for it. So if you like the artist, support them.

• -First, you need to obtain FairUse4WMA. You can get it from the zip archive, here.
• -After you extract the files, I found the easiest way to remove the DRM from the files was to use the FairUse Commander.
• -When you open the FairUse Commander, you need to set the path to FairUse4WMA.exe, which you should have just extracted.
• -Select the folder that contains the files with the DRM, and I leave the “Find only protected files” checkbox enabled.
• -Next, check the “Use output folder” checkbox, and select a place to put the un-DRM’d files.
• -You can choose whether or not to leave the “[NoDRM]” prefix, but check the “Batch DRM Removal” checkbox.
• -Click the “Search for Media Files” button, and verify that the music inside the gridview is the DRM’d tracks that you want to un-DRM, then click the green “Remove DRM!” button.
• -You should have WMA files in the output directory that are DRM free!

If you have problems, you can check out this article. Contrary to what this article says, however, I have been able to remove the DRM from Ruckus tracks without removing Windows Media Player 11 from my system, so YMMV. Good Luck!

Since FairUse4WM is no longer being developed (read cease and desist), in order to free our DRM’d WMA music we must turn to another method.

To everyone who is having problems getting FairUse4WM, I have some unfortunate news. After trying a few things, I can no longer get it to work either. I think SP3 for XP may have updated WMP and that might be causing the problems, but there is no way to know for sure.

Since FairUse4WM is no longer being developed, there’s not much we can do but to move on to a different technique. I would suggest using TuneBite. It allows for ripping at a higher speed than 1x with their proprietary high speed driver. This makes ripping the DRM for a CD worth of music doable in about 10 minutes.

I don’t really like this solution as it requires you to transcode the songs from one format (WMA) to another (MP3, AAC, etc…), thus resulting in a loss in quality from the original lossy source.

Obviously most people can find TuneBite w/o too much problem (*cough* piratebay *cough*), but for people who can’t, http://tunebite.com/en/remove_drm/index.html

Good Luck!

I really wish being able to use media, in which we have been given (or have purchased) a license to use, would be simpler.  If you feel the same way I do, please check out DefectiveByDesign, a group opposed to the DRM imposed on us by big corporations.

Protect your freedom!

So, the new Ubuntu distro has made it’s debut, and I can say I’m pretty happy with what it has to offer. The upgrade this time was a much less invasive process, compared to 6.10 to 7.04. It only took me about a total of 5 hours of work to get the machine fully upgraded, re-configured, and functioning again. The only thing that is kind of daunting about upgrading, is the fact that the updater wants to replace a lot of the config files with their distributed default ones. If you choose to replace or keep, no data is lost, but it can be a real pain in the butt to track down what is going on when something isn’t working. Overall this time, i felt more confident in what the updater was doing/replacing, so I guess I wasn’t as nervous as last time. From a desktop user perspective, this new distribution has some things that make it a lot more user friendly. I can’t really comment too much on these things however, as of right now I’m only running it on my server. I have seen a little bit of a performance increase, my load has dropped a bit, but the cpu usage has gone up. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the tickless kernel or not, but regardless, as long as the system is stable and performs well, I’m happy. I would recommend the upgrade for anyone who is thinking about it, and for the people who have yet to try Linux, now may be a great time to take the plunge into OSS.

Most “self-proclaimed gurus” have determined that the only real difference between 64-bit OS vs 32-bit OS is the amount of supported memory… This is the most obvious difference, however this is far from the only difference. I was catching up on my digging this morning, and I came across an article at bit-tech.net interesing article that discusses 64-bit processors. I can’t that I went into the article knowing everything about 64 bit vs. 32 bit, but it seems to be a bit clearer now. It will be interesting to see how 64 bit computing affects us, and how the OS developers embrace the new platform. YAY FOR MEGABITS!

Just saw a cute cartoon over at xkcd and wanted to share it. Engineers/Mathematics majors will get a kick out if it.

Coming soon to a computer near you! Try Linux today!

Support FOSS and ride the OSSM!

I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.

Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.

Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.

I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.