DoomBook

Last.fm looks like a fairly interesting service. Check out what other people are listening to. If it’s in the catalog, listen to it too!

Plus it looks like there’s integration in Amarok. That’s what I use to listen to audio these days, what with it’s exhaustive feature set, so that’s pretty important.

In addition to checking out last I’m also getting pulseaudio going. It looks like yet another audio daemon so I’m curious if it’s better than the rest of the (somewhat dissapointing) pack.

NAS (Network Audio System) always looked good and may yet be the audio layer of choice, but it’s a bit under the radar at the moment. Methodical is how I’d describe those Xorg folks.

And hey, whatdya know. It’s installed. Time to go play with last.fm .

We’re now on Wordpress 2.2 and all the features (comments and whatnot) should be back to a working state. If you notice anything odd send me an e-mail over at PCBurn.com if you’d like .. that’s chris@ the aformentioned website.

In case you’re curious, the problem I was having started when I changed wordpress directories on the server. It just freaked out.

All the incoming links started flaking, it didn’t ping out to services anymore, and comments were screwy. This after I changed all the appropriate places to reflect the new directory (plugins and such).

Now with a fresh install, DB updated for 2.2, and a cleaned up set of plugins we should be good to go.

Using XEN with hardware vitualization to get Windows up and running in a cute little box (where it’s harder for it to break things) should be easy. Just pop in the disk, tell it to install, and away you go, right?

Nope. Went through a good hour of tweaking and prodding the Xen install to get it kicking correctly. After which it just wouldn’t do anything when I went to install Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Nothing. Just sat at the Starting Windows for install screen.

Turns out, you need to hit F5 before it gets to that point. While it’s displaying “hit F2″ or “hit F6″ on the screen. Then choose the top option instead of the “other architecture” default option.

Freaky. And irritating.

While I was out celebrating the holidays there were apparently some server outages at the casa resulting in the MySQL server going down. Now it should automagically come back up after the fsck on a system outage and all is well in the world.

Except for the power mains in CT apparently.

Our new virtual server is live! Pound’s handling the connections and routing to the appropriate destination, Xen does the VM’ing, and Apache’s still working its server mojo.

All this being served up off a beefy (and more efficient) Red Hat Linux machine. Now I just have to get the processor power controls up and we’ll be all set.

As the new server lurches to life (thanks to Travis’s timely visit so I could clean up the Automobile, too) I’ll be swapping this machine out with it. Doombook and co. will be running on a swank little machine with a gig and a half of ram, a modern AMD processor, and virtualization up the wazoo.

Pound will be MCing as our delegator of incoming connections, so all the nifty Ruby/Mongrel/Apache connections are transparently proxied out to whomever is requesting them.

Ideally this will all be wired up by next weekend and you’ll never notice (except the speed bump). Miracles do occasionally happen.

The hardware all this runs on is a hodge-podge of servers in my basement. On the one hand they’re likely to fail at any moment, system wise. On the other they’re more reliable than MySpace.

Which isn’t saying much, but still.

So I’ve invested in some decent power supplies and a new case (to replace the frame that one system is currently housed in) to keep the whole mess running for a while longer. The one bright side of the setup is the lack of dust in their current locale.

So here’s for another 8 years of villa-straylight.

It needs some thematic elements added in. Aside from that DoomBook is now ready to roll. After considering quite a few CMS packages for the site, WordPress still seems to be the best option.

Joomla was okay, but lacked the advanced features that a proper weblog needs these days. It doesn’t really have a “weblog” integrated per-say and seems to be geared toward a much heavier format, such as a corporate intranet’s hub.

Typo looked much lighter, but unfortunately it also looked to be totally undocumented. While I’m all for doing a bit of hacking (I had to with Joomla), I’m not all for having to learn the CMSs programming language every time I need to do an update. PCBurn provides all the site code whacking fun I need in my day.

So there we have it. I tried a few others, checked out even more, and gave them a thorough thrashing. WP came out on top even with it’s sometimes-kludgy method of getting things done. It integrates all the features, where none of the other CMSs I looked at even come close.