Matt’s Space

Stop laughing. I’m serious. Check out my green blog, where I’m documenting the process. And to get a better idea of what I’m doing google “cargo house” or container house”.

Has any of you reading this post gone thru one? What was your experience like? How long did it last? What was the resolution? I’m going to update this post with my experience that happened today, as soon as I can gather all my thoughts on the matter.

Its been a long long time since I purchased a TV. My last one was a 61″ Sony rear projection model back in 2000. I’ve been wanting to get a flat-panel TV for a while now, just waiting for prices to come down for the size I wanted. After carefully considering all the different models and types: Plasma, LCD, LED, Laser, etc, I decided to go with a Samsung Series 8000 55″ LED. It should arrive Monday. I’ll take some pics of the un-boxing and eventual wall installation.

OK. I just got my Google Voice invite (woot?). I signed up for it over a month ago at the insistence of several of my younger IT co-workers and friends. The way they’ve described it, it will revolutionize how “you” use the phone… Hmm, where have I heard that one before? Even after watching the informational video on the Google Voice website, I’m still not entirely sure why I need it. But sounds cool. And I like Google.

And now I have it, so I will try it out and see what happens. So far, I’m having problems just trying to get their dialer app to install on my BlackBerry Storm. I suspect it has something to do with a lack of storage.

Here are some of their videos on YouTube:

Google Voice Overview:

Placing a Google call:

Screening Calls:

Taking Calls:

Blocking Unwanted Calls:

Google Voice for mobile:

Google Voice – Voicemail:

So anyone reading this post use Google Voice? How do you like it?

I feel like such a dufus. According to people who know me, I’m supposed to be this really techy, geeky, person. Well add dufus to the list. Here’s what happened: I wanted incorporate some of the things I was learning about virtualization (at work) into my own servers at home. And by servers, I mean server, but its hosting multiple services such as a mail server, database server, web and blog servers, etc. My goal was to split these up, where possible and provide some type of redundancy and availability. Not that any of that really matters for a site the eats more dollars than it generates, but I digress.

I ended up creating two virtual machines: 1 for email server, 1 for web server. They are both ‘hosted’ on the original hardware, with the VMs actually residing on a remote file server via NFS. The mail server mostly works, it accepts mail for “matte AT neomajic dot com”. I just can’t login to the Dovecot pop3 service to pick it up… But thats another post, though. I used Apache 2 to replace the original Apache server, which was sort of a headache learning how Apache 2 is configured differently than regular Apache. I managed to get most of my sites up and going except for my blog…which has been down for over month. The problem ended up being a link was blown away when I made my backups. This link seemed trivial at first. Its the link that tells my blog’s instance of WordPress where to find its themes used to customized the look of the blog. You’d think the abscence of such link would at least yield some unformatted text or garbage, or something, but it just yields a white screen. There’s nothing descriptive about a white screen that you can Google and I wasn’t getting anything my logs.

This problem was started by, you guessed it, me. Let me first explain a little bit about how WordPress is installed. Lets say you wanted to host blogs for 10 of your bestest friends. Using WordPress, this means that in addition to your single install of Apache, you need to install 10 installs of WordPress. There’s currently no way to share a single install over the 10 instances.

So, in an effort to save some space as far as themes were concerned, I thought I’d at least share all the installed themes in a common point and link back to it via each WordPress share. This works well.

The problem was when I used FileZilla to copy my files from the backup to the new server. Apparently, FileZilla does not like links too much. Fixed the link, viola! My blog is back.

For those of you still awake… here’s an example of the linkage:

Ex.
Blog====> /home/blog/matte
Themes====> /home/blog/themes

Link====> /home/blog/matte/wp-content/themes —> /home/blog/themes

So anyway, I’m back up. I do have a lot on my mind to blog about, so that’s next.

Obama: First Nerd President

This is promises to be the next killer app for smart phones. Its already available on Android platforms. Now we just have wait until its ported to other platforms like iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Mobile, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

http://www.bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=606071

http://buzzdroid.com/wordpress/wordpresscom-dead-blog-stats/

Duh. I know personally I’ve neglected this blog. I’ve been addicted to massively multiplayer online games busy with work and personal matters that I could blog about, but won’t. This is supposed to be a therapeutical thing for me. You know, getting it all off my geeky chest. I’m not out to get paid for this, although that would be nice. I tried to get Google AdSense working, but failed miserably. My failure is amplified because I’m the geek who’s supposed to figure that stuff out. I’ll figure it out one day I guess. Anyway, to anyone who is reading this, I promise to get some new stuff up soon. If you have any ideas to get me jump started, I’d love to hear them. You can email me at phreakincool AT gmail DOT com

I’ve been eargerly awaiting the debut of StarCraft 2, which has been 11 years in the making due to buyouts and mergers, staff departures, etc at Blizzard, they have finally built a successor to StarCraft that’s worthy of the StarCraft name. In my quest for more information on the new StarCraft, I found this interesting link where StarCraft has been used in an academic lecture on the theory of war as conducted in Starcraft.

I haven’t posted here in a while. I’ve had a lot on my mind, but lately I’ve been too busy trying to keep my job. As we all know, the economy really, really sucks. Here is a chart that compares the current recession to recent recessions in 2001 and 1991.

http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=1683

See that green line? See how its just plunging, suicide-like to the bottom? Shit!