Category Archives: Software

Digging in the Sandvox: a Rival for iWeb

Scottie posted the other day about Google’s Page Creator. Well, just before Apple announced the new iLife suite, Karelia.com launched the first public beta of Sandvox.

Tonight I decided to download it to take it for a test run. I’ve been playing with iWeb a bit here and there and managed to get a pretty decent start on a webpage for Amaya. I like it. It’s simple and attractive, despite being glitchy and a processor hog for my G4 700 mghz iMac. The worst is how they’ve chosen to implement image masking.

I haven’t liked RapidWeaver, BlogWave Studio (you’ll see why), or Site Studio. But I want to see what else there is. I’ll report back and let you know what I find out about Sandvox.

Use Linux!

Often, people claim they’re stuck with MS Windows because of the requirement of some specific application. Often, they’re right. While Codeweaver’s Crossover Office has saved me from that fate, allowing me to run MS Office on Linux, there’s a whole bunch of applications that aren’t MS Office out there. In many cases, there is no easy way to run them on Linux, but there may be a functional substitute. This article provides some substitutes for the ‘most wanted’ apps in Windows land. The list includes alternatives for Photoshop, AutoCAD, iTunes, and Flash.

Of course, it’s worth noting that many of these apps will run on other operating systems too. You might even be able to try them out without leaving the comfort of your Mac.

Server Harddrive Swap

So, the big day is 2/20/06. The two new harddrives are here – the challenge will be to transfer the files, as I cannot operate two Raids in the machine at the same time. So somehow, I will have to move the data off the existing Raid onto the new Raid, without having the drives in the machine at the same time. I would rather not have to go through and reconfigure the server (after reinstalling it). So, the question of the day is, how do you move an entire server system and the files onto that new Raid. Any ideas? Help wanted.

VMWare GSX Server For Free (as in beer)?

This article over at C-Net indicates that VMWare is going to start giving away their GSX Server product. That means that people could create and manage VMWare images for free! Currently, they provide a VMPlayer that lets anyone use a VM, but not create them.

Virtualization is all the rage in IT. Being able to run multiple OSs on a single piece of hardware dramatically decreases costs of administration and management. VMWare also has a snapshot feature that allows you to revert the entire system to a previously saved state. It’s pretty cool for testing and for disaster recovery.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this move. I really like VMWare. I use it practically every day. It is, however, proprietary. I’d rather see an open standard for virtualization like xen. VMWare is already somewhat of a de-facto standard, and we all know how de-facto propietary standards can result in lesser software becoming entrenched in the enterprise and consumer markets.

So Far So Good…

As many of you know my company is implemeting Active Directory and MS Exchange over the next month. We decided to contract First Tech Computer in Minneapolis to handle the migration from our NT4 domain to Active Directoy and setup/configure MS Exchange to handle our email and eventually our other collaboration efforts. I must say that I have been VERY happy with how it has gone so far. We are all setup and ready to go with some minor cleaning up to do with respects to our NT4 accounts and email accounts, lists, etc. Scott at First Tech has been amazing in not only the setup and configuration of both AD and Exchange, but with explaining himself along the way and making sure I’m involved with things I need to care about once he’s gone. I am also very happy with how Dantz Retrospect handles the backup of Exchange. We tested it out and it is really slick. I have to start getting in the mind set that everything will now reside on a server instead of our clients POP’ing there mail into the email client. It’s amazing to me that Retrospect can backup an individual mailbox and retrieve an individual message back out of the mailbox. Hopefully our users will not start being careless with respect to there email messages because I can see how this could suck up a lot of IT resources.

As we go along with the setup/migration I will keep you updated because I know a lot of people out there have opinions on Exchange and especially how it plays with the Mac. I too have read all the good and bad that people have to say. I will bring you an objective (as much as I can be) perspective of how it’s going and how it actually goes on D-Day (the weekend of Feb. 25th) when we actually go live.Bill Gates

That is all for now. I wonder which of the newly formed MS Companies handles Exchange. Does anyone know. I know MS broke up into three companies, one that handles the OS, one that handles XBox on peripherals and one that handles Office. Am I wrong on this?

iChat video chat kaput in OS X 10.4.4

All Mac Users got really excited when Apple introduced the encrypted iChats under OS X 10.4.4. Turns out, video chats are not too excited about this feature. Actually, they don’t even work at all – at least from what Grant and I can tell. Please note, this only occurs when being used between encrypted parties (on .Mac for example). Turn the security feature off (and restart the app, is this Windows or what?) and voilà, video chats are online again. Just in case you cared… Happy Unsecure Video Chats!

Chat to MSN in iChat with Jabber (this is sweet)

A buddy of mine pointed me to another blog where they tell you how to use Jabber in iChat to chat with MSN Messenger people. Now granted you can use a program like Adium which I use to chat with multiple clients, but this is through iChat dude! I would rather have the video chatting capabilities in iChat with other iChat clients then to load it in Adium and not have that capability. I wonder if I could then video chat with other clients? Hmmm, I’ll look into it. Check it out.

dyne:bolic – The multimedia OS

Because I like free software.

dyne:bolic is a bootable linux cd built for multimedia. That means you can run it without installing anything. This means you can turn any PC/Mac into a multimedia editing machine without installing a new OS on it. If you’re into text, you can even stream ascii video on the web with dyne:bolic. Gives you that matrix feel for real.

And it’s optimized for old hardware:

“This operating system is designed to run on a minimum of Pentium 1 MMX processor with at least 64MB of RAM (memory), not even an harddisk is needed. It can be used to stream online radio with a Pentium 2 400MHZ or a Xbox game console, all very cheap on the second hand market.”

Oh, if you try it out, post a comment.