YWGAV

With the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 software update, and launch of the 3G iPhone (I’ll have one soon),  Apple also launched the App Store, where 3rd party applications are sold and distributed for the platform.  This is a wonderful thing as it creates a slick, clean, one stop shop for applications [...]

The company I work for gave me a Blacberry 8830 “World Phone” not long after I started here.  I’d love to say I was thrilled, but I’d be lying.  I don’t necessarily have anything against BlackBerry, I just don’t really like them all that much. 

Earlier today one of the iPhone apps I’ve been waiting for hit the app store, Wordpress.
I’ve been waiting for it simply so I could have a method of bloging on the go, wherever I happen to be when an idea strikes me.
I’m giving it a shot right now, in fact, and think it’s [...]

Today is the long awaited release day for the iPhone 3G, as well as the day when MobileMe finally shows up and is accessible (while some were able to get to it yesterday, I was not amongst them). It’s also supposedly the release date for the iPhone 2.0 software update release, though an unofficial leaked version was available early yesterday. A few brave souls decided to take the plunge and install the unofficial version – I’m not that daring, especially with a major update like this. And of course, the much anticipated App Store is now officially online as well.

Earlier in the week I mentioned I had a project cooking that I thought was pretty cool. Last night, after I received the last piece of hardware I needed to make it work, I got it all set up and working. This didn’t involve much heavy lifting (none, actually) as I had already done the difficult parts when I set up a proof of concept to show Ann ( my girlfriend, for those who don’t know).

I’ve had it set up for a while such that, when I wake up in the morning I press a button on a keypad (mounted in wall) in my room and my room light comes up slowly – so as to be easy on the eyes – and the bathroom vanity lights turn on. The vent fan is then set on a 5 minute timer to turn on about the time my shower really starts producing steam – and turns itself off after about 15 minutes, ensuring it got all the steam. I press the same button on my way out my bedroom door and the bathroom light shuts off, as does my bedroom light.

Pretty cool way to do things – one button controls everything. It just got cooler.

For a few months now I’ve been running OS X 10.5 Leopard Server on an older XServe I acquired. I’ve been using it as a gateway on my network, but also as an open directory, DNS and DHCP server as well. Initially, I was impressed – the setup seemed to go alright and it seemed to work well.

That is, until I tried to really do anything

I am one of the few who, last year, went out and bought an AppleTV. I’d experimented with several media center PC’s over the years, but honestly didn’t really want a bulky PC sitting there beside my entertainment center. It also didn’t really work all that great. I’m sure if I had put more effort into things I could have succeeded with that project, but I didn’t and I didn’t. Regardless, though, I still wanted the ability to do the things a media center could do, and AppleTV made it fairly easy to do. Music could be streamed seamlessly from inside it’s interface, movies and TV shows could be organized and watched as well. In short it did a lot of what I wanted it to do, even with it’s limitations.

For a little over a month now I’ve been running Leopard server on my XServe. I’m using it as my gateway machine and have a variety of services running on it. Chief among those services is Open Directory, which serves the portable home directory I use on my Macbook Pro but also serves network home directories for my other macs and windows machines. Throughout the time I’ve been running it I’ve become well acquainted with it’s little bugs, as well as a few major ones.

First we’ve got the DNS admin panel in Server Admin. There appears to be next to no input validation – despite the fact that certain input characters WILL cause DNS to stop working properly (and in fact will prevent it from reloading data, will make your zone information disappear and generally cause a whole slew of other weird problems.) It also gives no indication that stuff isn’t working – you can start the service and it’s status shows as if everything were OK – the only way to diagnose that there even IS a problem is to watch the logs with verbose logging turned on.