Life on Snow Hill

So, I’ve had this idea for a while now about a website something like Facebook, but for Christians. I quit Facebook a while back because, among other reasons, there were trashy ads, I would see friends of friends’ photos and status updates that I’d rather not see, and just general stuff that a Christian doesn’t exactly find appealing.

I’m about to go geeky on you, so just bear with me.

I love WordPress. There’s a social plugin called BuddyPress that I really, really wanted to use. It’s lightweight, fast and pretty configurable. It looks somewhat like Facebook, so it would be familiar to those who moved over (or at least used both).

A couple weeks into it, I found it wasn’t going to cut it. I’d been trying to get a real-time chat script to work on it, but ran into a wall. Several times. then I found JomSocial. This is a social layer built on top of a powerful CMS called Joomla. I’ve actually tried Joomla before, but it was a long time ago and it was way over my head. I’ve learned a little bit about web stuff since then, and it actually makes sense (mostly) to me now.

JomSocial had a lot of the stuff I already wanted – photos, videos, walls, activity feeds, friends, groups…you get the picture. It didn’t have chat built in though. I tried the same script on this software, and voila! It just worked! So far, everything I’ve tried to do with this software has worked, and worked well.

Now that you’ve gotten through the geeky stuff, you may be wondering what this Christian website is? It’s called Friends of Faith. Feel free to go take a visit and sign up. It’s still growing, and things are changing, but that’s half the fun!

Wow, it’s been nearly 3 weeks since I’ve posted anything! I’ve severely neglected my blog. It’s not like I don’t want to keep it up to date – I’ve actually been pretty busy.

One thing I’ve been working on is a social website for Christians. It is still in its infancy right now. I’m getting some help from a group, mostly from my church, to get things set up for it, select a name as well as the initial features the site should have. My goal is to have all of that finished before it goes live and is opened up to the rest of the ‘world’. Hopefully it will be ready within another couple of weeks. Stay tuned for an update.

This month has been Youth Month at our church. So far, I’ve had the privilege to preach twice. We’ve had two Youth Sundays, and I’ve preached both Sunday mornings. We also had Benjamin Cooley for the first one, and Jeremiah Cooley for the second. For those of you who don’t know them, they are twin brothers who are great young men that serve God. We also had Seth Stewart from Redemption Baptist Church. He is 13 years old and has announced his call to preach. They all 3 did a great job and preached messages that encouraged, strengthened and charged me.

I look forward to this Sunday, when Breaking Ground will be with us. They are a group of young men (The oldest is 26 I believe) who sing bluegrass Gospel music and preach. One of their wives also sings with the group. All of the guys preach, and preach well. I’m looking forward to all of it.

We’re also having a youth revival the week of March 1st through the 5th. Nick Sorrell and myself will be preaching that revival. We’re looking for the Lord to do some great things in all our hearts and lives.

So again, this has been a busy month, and it isn’t quite over yet. I’ll do my best to keep this blog updated a little better so that you, my loyal readers, will have something to read.

Seems like everyone is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon lately. I’ve been on it for a while, but haven’t done a lot with it. I’m a little more into it now that I’ve quit Facebook, but I’m not sure how long it will last.

I did have a twitter feed on this site back in the day when it was known as jdsnow.net, but had removed it until recent days.

One of the reasons I’ve gotten interested in it again is because there are a ton of iPhone Twitter apps. I’ve found one, Schmap GeoTweeter (iTunes Link), that will post a short URL which maps your location on a Google map. It gathers the information from the GPS locater in the phone.

If you look to the right of my page, you’ll see 4 posts from my recent tweets. Starting now, if I update from my iPhone, you’ll see a link (like this one: http://schmap.me/xkq3yy/) that if you click on, you’ll see my location at the time of the update.

Pretty cool, eh?

But I enjoy being a geek.  This week I’ve been in a VMware training class – Deploy, Secure and Analyze.  It’s been a good class.  For a lot of it, I already knew the concepts about how things worked, but the class went into a lot of detail of exactly how things worked, and why they work the way they do.

One thing I learned a lot about was the networking portion of it.  One of the instructors showed the class a live VMware implementation (It may have been one that he has at home) and gave me an idea.  He had his ‘production’ network, his ‘internet’, or public, network, and a ‘DMZ’ network.  All of these were attached to physical NICs on his ESX host, but during the lecture we were told that a physical connection isn’t necessarily required.  So that gave me an idea.

I have a web server, database server, and file server.  My web server, of course, serves web sites and other miscellaneous web stuff.  For my more robust websites, it connects to my database server for data storage.  My file server is where I keep all my photos and application install files and things.  I’ve always known that any public-facing server (i.e., my web server which is accessible from the Internet) should be in a DMZ with its access to other parts of the network restricted.  It’s just simple security practice.  But I didn’t have a way to do it on my ESXi host.  Or so I thought.

I configured my virtual networking so that I had an Internet connection on one virtual switch (we’ll call them vSwitches) attached to my first NIC, my internal servers on another vSwitch using the other NIC (I only have the two NICs), and another vSwitch that is completely internal to the ESXi host.  It isn’t attached to any NIC or external switch or anything.  My Internet vSwitch is connected to my DSL router.  That’s the only thing on that vSwitch.  My internal vSwitch has all my servers on it.  Except for one.  My web server is on my DMZ vSwitch.

I’ve always liked the SmoothWall product (the free one – I don’t like paying for things I don’t have to).  Now I like it even more, because it does exactly what I want it to in this setup.  For my new firewall, I connected 3 virtual NICs to it, and put one NIC on each vSwitch.  I have a GREEN interface (my internal network), an ORANGE interface (My DMZ) and a RED interface (attached to the Internet).  Because the firewall is a virtual machine, that is all I need to be able to access my totally virtualized DMZ network.  Pretty clever.

To the left is a diagram of what my virtual network looks like. (Click it to see the full size screenshot)  For any of you that have had the pleasure of configuring or managing a virtual network, it should make total sense to you.  To anyone that is curious, drop me a line and I’ll explain in more detail if I can.

So Jacobs paid upwards of $3,000 for me to take this class so I could learn this simple (but clever) network strategy.

Yep, I’m a geek.  I’m fine with it though – I don’t have to ask for help with electronic stuff.

Hey, everybody! A little while back, I bought myself a Macintosh. I’ve been wanting one for a long, long time, and I was finally able to get one. One of the things included on every Mac is iLife.

I’ve been playing around with iPhoto for the last few days, and it is actually fun to use rather than tedious like other photo management apps I’ve used. You can geotag photos and display a map with all of the places you’ve taken your photos. You can also use iPhoto’s built-in facial recognition and tag people’s faces in photos, sort of like Facebook’s photo tagging, but better. It recognizes the same faces in other photos and tags them appropriately.

The feature I want to talk about here, though, is iPhoto’s Flickr integration. As I understand it, it’s been an included feature in iPhoto for a while. But since this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned, it’s new to me.

I’ve played around with Flickr before, but never really gotten into it for different reasons at different times. I used to host my own gallery using Coppermine Photo Gallery, but didn’t keep up with it very well. It has great features, but it was another place I had to keep up with photos.

With iPhoto’s flickr integration, you can publish an album or set right from iPhoto. All in one place. Nice.

And others have said I needed more photos on my blog. Well, I’ve killed two birds with, well, 1 1/2 stones anyway. I added a Flickr widget to my sidebar over there on the right. So as I take more photos and import them into iPhoto for organization, I’ll publish them to Flickr as well for your viewing pleasure – they’ll show right up in my sidebar. Spring’s arrival has inspired me to get the camera out a little more than I have in the past, so I’ve added a few photos in the past few days.

Clicking on one of the thumbnails in my sidebar will open it up on my Flickr page. There you’ll be able to browse all of my uploaded photos.

As an update to my site change post, I introduce to you TechJolt.  I’ve had it running for a few days now, but wanted to iron out the quirks before I posted anything about it.

So, for those of you who like my geeky posts, head on over and check it out!  I don’t have much content yet, but that will be added as time allows.  I have a few topics in mind, I just need to take the time to test what I’m planning to write about before I write anything on it.

That’s right, folks.  I’ve been hitting refresh on Ubuntu’s front page for the last half hour or so, and they’ve finally made the final release of 8.10 available.  I’m downloading now and will be installing it on my workstation at work today.

Ubuntu is sporting a fresh new look on its front page as well.  Well, it has a nice little flash animation anyway.  It’s explaining all of the bigger features in the new release.  Go ahead and download – I’m sure you won’t be sorry.

— UPDATE

I now have a fully functioning Ubuntu 8.10 system.  Once word got out that it was ready, everybody began downloading and started slowing down all of the circuits.  But I finally got it, and installed it.  Installing the handful of security fixes that are already out takes a little bit of time because of how saturated the circuits are, but it works.  Installing new software using the Add/Remove utility on the Applications menu is the same – slow, but working.  I imagine it will take a few days to sort out while everyone downloads their copy.

I have, however, managed to get everything I need to get going.  I installed the 3D drivers for my nVidia card, and my 3D desktop is all working.  I installed the Advanced Desktop Effects Settings utility and tweaked them to my heart’s content.  I also installed Synergy from the Ubuntu repositories so that I could control my XP laptop from this machine as well.

So far everything is working completely as expected – flawless.  Unless, again, you count slow speeds at Ubuntu’s repositories to be flawed.  Don’t worry – that’ll settle down soon.

My only disappointment is that OpenOffice.org 3 wasn’t included.  2.4 is here, but 3 has been out for a few weeks now.  I suppose I understand, though – they didn’t want to introduce last-minute changes.  It is available for install, however, so I’m sure I’ll be remedying that in the not-so-distant future.

A good while back, I spent a lot of time searching for a nice, solid, smooth email server for use on my system at home.  I host my own domains, and my own email server.

At that point, I tried several different systems, everywhere from simple Postfix IMAP/POP servers, to full-blown groupware suites.  I won’t take the time to list them all.  Some of them are free, some of them are not.

I decided that since I was able to use virtual machines (VMware has a free server product in case you’ve been living under a rock), it was time for me to implement a simple ActiveDirectory at home.  Just because I could.  It seemed logical to try out Exchange in this little lab of mine.  It worked well.  But as I moved my desktop/laptops over to Ubuntu, I needed something better than OWA through Firefox – OWA is no good without Microsoft’s junky ActiveX in case you’ve never tried it.

Here is where Zimbra comes in.  It was previously one of the systems I’d tried, and I liked it really well.  In fact, it may have been what I replaced when I installed Exchange.  I honestly can’t remember, but I can’t think of any other reason why I would’ve ditched it.  It’s that good – to me.

It offers pretty much everything Exchange/Outlook does, and it does it very smoothly, efficiently and prettily, if that’s a word.

Zimbra runs on Linux, which is a huge plus for me.  It was actually my main requirement for finding a new email system.  They offer a completely free, open-source version (which is what I’m using) which includes most, if not all, of the common features needed by pretty much anybody.  The Network Edition, which costs real money, offers things like Outlook integration, and Mac integration with utilities like iCal.  The Network Edition also includes features like over-the-air sync for most mobile devices.  For me, those would be cool to have, but I doubt I’ll be paying for their Network Edition any time soon.  The only thing that would be nice to have is a supported backup solution, but that are a couple of tried & tested methods to back up and restore the open source version, so I should still be covered there.

The web interface is all that I use now.  It beats Exchange OWA hands-down as far as the interface goes.  Functionality wins as well in my book – it has everything OWA has (Mail (duh), Address book, calendar, tasks, documents (replacement for notes)), but it also has what’s called a briefcase.  I didn’t think much about it until I had everything installed and running.  I looked at the briefcase and noticed I could upload pretty much any type of file that I wanted to.  It makes a great repository for files that I need available from wherever I’m at.  And this is all for free.

The best thing, to me, about Zimbra is that its web interface is completely AJAXified.  No ActiveX garbage, no browser-proprietary stuff, just plain, simple AJAX and solid HTML/Javascript.  This means it all looks the same no matter which browser you use.  I will say, that in my Firefox installs, I have most if not all of my ‘extra’ javascript stuff disabled in the settings.  It still all works great.  Oh, if you don’t know what AJAX is, it basically means the interface is much quicker and much, much more smooth.  You can almost forget you’re using a web browser for your email!

So if you host your own email and you’re looking for a system that handles it very well, Zimbra is definitely worth a look.

–UPDATE–

I forgot to mention that Zimbra has a pretty impressive list of not-so-small companies and organizations that use their suite either as an ISP’s email solution for its customers, or a company’s in-house email solution.

By now I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of the commercials advertising Mac’s.  If you haven’t, check them out on Apple’s website.  Some of them are quite funny.  These ads have been running since sometime in 2006.

Microsoft, in yet another display of how they lag behind in pretty much everything, decided to run similar ads this year entitled “I’m a PC”.  Yes, they’re copycatting.  And not only that, they haven’t put any ads out there at all until this year.  The only thing they could come up with is something that mimics their competition.  Wait, wasn’t that what Vista was all about with Aero and gadgets?  Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty and all, but Mac already did it.

Anyway, the point of this post is to tell you all how clever I am.  Well, to me, I’m clever anyway.  I got an email in my Windows Live account from Microsoft.  It was basically along the lines of them wanting me to tell the world how great PC’s are by becoming part of the “I’m a PC” ‘movement’.

So I decided to tell everybody how great the hardware is..but I’m not using Microsoft.  All the site allows you to do is put in your name, and it’ll let you complete the “I’m a PC, and I . . .” sentence.  So I just entered “run Ubuntu”.

After I submitted everything and released my photo for public use and all that jazz, I got a note saying it would take them a day or two to review my submission and I’d get an email then.  We’ll see if it makes it out the door…

My geekiness is about to come out in this post, so if you’re not into geeky computer stuff, read no further or you’ll be bored out of your mind.

Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, is set to be released on October 30, 2008.  I even added a nifty little countdown timer over there on the right.  I’ve recently converted to 100% Linux on my desktop at home.  It does everything I need to very nicely.

In a lengthy email discussion with Jon and Brad over at RantsAndStuff, we pretty much decided that Linux is pretty much ready for mainstream use, with the rare exception of specific apps that aren’t available for it yet.  Ubuntu is right at the top for ease-of-use distributions available.  Out of the box, all of your basic needs are met:

• Full featured office suite
• Firefox web browser
• Instant Messaging
• Photo and Music management
• and tons of other trinkets and utilities

If you want to add something, it’s a simple process to Add/Remove programs and do a search for whatever you want to install.  What’s cool is you don’t even necessarily have to know the name of the app – the descriptions are generally very nicely written so that if you search for, say, “word processor”, you’ll get several options to choose from.  Simply check the box and go from there.

So enough about how easy Ubuntu is.  In just 3 weeks, the next version is set to come out which sports several improvements (here is where it gets even more geeky if you’re still reading):

• Gnome 2.24 – contains several bug fixes and new features.  Probably the most touted new feature is that the file browser now has tabs much like Firefox
• Xorg 7.4 – this version of the X server (the stuff that makes Linux have a GUI rather than just a text console) makes it much easier to configure your display adapters and monitor(s).
• Kernel 2.6.27 – this kernel supports more hardware and has several bug fixes
• Encrypted private directory – this allows you to secure an area of your home directory for sensitive documents such as tax returns, etc
• Guest session – this is sort of like the guest login that Windows uses may know a little about.  I honestly don’t know why it’s taken Ubuntu this long to implement this feature, but it is a welcome one if you have someone that wants to use your machine to check email or browse the web for a little while, without running the risk of him/her seeing those sensitive documents or changing any system settings.
• There are several others as well, but these are probably the ones that matter most to most users.

So really it doesn’t look like there are going to be any major usability changes, just improvements on what is already there.  I’m excited about the release coming up, and plan to install it as soon as I can get my hands on it.  I’ll post a review of it as soon as I can put it through its paces.