So as you can tell, I have been quite the busy bee. I have not had the time to post in quite awhile. Currently, Biggs, Ialacci and I have been trying to get a small bidness running. (Ialacci calls Business Bidness for no real reason. I think it is more that he can not spell it.) Anyway, it’s been that, school, work, and just random other adventures in my life holding me back from posting on this site. So here is my almost month old update post.

Thursday, me and Ialacci went to check out a “Virtual Office” off Motor Pkwy and the east bound service road off the LIE. When we first walked into the building, I swear that we both almost, well, I think you get the idea. The whole place was completely new; it was only built like 4 months ago. If you look on google maps, its still under construction. But hey, most places close by are like that. If you look at Island 16 off Nicoles Rd and exit 62 off the LIE, half of the movie theater is under construction and the other half is done. That place has been there for quite a while now. Like a good 6 years or so. Well anyway, this place we found is completely amazing. It comes with everything we would ever need plus the whole building is completely biometric. I can go on for hours about the features and amazingness of the place but I have much more to talk about.

I am still using Windows 7, build 7057, on my laptop and boy, is it amazing. I have to admit, I hate Windows and this is the first Microsoft product that I actually like, a lot! It has a quality feel to everything it does and it runs much faster than Vista ever will. There are still a bunch of bugs that need to get worked out and driver support is still not up to par but what do you expect to a beta product. I think I will actually buy a license for this when it gets released.

I am again working on a new server. In the past 3 weeks, I actually already have rebuilt my server. Right now it has a E6600 Core 2 Duo with 8GB DDR1066. I thought it was complete overkill and using to much power for what it is doing. So I went Newegging. I bought a Jetway ITX socket AM2 board with a AMD Athlon x2 4050e 2.1GHz and 4GB DDR800 Ram. I figure that I will only be using about 60-70 watts average. I am mostly doing this to save space and make my mom happy with the power bill. I got all the parts except the board so I really can’t do anything about it right this second. The one thing I am doing is changing my Drobo from HFS+ to ext3 so I can use it on my server instead of having it on my iMac. I figure that it would be better since it will always be shared over the network and I don’t need to worry about my iMac having to be running. As an added bonus, I also bought 2 more 1.5TB drives for the Drobo for a total of 4.5TB. I mean I do actually need it. Right now I am currently using over a TB and I still have about 200GB more to move on to it. Ill give you updates on how that is going when I get to it.

My mom is selling the family camper. It is sort of sad to see it go. I did not really spend much time in it since we are always busy doing something. One person is doing that when this person is off and vice versa. My mom needs the money so I do understand it but it is still the point. My mom just a few days before said that she would like to take it to Massachusetts for a weekend or so. I am all up for it since I like driving around with the car and such but hey, its not my disission.

Also, I got my new sneakers for my Bora. I don’t know if I have already posted a picture of it on here yet but I might as well do that now. I have had them on it for a few months already.

Also, I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out why my blog page is unhappy near the bottom of the page. If you look, the background is all not right and the sheets overlap and underlap. If you can, it would be great.

Sorry I have been not posting for awhile. Been very very busy with this and that, with school work and all. I have no idea when it might slow down just a bit more but when it does, I will be sure to post more stupid stuff.

For the last few days, I have been running Windows 7 on my Thinkpad with almost no problems. So far though the keyboard hotkeys work and than don’t and the biometrics just refuses to work. Anyway, I am happy to report that I think MS is getting back into the game when it comes to OS’es again. If I find anymore problems, Ill be sure to report them.

I finally set something new up for my computer network. Recently, I thought about the idea of trying out VMWare Server 2 since it is free and all and it’s easy to run. How it works is that you have to have a machine with either Windows or Linux in either X86 or X86_64. All you do is run the installer and after you configure it, you log into the web interface to control everything vmware wise. It works amazing and it is easy to figure out. If you want to try it, sign up and download from here “VMWare Server”.

So for my server, I built a system from my old AMD 64 machine and installed Ubuntu 8.04.1 x64 on it. The hardware I used for this project was:

• Board: BioStar T-Force SLI
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 +3500
• Memory: 2 Gig DDR400
• Hard Drives:
  1. Seagate 20Gib IDE – OS
  2. Seagate 120Gib SATA – RAID Drive 1
  3. Seagate 120Gib SATA – RAID Drive 2
  4. Hitachi 250Gib SATA – Extra Storage (Not used yet)
  5. Hitachi 500Gib SATA – Soon to be RAID array with another 500Gib
• Case: Antec Sonata 1st Rev with 380w PSU
• Network:
  1. No name brand PCI Realtek 8169 Gigabit card
  2. Zonet Realtek 8169 Gigabit card (File server)
• Video: EVGA MX4000 PCI card

I have the two RAID drives in RAID 1 using MDADM and it works perfect. The 250Gib drive is empty but it is there just in case I need more storage. Also, I am in the process of setting up another RAID 1 array that will hold my servers files on it using two 500Gib drives from my new Drobo box (I’ll explain in a bit). What that means is that I am going to be moving my main ITX server into a virtual machine to run on my VMware server but using it exactly as it is setup right now so I won’t have to start all over again setting it up. On the plus side I get to use my ITX server as a small machine for my living room. Mostly so there is a computer for my mom to use to work on school work in the living room instead of her desk which is quite small. Another plus is the fact I will be gaining more space on the server since it will have the new RAID array.

Next up I have a new file storage device called a Drobo. They call it a storage robot that essentially is a non-RAID RAID array. They have their own system called BeyondRAID which is RAID like but not true RAID. How it works is place any size drives you have in it. From them it will completely build a new drive from all the drives. No need to match size and brand, it just builds it into an array. When you run out of space on it, you just pop a drive out and install a new one. It will automaticly set-up the drive and rebuild the array. So far I love it, even though it is quite on the expensive side hovering around $450. As of yesterday (1/25/09) it now has 2x 1.5tb and 2x 500gib drives totalling 2.3tb and it is fully backed up.

Now car news. I am still modifying my car. Now it now has a BORA and euro 1.8T emblems, German plate with replica registration sticker, and it will soon have black euro VW emblems. Also I ordered and received the matching German “HN F1744″ plate for when I finally have the money to get a genuine VW BORA trunk lid with the wide plate opening. For now it is going to be chillin on my desk waiting for the day to be mounted.

Well that’s it for now. Finally I get to post this post. Hope your happy and if you have any questions on how to do any of this or about something else, just sign up and post a comment.

I found a cool open source program that makes CSS/JavaScript menus and works on Windows, Mac OS-X and even Linux (GUI of coarse). Once I figure out how to use it, I will be replacing my current menu to a newer, better working menu. So far it looks very promising and seems like it will actually help me out. Now if only I found this when I was fighting with it months ago. Well here is the download page and the program is called QuickMenu 6. Try it out. I hope soon you will see a much better working menu on my site soon.

I reinstalled Windows Vista Business x64. So far it’s done nothing but freeze up and just not work with most programs, even its self. It’s sad how they made people use this garbage OS. I am still going to try running it as everyday computer but I don’t know how much more I can take with it. I know it’s not my ThinkPad that is slowing it down. Anyway, I’ll keep updating my (probably bad) experiences with Vista.

I finally put the hard drive with Vista installed back into my laptop only to reformat it. I reinstalled Vista again but went from x86 to x64. I switched over to x64 because so far I have had good luck with x64 Windows XP and Windows 7 and the fact that Lenovo has full x64 drivers for my T61. Lucky for me, I have full legit copies of Vista Business x86 and x64 retail as provided by my friend Andrew.

Windows 7 is finally here. I grabbed an ISO off TorrentLeech.org and installed within a virtual machine using VMware. Wow, what a difference. It just works so much better in alpha than Vista with SP1. It’s kind of said that it turns out like that. My friend Andrew will soon be posting his review on this very soon (He is slow) so look forward to that.

So I have not been using vista for a bit now. At some point I ended up switching back over to windows XP and just never switched the hard drives back. Maybe since I am now thinking about I might just do that.

Wait, what am I thinking? I am just to lazy to do it so it will probably never happen.

I am also trying out VMware Server 2. I installed it on my Linux server just to play around with it. So far it is quite awesome. Its free (Always a Plus) and it runs very well and easy to manage. Its all web based so I can use any web browser on any computer in the house except my iMac (ill explain in a bit). How it works is that you log into the web console from any computer on the network or external if you forward the ports on your router (unsafe but people do it). You can manage all the OSes you have running on the server, start, stop, restart, everything. Also it has a web console so you can view what you would see if you where at the monitor. Neat stuff here.

Well here is my little problems. VMware forgot that people use Macs, well just like most other companies, and left out a working Firefox plug in for the web console. This sucks alot because I use my Mac for almost everything. It’s my main storage and, well, just everything. I hope they come out with a patch or plug in or even application that will let me do this. Lucky me, I have my trusty ThinkPad.

Sorry I have not posted in a while. Been quite busy with everything. Still running vista on my laptop and I must say that they made a huge improvement since SP1. There are still stability problems with explorer but overall it runs so much better than people say it does. I still think alot of it is just extra garbage like 3D Flip and the dam network and sharing thing. They should also have a better defragment program because this one you have no idea what its doing or working on or even when it will be done.

Also, I have just started using distributive computing networks. I have a client for folding@home running when my iMac is booted into Vista. I felt like helping out Stanford because most of the time i’m doing nothing with my computer. It just sits and runs all day. Lucky it uses almost no power because of the mobile chip it is using. Most of it is the same exact as my laptop, which I love.

Anyway, sorry to bore you with my vista garbage.

Vista:

Well I have been playing with vista for a few days now and I am actually starting to like it. There of coarse plenty off annoying things it does but overall not bad at all. There is something about the Aero glass I like. I think the network sharing thing was just plain stupid. I have also been testing out IE 8 beta for a bit. Crashes all the time. Mostly my site which brings me to the next topic.

CSS:

I love the idea of CSS but this is getting really frustrating. I have been working on setting up drop down menus on my site for 4 days. They still do not fully work. They do but you will see alot of bugs I have not been able to find and fix yet. I am just pulling out my hair. Think of the ACE hardware commercial where the woman cant decide the color of her room and starts pulling her hair. Think of that with not very long hair.

Anyway, if anyone knows what I am doing wrong, please e-mail me. Unless you want me to die. If so your a bad bad person.

Till next time.