Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

I just hit 30

So tonight I hit 30. Well, the funny thing is, as much as I tried to deny myself, 30 is an interesting paradigm. I fell young, I feel ready for the world. I feel on top of my game. I have a good wife, smart children, and a fulfilling job. The world is doing its best to keep me in the game and so, the dude abides. Anyway, I think I drank too much and should edit this tomorrow.

In the News, literally

I recently rolled out a huge new website for the school district I work for. Actually, 15 new sites, all using drupal, an open source content management system that I often talk about on this blog. I got in the paper, and thought I’d post it here to archive it. I love the last quote!!!

Work, or play?

I set up two servers today, and moved my virtual machines to one of the new servers. I decided to use Ubuntu as my base platform, as I sometimes have raid issues with other linux distros. I’m not crazy about the vmware install on Ubuntu, but it is working. I solved a replication issue in active directory, and fixed an ntp problem. It is days like today that remind me why I love my job so much.

Intranet extravaganza!

For those of you keeping score at home, here is what I did this weekend:
I created a banner for my band site acousticbasement.com using Gimp rather then photoshop. I pretty much hated it. But I think the banner came out ok.

I also loaded Drupal on my desktop
to serve as an intranet home page. I am pretty much an animal when it
comes to drupal these days. I am familiar with just about every module
known to man, and I am starting to delve into the greater depths of
theming. The only problem with that, is theming takes time, no really,
I mean TIME. Here is the quick rundown on installing drupal on an
intranet at home. You need
mysql
apt-get install mysql-server

php5

apt-get install php5

apache2

apt-get install apache2

My suggestion if you want to do this is to go over to howtoforge.com.
I linked to the article specifically for Ubuntu, but basically you can
get any server setup you want and the guy that does most of the
debian/ubuntu stuff is a genius.

Once I set up my internal web server I went ahead and installed phpmyadmin

apt-get install phpmyadmin

and created an empty database for my drupal install.

Then all I did was download drupal 5.1 from drupal.org and threw it into my /var/www directory. I navigated to http://localhost/install.php and instantly had a drupal intranet home page.

Yay. I downloaded the modules I knew I was going to need for the intranet such as:
audio, fileshare, pathauto, menu, webcams, birthdays, dhtml_menu,
googleajaxsearch, photoblog, video, webfm, blogger, jstools,
phpfreechatm views, calendar, mugshot, printable, views_bonus,
chatroom, fckeditor, mysite(beta version), privatemsg, views_bookmark

Those where what I knew I needed to start, but I’m sure I will get
more as time permits. Basically I’m looking for inter-household
communications and media gateway action.

I also downloaded the Zengine that the folks over at lullabot.com
put together and downloaded the test theme zenzen. I did this mainly
because I am trying to learn as much as I can about theming, and they
are great about commenting code.

I did some basic shifting of blocks and put a the nice google ajax
search right on the main page. I made sure a nice calendar was present
so we could schedule family events, and made links to all 420000 of my
personal web sites, almost like a quick favorite places on the top menu
bar.

I then went ahead and installed a great web streaming media package called Jinzora.
Essentially this is the same type of install, you place it under your
web directory, in my case /var/www/jinzora2 and then create an empty
database. Navigate to http://localhost/jinzora2
and follow the on screen instructions. When finished, you have a
streaming media server that can be browsed to by any computer in your
home. Here is a screenshot of mine.

It
takes your library, strips it of the id3 tags, and sorts your library.
If you are in the kitchen and want to listen to Foo Fighters, you just
click on rock–foofighters, or search for foofighters, or a million
other ways to navigate to them, then click play or play random. Bam, it
automatically pics your default player and starts streaming the album
over your network. Wow, cool as hell. So I got this all set up in a
matter of 20 minutes, having never set eyes on this before. I got
thinking, why not do this with movies? So I set up a new folder called
/var/www/jinmovies and put a fresh copy of jinzora2 in it. Set it up
just like I did with my music collection except this time instead of
pointing it to my music, I pointed it to my movies (all of which are
perfectly legal copies and all that legal crap). Sure enough, it read
all my movies and created an online library. And sure enough, when I
wanted to watch a movie, I went ahead and clicked on it and sure
enough, it began streaming. Sweetness.
So now I just went ahead and made links of my drupal main page to my
music and movie library, and can watch and listen to my collection
anywhere in the house. Yay.

All that, and I wrote a song too. It has been a good weekend for this geek.

More to come…

Luck…

I sometimes
feel lucky that I have the job that I have. Lucky, that I am healthy,
have a great wife and two great kids. Lucky that I have a beautiful
home and friends and family.

I was just watching Inside the actors studio and the host quoted:

“Luck, is the residue of design.”

Amen to that. May it live on in Cwollydom forever more.