Well I’ve been having some good luck with tutorials lately. Usually the linux tutorials I find are crap. I mean let’s face it the documentation for most open source projects sucks. Oh okay RTFM, well the manual sucks okay. So ReWrite TFM (except for Gentoo, you guys rock on documentation). Anyways I found some good one’s lately. One of those described how to setup vmware on debian. I’ve been interested in virtualizing my linux server for a while now. With out going into a lot of detail on why I’ll just say cause it’s just cool I guess. This how to forge article posted by Falko Timme in October of 2006 does a great job of walking you step by step. I’ve archived the article on my site just in case.
And here is a rather unexciting pic of me installing a debian vm.
I spent 6 hours of my weekend on VirtualNES playing all my favorite NES games. It brought back memories. It’s a web/java-based emulator for good ol’ Nintendo! I mainly played Tecmo Super Bowl, my all time favorite football game. Anyways they have 500 english games so this site should keep any one looking for some nostalgia going for a while.
I also updated the look and feel of this blog. The default regulus theme is kind of dainty, so I added my own header image (it doesn’t really make any sense but looks kind of cool) and I removed the purple-ish background. It looks plain and simple now.
I borrowed this article from unixreview.com. It was originally posted by Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier in June of 2005 at www.unixreview.com… The example he lays out works. I was able to send email to my gmail account about 10 minutes later. I didn’t use my own dns server for the MX record though. My domain is registered through yahoo and they allow me to edit my dns records. So I made an entry for my debian server and added the server name to the mx record. This is a real bare-bones install, but a bare-bones install of postfix is often needed by other packages (such as Nagios to name one).
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I’ve decided to use my linux server as backup file storage. It has two large 160 GB drives sitting in a mirrored volume so my data is safe 
Here is a quick dirty how to on samba:
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I decided to setup an ftp server to allow me to easily upload files from my windows development machine to my debian linux server. vsftpd is an easy to setup and configure ftp server. I probably had this thing going within 10 minutes.
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I’ve been putting together a new system over the past 3 months to replace my well-aged six-year old Pentium 4 based system. The specs on it look something like this: 1.6 GHz, 512 RAM PC133, 40 GB ATA, and a 64 MB GeForce 2 graphics card. Now this system will make a fine linux server, but I need something that can take me into the next decade for everyday use. The next decade is all about the Aero (vista) and XGL (linux) user interfaces. It’s about virtualizing your systems and multi-core machines. So I went out and built a system for under $800 that can deliver all this, here are the specs.
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I picked up one or two new things in PHP this past week. One neat thing I learned is how to pass variables in a url string and how to retrieve them on the next page. There are lots of ways to pass variables between two pages in PHP, this one seems to have the least overhead, but makes for an ugly url. The other thing I learned is how to store checkbox values in an array using the foreach loop. I show examples of both if you’re interested below.
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So as of late I’ve been writing a lamp application. I’ll post some specifics on this webapp later. One of the things I needed it to do was read and write ID3 tags for MP3s. I exhausted google and phpfreaks for answers to this. At first the only thing I could find was some support within an obscure extension called PECL (pronounced pickle). Yah know I’m still a noob and didn’t want to mess with extensions just yet. So I found the getID3 project instead.
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