I recently bought Apple's Mac Box Set which allows for five licenses of their Leopard OS and iLife '09 and iWork '09. I doubt if I'll use iWork '09, but the other stuff is all good.

With three Macs in my house, I can now stay legal *and* up to date. I spent the weekend backing up our machines then applying the upgrade. Leopard is pretty cool. It has some nice eye candy and I like the expanding folder look in the dock.

iLife is even better. Its face recognition feature allows me to group photos by kid, spouse, and family members. Its Places feature allows me to put a pin on a Google Map and tell it where I took the photo then I can group all photos by location.

All in all, it's cool. After a few quirks are worked out, it'll only get better.

So, two geek thumbs up.

If you rather read this site using an RSS reader (maybe to avoid being obvious you're surfing the web at work), you can easily connect with the following feed: feed:// merlisk.com /mikesrants/ backend geeklog.rss" (without the spaces. I had to put those in to get the article to post the URL directly.)

Don't know what RSS means? See here: www.whatisrss.com

For you technical folks out there, here's a good article from Ars Technica about Everything you need to know about IPv6. If this topic interests you, go read it. I thought it was well-written article with good information.

As I've mentioned, I'm creating MikeVO, a PVR using MythTV. It's been working for a few weeks, but I had a Cat5 cable strung on the floor from my office where the switch is to the living room, where the TV and the MikeVO is.

Hit Read More to see the photos. Don't do it if you're afraid of downloading about 300kB of pictures.

Yes, I'm a geek. I don't really either.

My wife and I both have Macs and have been wanting to share calendars for some time. So, I scoured the web and found just the perfect site. that had all that I needed to use this Linux server (that you're currently accessing) to allow access from the Mac's iCal. So, now, with a little iCal publish and subscribe action, we're sharing away. And, we now have a shared iDisk too between us at LAN speeds.

So, yes, I'm a geek. But, it's cool.

I'm still researching eCommerce scripts for an online game company for which I volunteer. I'm actually enjoying looking at multiple open source projects and trying to find one that most meets the need. So far, I'm leaning towards OS Commerce. The problem I had is that OSC doesn't natively support a subscription service that would allow the company to rebill for their products on an ongoing basis. Well, after loads of web surfing (in the name of research, mind you), I've found a modification of OSC by some programmers called OSPro. Now, OSC with those modifications seems to do subscriptions. I guess it'll take me hours and hours of testing to just figure out if it's what I want.

I really like (the free) Open Source products that use the PHP/MySQL/Apache combos. Unfortunately, many of the PHP scripts only address the base need allow the user to customize at will. Of course, this means hours of programming.

But, hey, I guess you get what you download for free. :)

I was running Red Hat's Fedora 1 as my Linux operating system to host this board and a few other sites. I say 'was' because I was several revisions behind and decided to subscribe to the Fedora Legacy project to continue to get updates for Fedora Core 1 (because Red Hat is up to Fedora 3 now.)

All was well until I updated the kernel. That went well, but the GRUB bootloader got all messed up and didn't realize I had a new kernal...and well, next thing I knew my Ethernet cards weren't loading...and gah!

So, after scouring the Internet for answers, I decided to just upgrade to Fedora 3.

Ta da! I bet you noticed the difference, right? :)

PCs are everywhere! But, apparently, finding a small form factor chassis PC is darn near impossible.

I'm looking for something that's about the size of a VCR but still allow for a full-height PCI card.

My quest for a PVR Intel-based SMF PC continues!

What should I do with my vacation pay windfall? I was thinking of buying a Treo, which is a combination Palm Pilot and a Spring PCS phone. (Insert a Home Improvement grunt here.)

However, my current frustration is my VCR. Friday night is a hopping night for SciFi and I'm continually faced with having to watch one program and tape the other or having to coordinate taping reruns. Add to that the fact that the tapes wear out at odd times and I lose what I taped (but I don't find this out for several days when I sit down to watch the programs.)

What I'd really like is a simple PVR without the TiVo monthly fee and privacy violations. So, after some investigation, I finally decided that I'd look into MythTV. I've known about MythTV from some time, but I never bothered looking at it. I guess my 'pain threshold' wasn't high enough. Now, though, I'm going to seriously investigate it. Even more so now that I've found complete instructions on how to install MythTV on a Red Hat linux box. Beware. I'm primed for Open Source PVR-ing! If have experience in this area, drop me a line.

I've been working on helping out a small business with their eCommerce site. After some investigation, I've settled on using OS Commerce for the shopping cart program.

What I like about it is that it's more straight-forward than some of the others, even some of its derivatives like Zen Cart.

Of course, no matter what, some customization is needed. When it gets to that, I use jEdit as my programming program. I've posted a screenshot (about 348kB) showing how cool jEdit is. It's a free, open source program written in Java. It looks and works the same on my Windoze XP box at work as on my Mac OS X laptop at home. With its numerous plugins, one can do everything from syntax checking to spell checking.

If you need a good IDE for Java, Perl, XML, HTML, PHP, C, C++, etc., check it out. I really like it.