Well, today is the third of the month! Megan and I have managed to not destroy each other (or feed each other poisoned lightbulbs!) for ten whole months. So it's two more months and we'll have been going out for a whole year. Which is kind of crazy to think about.
So yeah... ten months.
One of the things I always purport to strive for in this blog is posting things in a timely manner. What this usually means is writing something pretty angry one day, but realizing that somehow, I've got posts already scheduled out to like, next Tuesday, so I just post it then.
The problem with that is that when the post finally comes out, if I even let it live long enough to be released, it's no longer relevant because I don't usually stay angry that long. Plus, I suppose that it's in somewhat bad taste to post something angry about someone else.
I suppose it's a bit of a control issue for me, because I would love to have each of my blog entries appear at approximately the same time each day. The problem with that is that it encourages me to start pre-writing posts, or doing posts that aren't up to my standards as quality goes. But for whatever reason, I think that posting in this crazy way will make people like my blog, because I post on such a regular basis.
A much more sincere way to post would be to pick one topic for any given day, and actually spend an amount of time during that one day to write the post, and have it up on that day. Even if it means that people won't read it until the next day, it's still better than doing poorly written posts a few days in advance.
I suppose it's just one of the many things I need to continue considering, about the blog. I definitely want to make my content more timely, so I am probably going to preserve massive pre-writing and scheduling for "away from the computer" days, and giant project posts. Other things in my list entitled "things to think about for the Blog" include whether or not I want to continue posting the same content to two different blogs, and whether or not I ever want to switch my WordPress blog to a better theme.
So much to ponder, so little time.
Just a note to let everyone everywhere know that today, Nikon has introduced the D700, which is it's "midrange, semi-pro full-frame dSLR." To my eyes, that means "expensive, full-frame D300."
Naturally, having bought my D300 less than a year ago, I am very slightly miffed. But the reality of things is that I probably would've spent all that money somehow anyway (surplus automobile?) and that I really do like the D300, even though all my friends who have Canon 5Ds are rockin' the full-frame sensors.
Of course, the rumors say that there's a Sony Alpha 900 in the works, which is purportedly a 24 megapixel camera with a full-frame, working at a fairly respectable six frames per second, which would probably make it the fastest camera of it's kind. The killer part of the Alpha 900 rumor is that the whole thing is supposed to cost less than $2000. I think some numbers have been tossed around at about the same cost as the D300.
Ouch, Sony. Ouch.
A large amount of this vacation, Patrick and I have been going to our Aunt Darla's house. Darla is my dad's youngest sister, and she has four children. She home-schools them, and for whatever reason, they are all very, very smart.
Darla's oldest son, Wade, is just about a year or two younger than Patrick I think, and since my last visit, he's become a pretty hilarious Linux programmer. He's pretty good at it I presume, he's definitely very quick at getting little file processing and browsing tasks done.
One of the comments he made was that he was a bit surprised that I wasn't able to do programming, as a result of the fact that I seemed like "such a massive computer geek" on my previous visit. Hilariously enough, my previous visit involved me re-combining little videos from my digital camera in Final Cut Pro, and a few other things in Illustrator and Photoshop, on the old PowerBook G4. I was definitely more of a creative arts geek at the time, than a programming geek, or a networking geek like I am now.
Of course, I don't feel too terribly bad about not being able to program, I've got a pretty good understanding of most networking concepts, and I've done pretty well in my studies of directory systems like OpenDirectory and ActiveDirectory. All I've got to do now is implement a few legacy directory systems like NIS or YP on A/UX, and then learn straight-up LDAP on systems like Solaris or IRIX, or even Linux, since those are easier to come by. There's also NetInfo, but I don't have enough (any) OPENSTEP systems running around to be able to do that. Like I said, networking geek.
Hilariously enough, Wade knows almost nothing about networking. He knows what packets are, probably in more detail than I'll ever need or care to have, but he doesn't understand the actual application of it, like how to plug some systems into a Linksys router in order to create a small network. I really wish my virtual machines were working, so I could show him some of the cool things a system like ActiveDirectory can do.
Another benefit of networking my computer to his is that it won't bug him so much when any of my online friends pop up with what he refers to "just punctuation!" There's a whole dialogue that some of my friends online and I have got going that sometimes doesn't use full sentences with proper structure and correctly spelled words. Ah well, I suppose it would be too difficult to explain communication theory and "Grammars" to a 14 year old. More importantly, I don't know if I want to bother.
Hilarity and youngness aside, it looks like Wade has a pretty good future ahead of him in the realm of open source programming. I wouldn't be surprised at all if after a bit of a formal education in computer science and maybe some volunteer work doing something like a Google Summer of Code, he would be able to get hired on at any of the big developers, like Novell, Oracle, or Sun. He could probably get hired at Microsoft too, were he willing to learn the Visual Studio development environment on Windows.
On the topic of the Internet, it's very interesting to see how someone who has access to it so rarely does when they get access to it. At first, Wade was unwilling to accept the idea that the Internet in and of itself was a form of entertainment, which is sort of an inevitability, at least for me. Then he wanted to use it to gain access to games, the one he tried was BZFlag, and that was "interesting" I suppose. If I could successfully get a Linux VM going, or if my Windows VMs were willing to work properly, there's a lot more we could do with even our small network.
Ahwell, one day he'll have more networking experience, I'm sure. I think he's still just amazed at the idea that we were able to connect our two laptops together with Ethernet, and share my silly EDGE connection to the Internet.
One of the disadvantages of being as massive a nerd as I am, is that scheduling becomes very difficult when I bring all of my gadgets along.
For example, I am now officially unable to count the number of times where I have been somewhere, and my grandmother decided that it was time to leave, without giving me any advance notice at all. So everyone will be sitting in the car while I have to put my computer to sleep mode, disconnect the hdd, switch my SIM chip back into the iPhone, put everything in the backpack, zip the backpack up, and make sure I didn't leave anything behind.
This is because except for the flash unit, I'm making about 100% utilization of the things in my backpack, so when I'm visiting someone, just about everything has been taken out of my backpack.
The frustrating thing about this is that the comment "do you want to walk home?" has been tossed around a lot. It's being tossed around rather lazily, I think -- If you can't wait five minutes for me to pack up, then maybe you should've told me we were going to be leaving five minutes sooner.
In the west, when we're going somewhere or planning something, someone takes the effort, and five seconds, to pop their head into whatever room I'm in and let me know when we're leaving. Typically, even if it's several hours in the future, I make a note of it, and I am ready to go fifteen minutes before our departure time, just in case.
Well, I finally went ahead and started trying to fix a bunch of the things on the U60. Unfortunately, I'm not that great at making sure everything works, although my friend Lando, who is an UNIX hero, was able to make sure everything was working just fine.
In all, we got some paths fixed from when I first installed the Blastwave package manager, we got Apache2's userdir settings working, and I'm sure there's something else that I've now forgotten. So, a big shout out to Lando, an UNIX hero.
Also, I've gotten a hang of setting up new software on the U60 with Blastwave, so I was able to set up and use GNU screen, IRSSI, and links. All interesting pieces of software. Gnu screen is really cool, and with that and irssi, I'm now able to log the IRC channels without having any other machines turned on. I think it's time I started using the U60 for more things, because I'm starting to get used to it a bit.
Anyway, all of this leads up to the U60 becoming a very usable system, and, y'know, if anyone wants an account on it, feel free to ask.
Yesterday, we went to the "beach." I quote the word beach, because we weren't at an ocean, nor am I even 100% sure of the name of the place where we were, just that there was in fact, sand, with people, at the edge of some body of water, that was set up in such a way that it was available to the general public. Therefore, we were at a beach.
In order to understand my misery, I should help you to know that in Arizona, the humidity typically sits around "zero" and "zero." We have no such thing as a "heat index," and whenever you perspire, it evaporates off of your body, and you actually feel cooled by it. In Michigan, even though the temperatures aren't insane, or even crazy yet, there's this massive amount of moisture in the air, which causes normal people like me to perspire, which causes people who are too modest to remove their shirt to get into a very "sticky" situation.
With my clothes sticking to my body, and a small headache forming, we decided we needed to rent a boat and venture out onto the water. So we walked the quarter-mile to the rental shack, even though the boats were just 20 feet away from us, to find out prices. Then we needed to go back to get money, then we needed to go back to the rental shack to actual get the rentals, then back to the boats, then after an hour of fun on the lake, we needed to go back to the rental shack and back to the car again.
Speaking of our hour of fun on the lake... we made the plunge to get two boats. Wade insisted that at least one of them be a rowboat, so we got one paddleboat, which Seth and Patrick wanted, and I took a rowboat, along with Wade and Kyle.
Unfortunately, the rowboat was a disaster. Part of the mount for one of the oars was broken, so the whole thing didn't work properly, and made a terrible and loud noise. We managed to get Pat and Seth to trade us, although they didn't seem to appreciate it too much, I think I made up for it later on by allowing them to use my computer to check myspace.
So yeah, that was my disjointed description of a day that I'm sure was actually better than I make it sound like.
In the past few days, I've learned a lot about living with a slower Internet connection. Although it's not just that I've got a slower connection. The biggest problem with EDGE is the latency, and the fact that it seems to be ridiculously difficult to maintain a connection long enough to make sure a blog post is scheduled for the right time.
With luck, these issues will clear up in the next few days, or hours -- but if that doesn't work, I may just have to post all of the blog entries from my trip retroactively, when I get back to Arizona.
Another possibility I've considered is that I'm not sitting in the right place, but that makes very little sense because on the first night, I was able to get a decent connection with two/three bars while I was laying down in the sun room, but the next two days the connection there got progressively worse.
Right now, it seems like the only place inside Grandma's house to get any connection at all is right next to the window where she keeps the radio she listens to. Right here, I've managed to get one bar with the green EDGE flag, and actually have some web pages load. I can sign into AIM, but I don't think I'll be able to get onto Google talk until I get home to Arizona. I thought I might be able to even upload a picture or two, but I don't think that'll happen.
My grandmother keeps talking about Arizona as though it's on the edge of civilization, and that nothing good could ever possibly happen there -- but I've got to admit, everyone I know in Arizona has DSL, even my mom in two of the places we lived in Golden Valley, and my dad all the way out in Valle Vista.
EDGE seems to work well enough at Aunt Darla's house, so I may just need to use it there rather than here. Of course, another weirdness is that the iPhone seems to be able to get 3 bars + EDGE wherever I am, but when I switch to the PCMCIA card in the laptop, I get no signal, am told that there's no service, and experience massive lag.
This is a test of Adobe's BUZZWORD on-line word processing application. The idea is pretty simple, and I'd wager to say that it even works fairly well. The whole thing is pretty nice, the formatting works pretty well, and unlike Google Docs at its launch, the display is really nice. I would probably be comfortable using this to prepare a document for handing in to an instructor at the university. I would probably also be comfortable using this environment for a bigger project like NaNoWriMo, although I'm really not sure how well it scales up to larger documents, which is something AppleWorks 5 did decently, and something that really let Word 2007 prove itself to me.
The biggest thing I use word processors for is collecting, creating, organizing and presenting documents. What I've found in the past is that different word processors are good at different things. Adobe's Buzzword, so far, is great at creation of documents, and designing beautiful, presentable documents. Part of Adobe's goal with Buzzword, and other parts of the new Acrobat.com suite, is to "to change the way the world works together on documents, for the better."
Initially my biggest concern about Adobe's Buzzword is what seems like a lack of styles. I don't mind too terribly much because Buzzword purports to be "the first real web-based word processor," so I'm giving it some slack. However, these days styles really do seem to be a very basic and rudimentary thing, on which a lot of formatting and document control implements are really nice. However, styles would make long-form documents such as the NaNoWriMo novel much easier to manage. Buzzword does allow endnotes but it doesn't have any implement for footnotes, page breaks, section breaks, or a Table of Contents.
The major success of Adobe's Buzzword is it's power in the department of text formatting. For shorter documents where you don't need to do very much in the way of organizing. More importantly, it would be really nice if you need to create graphics-heavy documents. Commenting and change tracking are great, although I haven't yet seen actual collaborative editing at work in Buzzword.
Adobe Buzzword is a capable word processor, but like Pages from Apple and Google Docs have done, this app needs a lot of growing in a few major areas. Whether or not it'll actually grow in the way I personally need is yet to be seen, but I'm going to be keeping track of it. It's a great writing tool. It's not so great at organization, which is what I tend to look for in a word processor, and it's a great presentation tool.
One of the things I've noticed while here in Michigan is that sometimes, people hear you incorrectly, in the interest of creating a story for themselves that they think is believable, and that they want to tell to others.
For example, upon our arrival in the Lapeer train station, my brother and I told our grandmother and our aunt Lisa about how we had our own train car for a portion of the journey. It went like this: "Yeah, we had our own train car from Durand to Lapeer." Our aunt heard it this way: "We had our own car for the whole second leg of our trip, from Chicago to Lapeer." Our grandmother heard it this way: "We had our own car for the whole trip."
That has caused a few misconceptions. Our grandmother is now absolutely convinced that Amtrak is doomed to death, as a result of their "very low" ridership. Lisa is now pretty sure that Amtrak has been run at a loss for one or two years before, and somehow the same thing is happening again.
The complete and total inaccuracy of this amuses me to no end. To start, Amtrak has never turned a profit since its operation started in the 1970s. In addition, ridership is up a record amount this year, it's been a bigger increase in ridership than Amtrak has ever seen before.
While this misunderstanding has caused much hilarity to ensue, it's frustrating because I don't think this is the only misunderstanding of the trip. Others, such as my misunderstanding of the term "vacation" have caused me to wrongfully believe that I wouldn't be asked to help anyone with their home improvement projects. More on that later, I'm sure.
In the wake of my recent, seemingly much more epic article about Google Documents, I've got a bit of an overview of a few other cool things I've seen in Docs recently.
One of the things that stood out most to me when I logged in to look at one of my Gotschland documents a few days ago was the new "Fixed width page view." It doesn't really change the workflow of Google Documents at all, but it does take Docs that much closer to being a very worthwhile word processor. Formerly I'd thought Docs to be a great tool for writing and having data available online, or for backup, but I hadn't thought of it as being a tool for preparing a document for printed output. With page view, Docs comes that much closer to being a word processor that's capable of replacing traditional desktop software for everything.
Another really cool thing I have noticed is that it's got a word-count mechanism. It doesn't update automatically like the wordcount on the status bar of Word 2007, but it does exist, making it helpful for NaNoWriMo. Another cool thing about Google Docs as a word processor for something like NaNoWriMo is that it exists everywhere, but we already knew that.
I've also recently discovered the new Find & Replace feature, which for the time being is really just a "replace all" feature. It's still quite handy. For example, I had an old document I'd pasted in from AppleWorks 5 on my old Windows XP machine. In this document, I used a lot of quote marks and apostrophes, and somehow they all transferred over as "Ò" and other similar characters. Luckily, I was able to use the replace all feature to put the proper characters in. It's just unfortunate that I didn't win NaNoWriMo 2006.
So, that was just a few more little things about Google Docs. It's got growing to do yet, hopefully it'll continue improving in the next year or so.
One of the things I'm going to be trying in the next few days is batch processing huge numbers of my raw NEF and DNG files into web-sized JPEGs. Then I'm probably just going to upload pretty big numbers of them to Flickr, or I may try Microsoft's Windows Live Gallery service.
I don't know how fast the EDGE data connection will be at my grandmother's house, but if it's decent enough (i.e. existant at all) I'll probably go ahead and upload a lot of my favorite pictures to the web. If it's fast enough, I may go ahead and upload all of them for each day, and invite people to view them, or recommend ones for further processing and work.
I may purchase myself a pro Flickr account so I can have more than 200 photos up at once -- already there's more than 300 pictures, just up to Chicago. Either way, look for a lot of Albuquerque and Lamy, NM; along with plenty of Chicago, and a few of the other places we've been.
In other news, we've landed at Grandmother's house. The train ride from Chicago to Lapeer was pretty awesome. The Horizon Fleet coaches don't have as much leg-room as the SuperLiners do, but it's a comfortable ride nonetheless, and because they're lower to the ground, you don't feel the sway of the train as heavily as you do with the SuperLiners.
I'm looking forward to being able to take platform pictures of the Blue Water service when we take it from Lapeer to Chicago in a few weeks, on the way back. I got a few good interior shots of the Horizon Fleet coaches when, after Flint and Durand, my brother and I had a whole coach to ourselves. Hilarity and good photos ensued.
Patrick and I did eventually make it to Chicago. Fully six hours after we were supposed to, and after nine hours of bus ride, dehydrated, with a headache, and completely exhausted, we got off the bus, found our luggage, let Meghan (Kate's daughter) know we were there. After Meghan picked us up, we all went to get an awesome frozen yogurt treat, and we then went to (Kate's sister) Becky's house. We had some pizza, watched The Day After Tomorrow, then went to bed. It was a fold-out couch, but it was such a relief, and a good night's rest after havinng been on the train and buses for so long.
The next morning, we decided to head out to see some of downtown, Millennium Park and one or two other things. It was great fun, seeing the Chicago skyline, the giant reflective bean thing, and the giant water fountain faces. We had lunch at a little place called the Corner Bakery Cafe, then went back to the car to get our stuff, and head to the train station.
I knew were running later than we should have, and that the cause for it was an error in my own memory, saying that we needed to be on the train at 3:20, when our actual departure time was 3:00. So we rushed back to the car, only to have some shoe shining guy take my brother against all of our will, and dob this "interesting" white shoe cleaning material on his feet. The crosswalk had just told us we had permission to cross the street, and here we were, having to wait for some maniac to finish with my brother's shoes. All the while I'm screaming about how "the train is at three o'clock! we have to go!" and my brother's shoes, which already had the exact appearance he wanted, are being visually altered against his will, by some maniac who has the gall to charge him $4 per shoe.
So it was at that point that I decided we were late. Most of my readers know about CoryTime, and it went absolutely crazy today, as we walked into Chicago Union Station at about 2:45 p.m. (CDT), which was just fifteen minutes before our train was scheduled to leave. Luckily, Meghan and Sean saw us all the way into the terminals, and we got on the train just in time. Not to be outdone by my schedule, I still managed to snap a few hundred photos of downtown.
So now we're on the train, heading to Lapeer, Michigan, where we'll see our grandmother. I'm pretty excited for our travels to nearly be over, and for our vacationing to start.
Our train was supposed to depart Kingman at about 2:03 a.m. We finally got on it and were rolling a little over two hours later, at 4:10 a.m. Once again, I found myself on a train at night, but this time I was seatmates with my brother, and not with another college-aged person, like the last time.
Our vacation is now officially underway, and only two hours late. While I find that I can't really sleep very comforably in these seats, I do find that I love the swaying of the train when it's at track speed, especially as it rounds bends. It's an oddly reassuring feeling, and you know you're making progress, even if a bus has more efficient routes, and an airplane goes faster. When a bus or airplane sways, you think the driver has had a bit much to drink or that the vehicle is experiencing some kind of mechanical failure. When a train sways, you feel like it's intentional, like it was designed that way.
One of the greatest things about train travel is the fact that you've got so much freedom while you're on the train. The trains' not particularly huge or anything, but they're large enough that when you need to move from your seat to the lounge, or from your seat to the lower level, you can usually get there without having to stand too far out of the way.
Anyway, so far the trip is going great. My brother's been playing his mobile games, and I've been hopping back and forth between the land of dreams, and the land of listening to Fabulous Tunes on the iPhone. We've already made a visit to the snack reseller, and we have lunch reservations in a bit.
More on the train trip later, probably once we've made it to Chicago, and made it onto the next train.
Recently I've decided (on accident really) to take another look at Google Documents. The interface has changed a little bit, and of course there's the presentation feature at which I haven't really looked too closely -- but the biggest change I've noticed is the addition of an offline mode.
For those not familiar with Google Docs, the whole setup is pretty cool, basically it's a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation app all stored on the Internet. Although one of the problems I've had with it in the past is the fact that it's more of a gimmick that you can only access when you're on the Internet than an actual productivity application.
With a technology called Google Gears, the Google Docs interface stays on my computer and I can work on my existing Docs items in my web browser without having an Internet connection. When I'm once again connected to the Internet, either through that AT&T/Cingular mobile "broadband" card, or at home, I can re-synchronize my data with the google servers.
The only problems so far are that I have never really had an opportunity to try offline mode before -- because I never really wanted to be offline if I didn't have to be. The other problem is that you can't create new documents when you're in offline mode. It shouldn't be too terribly difficult to just write something into an existing document, or use a piece of local software. If, for example, I wanted to write my blog entry about how I'm on the bus going to Tucson, I could just open up my copy of Word 2007 and start typing away.
It would be a huge advantage to be able to create new docments in offline mode, because it brings a pretty healthy amount of unification to the workflow of using Google Documents -- especially if I were to be away from my Internet connection for an extended period of time, while somehow having the opportunity or requirement to create a fairly massive number of new documents. (Anything more than five new documents for which I intended to use the Google Docs workflow, is a number that I'd consider to be inconvenient to have to upload separately to Docs. For now though, I'll probably have to continue creating documents in Live Writer, Word or OneNote for offline use, and transferring them to Google later on if I need to. Docs.
Another cool new feature is Docs' ability to display everything in a fixed-width page view. This particular feature does help close the gap between Docs as a cool thing to talk about, and an actual useful tool. Google Docs is a great writing tool, and it is great for collaboration, since just about everybody ever has a Google account at which you can send them docs to review. But it lacks in a few organizational things, and it's not the very best at making documents look very pretty, for presentation.
The past week or two, here in Kingman, I've been having fairly massive headaches.
I figure they're a result of the fact that it's at least ten to twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer here than in Flagstaff. The other potential explaination is that I haven't been drinking enough water, coupled with the fact that whenever Kate and I go to run errands, a massive blast of heat comes out of her car and hits me right in the face.
Well, Kate and I finally got all of the machines in the photo computer lab imaged, and set up. We got the printers going, OpenDirectory works just fine, the drobo's doing great (3x500GB disks = 900GB of disk space for userfolders and other supporting materials.) and in general, the photo room's technology should be ready for another school year's worth of usage.
It's worth noting that setting up OpenDirectory on a Mac OS X network is ridiculously difficult. Surprisingly, it's more difficult than setting up ActiveDirectory on a Windows network, it's even more difficult than setting up and managing an old Windows NT4 domain, which I find to be ridiculous. It takes me a few hours to set up a fully functioning Windows NT 4.0 domain, with a server, three clients and roaming profiles. Mac OS X didn't take too terribly long once I got everything figured out, but it took a generous amount of time to figure everything out.
While I am definitely happy about my accomplishment at the photo classroom last week, I think the biggest accomplishment will be at the end of next school year, in spring/summer 2009, when I come back to Kingman and hear about how well it all worked, and about how we won't need to reformat the server again. At that point, I'll definitely start to trust the Leopard Server environment. I'll believe it though, when I see it. In the meantime, I would really love to get my hands on a few machines I can use to test out my own Leopard (and eventually Snow Leopard) server environment, but that's a project for later on.
One of the things that has been pointed out to me recently is that I have been heavily favoring a substantial quantity of blog posts, instead of concerning myself with the quality of them. We can be sure that it started in February or March when I was still writing multiple posts each week.
The question I suppose is whether or not I value the quality of having a lot of time to write, re-read, edit, re-read, re-edit and then re-read each post yet again.
On one hand, I would love each of my blog posts to be a finely tuned work of art, ready for proud display on my personal blog for viewing. One of the advantages to this setup, for me anyway, has been that I don't need to worry about the quality of my posts, because with a whole week to write something, I am able to write the post, edit it, research it, gather media for it like tables, photos and even videos, and then post it. The problem with this in the past was that releasing a blog post to Blogger at 11:50 p.m. on Sunday meant I actually had to be awake and online at that time, luckily Blogger has changed that, so I'm able to post blog entries into the future.
On the other hand, when I was limiting myself to one "incredible" post per week, I would defer my project posts when some life update happened, so I ended up with this horrific backlog of project posts that I not only put off posting, but I started to put off posting because life updates were getting in the way.
I think what I may need to do is start going back to the weekly project posts, and just post short, brief posts on whatever else I may be thinking or doing, whenever it's appropriate. I also want to put a little bit of thought into whether or not I want to continue hosting my blog on my own server in my own room, or if I want to consider switching my blog from my current hosted service (blogger) to another (wordpress, typepad, .mac/mobileme, etc.) The biggest reason I want to think about doing that is that while I really like having the wordpress blog around, it takes an inordinate amount of effort to post the same content to two blogs simultaneously, and while Windows Live Writer is definitely a big help with that, it's maybe not the best solution ever. Blogger is nice because it's always there, and I don't have to worry about the server, but Wordpress on my own server is nice because, well, it's my own server, and I enjoy that.
We'll see, but for now I'll continue posting to both.
Well, it's not actually as cool as it sounds, but I'm now officially an OpenDirectory Master! Today I ended up reformatting the server and setting everything up one step at a time, instead of the way I did it last time, which was "everything at once."
The moment of truth, when it finally happened, was nothing short of breathtaking. At first, I was able to add accounts just fine, which was our problem yesterday. Then, we were able ot see that the clients recognized something should be happening, but we weren't sure of the exact solution. Then it clicked, of course it had something to do with DNS! So I changed a setting on the client machine and blammo, the test user logged in perfectly!
We finished up the configuration of the PowerPC Macs (two G5 iMacs, three G4 iMacs, and one PowerMac G4) and tomorrow, we're distributing a new version of the system image we made on MacBook Pro 11 to the rest of the numerous intel-based Macs. From there, we'll be in business.
Tonight, I'm also setting up the software on the G3 iBook, which is just going to be an install of Mac OS X 10.4, iWork '08 and Office 2004. Much as I'd love to take the path of my Pismo and put Office'08 on there, I doubt that it would be appreciated. Tomorrow at some point I'll install Photoshop CS2 on the iBook, and with luck, be able to join it to the 10.5 OD server. If it works, Kate will have yet another machine she can have someone use. If it doesn't, I may put OS9 on it for her, along with Final Cut Pro 2 and recommend she have someone use it for on-site video capture. I presume it'll work though, as it's advertised as working, and the 10.5 system is nearly at a default configuration.
So, with luck that'll all work tomorrow, but the biggest and hardest part of the project is done.
One of the parts of my project at Kingman High School this week has been to help Kate set up our new server, which happens to be a Mac mini. The biggest reason we got a mini instead of either a macpro or an xserve was the fact that a mac mini really is enough for the high school. Currently there are 15 MacBook Pro computers of various ages, 7 iMacs of various types, and a G4 PowerMac, all of which are student client machines.
The goal is to give each Photo 2 student an account on the system that has a fairly hefty amount of available disk space, and that roams with them to whatever of the client Macs they choose to use. We're accomplishing this by using a mac mini as our server computer, with the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server software, and a drobo drive enclosure for the student home folders.
The unfortunate thing is that so far, while the client computers can see and connect to the server, I've been unable to successfully create network accounts and get their home directories added to the server. So far, everything leads to a potential trouble with the DNS setup, which I suppose I'll have to try tomorrow, because setting up the mini at home seems to have failed pretty hardcore.
Anyway, this is just a note to say that the mac mini is probably the most adorable server ever, plus it's so small and quiet. At some point when I replace the U60, it'll probably be with a mini.
Posts
All Comments
