In case you haven’t been following, this site is all about an actual build out of a data center.

It’s pretty amazing, I recommend checking it out. If you’re as much of a geek as I am, subscribe to the RSS feed already.

New Time-Elapsed Video: Equipment Yard « Datacenter Builder

Tonight, I decided I’d give Google’s Chrome OS a try, and what better way to try a new OS than as a virtual machine via VMWare Fusion on a Mac? To get started, download the VMWare image from GDGT. There are alternatives available if you’re not a VMWare user as well.

What you’ll end up with is a .vmdk file, which is a Virtual Machine Disk. We’ll use this to create our virtual machine.

Open up VMWare, and select File > New… Then click “Continue without disc”

Now select “Use an existing virtual disk” Navigate to the .vmdk file you downloaded.

I chose to create a copy of the virtual disk so I can reuse it for testing purposes. You don’t have to do this, but if you have the space, why not?

For OS, choose “Linux” and for version, I selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel. I’m not sure yet if other versions of this kernel would work, but you’re welcome to try them out and let me know in the comments if they’re successful.

In this step, we want to Customize Settings. If you forget this step, you can change the settings later, but the default settings will not work, I promise you that.

Give your VM a name, and hit “Save.”

The copying process won’t take too long.

When it’s finished, you’ll see the settings dialog open. First, find the Network settings.

You’ll want to choose the “Bridged” mode, and authenticate if prompted.

You can also adjust your Processors & RAM settings. I gave it two cores and 1GB of RAM just to make it that much more pleasant to work with.

There really aren’t any other settings to mess with, so you can close your settings and start the machine.

It boots relatively quick, and you should be at the above screen. Use your Google user id and password to log into the OS.

Once logged in, you’ll see a very familiar interface if you’ve ever used the Google Chrome browser.

As I get time to further explore the interface, I’ll give some more updates, but here are a few screenshots of some settings areas I found right away:

And, the resource usage is extremely minimal. Here’s a screenshot from Activity Monitor:

If you get a chance to poke around, let me know what you think. Would this be great for only netbooks? Or perhaps breath new life into older computers and laptops as well.

The Opencast project is looking for those who have experience in licensing issues related to various codecs. It was posted yesterday to the Opencast Community email list.

Who uses ffmpeg to encode their media? Have you considered licensing fees for codecs and media distribution? Did you happen to run this by your insitution’s lawyer?

When institutions install Matterhorn they will have the opportunity to install ffmpeg, Matterhorn’s encoding service reference impl out of the box. We want to provide adopters (and their lawyers) with legal case studies to clarify legal ambiguities around codecs and ffmpeg.

We also could use a lawyer or two to clarify some ffmpeg installation questions. Does any institution have a legal resource that can join the list?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Best,
Adam (Matterhorn Project Manager)

If you’d like more info on Opencast, visit their website. Maybe you can help!

I finally got my Google Wave invite today, and the very first thing I did was make a Site Specific Browser (SSB) with Fluid.app.

Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s a detailed view:

As you can see, even the menu icon uses the Google Wave icon… just a default choice you can make when creating the SSB.

Now to put it on my iPod Touch and my other Macs…

According to a message sent to the WP-Pro list, Best Buy is looking for some pro WordPress developers.

The representative stated that they use WordPress MU to host over 1,000 individual store blogs, and because of the explosion in popularity, they need some expert help asap.

They’re particularly interested in individuals with custom plugin experience who can extend WordPress beyond it’s normal blog nature.

Personally, I think WordPress is up to the task, but I can’t say that I would jump on WordPress in a mission-critical business application. I’d probably look towards Drupal or Expression Engine if I needed a real CMS with potential professional support included.

That said, I have certainly seen WordPress extended to fill many CMS roles, and I’m sure one of the pro’s on the list will hop all over the challenge. And the money.

While not an “official” fix yet, I found a way to fix the Vimeo settings for the Lifestream plugin.

This will allow you to use the Vimeo extension in the Lifestream plugin. I’ve already contacted the developer and posted the fix in the support forums here as well:
Lifestream Forums Vimeo Fix

You have to find this file in your plugin:
/wp-content/plugins/lifestream/inc/extensions.php

Scroll down to where the Vimeo class starts on line 954.

On lines 913 – 926, you’ll want to change the following:

function get_videos_url()
{
return 'http://www.vimeo.com/user'.$this->options['user_id'].'/videos/rss';
}

function get_likes_url()
{
return 'http://www.vimeo.com/user'.$this->options['user_id'].'/likes/rss';
}

function get_public_url()
{
return 'http://www.vimeo.com/user'.$this->options['user_id'];
}

To this:

function get_videos_url()
{
return 'http://www.vimeo.com/'.$this->options['user_id'].'/videos/rss';
}

function get_likes_url()
{
return 'http://www.vimeo.com/'.$this->options['user_id'].'/likes/rss';
}

function get_public_url()
{
return 'http://www.vimeo.com/'.$this->options['user_id'];
}

You’ll notice the important part is taking the ‘user’ part off the end of the url. Vimeo no longer uses that format for RSS feeds (or anything), and that’s why you’re getting XML errors trying to add Vimeo to Lifestream.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m lazy. Really lazy. If something takes more than a few minutes, or maybe 3 steps, I just won’t do it. I’m admitting it.

Blogging is no different. Sure, I have interesting things to share with you… but very little time or mental energy at the end of the day with which to do so.

I grabbed the developers option of the Thesis theme so it wouldn’t take much effort to set up and maintain at least a halfway decent site.

You may not have heard of Blogo, but it’s a desktop blog editor for Mac, and I really enjoy it. I used to use Ecto, but it’s had its issues and it was time to say goodbye.

You won’t see many ads on this blog, and if you’re looking for a list of the top X ways to get rich blogging, you’re in the wrong place, my friend.

It appears as if Hillary Clinton has taken her loss (yes, it’s a loss) like a champ…or so she says…

Yeah, whateva’s. Loser.