Ever set up a server? Ever managed a server? Ever wondered if there’s a tool out there to help you do these things? Well (as far as I know) there isn’t such a tool out there in the open source world yet.
That’s why Paul and myself decided a while ago that it would be a good idea to make one! I am hoping that we’ll actually get round to doing some work on it now that we’re both going to be working in Coventry. That is assuming we actually get some spare time!
So, watch out for it!
So today I’m in Stafford because Helen has an assessment day for the police which is being held at Stafford University. I dropped her off there about 30 minutes ago and then decided to pop into the town centre to see what’s around. It was 8:30 so all the shops were pretty much shut apart from the coffee shops, some discount shops and McDonalds. I was quite hungry and really needed a coffee so I thought I’d grab a McDonalds breakfast!
Anyway, whilst ordering I noticed a sign saying free WiFi, so I got my laptop out and here I am, on free WiFi in McDonalds! It reminds me of Canada where there was free WiFI EVERYWHERE – and I do mean everywhere. It’s a good sign of things to come in the UK.
So this is the first time I’ve ever written a blog post whilst eating a fast-food breakfast! Needless to say, the breakfast certainly hit the spot!
I’ve just managed to deploy Google Apps on the domain for Riverdale (my parents’ house in Keswick – http://www.riverdaleinkeswick.co.uk/) and it went very smoothly again. This time is took me about 15 minutes to set up 5 email accounts and all the back-end framework. It really is groovy.
The great thing with this is that my parents and Dave & Sharon can share all their documents relating to Riverdale, so they’ll mostly be using Google Docs I’d have thought. But I also thought that the calendar feature could be useful because they’ll be able to put information in there about when the house is booked up.
Anyway, another successful Google creation…
Since the release of MobileMe by Apple, I’ve been wondering about what I’m going to do with my galloway.me.uk domain now that there’s options like this out there. I looked into MobileMe but it doesn’t allow you to have email addresses like @galloway.me.uk – only @me.com. This is a bit pointless for a domain hosting service!
So I looked into Google Apps which is essentially a free equivalent of MobileMe. I’ve found that it’s absolutely amazing. Quick & easy to setup and very easy to use. I’ve had a GMail account for a while, but now I have one setup with my matt at galloway dot me dot uk account. This gives me all the benefits of GMail along with IMAP access, Google Docs, Google Calender, etc, etc, etc.
The dashboard for our new family Google Apps is at http://partnerpage.google.com/galloway.me.uk so check that out. I’ve not quite finished porting everything over, but that should happen sometime this week.
Anyway, thanks Google – very pleased!
UPDATE:
I’ve just finished importing all my old emails from the old server into GMail and it’s worked perfectly. I used Thunderbird to drag across my old folders into my new GMail (using IMAP for both servers). It’s worked like a charm and GMail is even clever enough to sort out duplicate emails by only importing one copy (there were a few duplicates left over from a poor IMAP migration of my server host).
So, everything is going great with Google Apps!
I’ve just bought FixTunes, which is a piece of software to automagically fix all artwork, song names, album names, etc in iTunes. It works on a backend database which has been populated with tonnes of data. It really does seem to be amazing!
Anyway I recommend anyone buying it who needs to sort out their iTunes library. Ours has 7110 songs in it and I certainly didn’t want to manually go through and fix all the songs!
It can be tried for free as well – go grab it: http://www.fixtunes.com/
I bought the iLife update yesterday, the family pack so I can install it on up to 5 Macs at home. So far I am finding it really good. The new iPhoto is amazing – I really like the sorting by events and that it just knows what events are. It’s much more intuitive than the old “film roll” way of organising the library. I guess that’s the way it used to be done with film cameras, but “events” is a much better way of thinking about the different files in your library.
Anyway, well worth the money and I look forward to playing with iMovie to create a new movie showing photos and videos of the world tour!
I’ve just downloaded the WordPress application for my iPod Touch and am writing this post from my iPod!
It’s amazing really – can’t quite believe it’s this easy to write on my blog.
I really can’t wait to get an iPhone…
I had my first slight issue with Leopard today. Basically I tried to plug my iPod touch in, but iTunes wouldn’t recognise it at all! It’s really strange, but I’m going through a troubleshooting process which is outlined on the Apple support website and hopefully that will work. I’m not sure if the issue is Leopard specific, but it was working fine before I upgraded, so I guess it must be something that Leopard did when it installed which decided to break iPod touch support.
Oh well, fingers crossed that this fix will all work smoothly.
Having come back from travelling and using my MacBook all over the world I decided it was time to give it some TLC and install the new version of Mac OS X on it. Well, Leopard is absolutely amazing.
I hadn’t ever installed a copy of Mac OS X because the only time I’ve dealt with setting it up has been on new Macs which come with it pre-installed. The installation was extremely smooth and I didn’t have any problems what-so-ever. I bought the family pack so it’s on my Dad’s iMac and my MacBook at the moment and I’ll install it on my Dad’s iBook and Helen’s Mac Mini soon.
The advantages of Mac over Microsoft really showed with Leopard. For a start, the price is amazing. I remember the days of Windows where a single license would cost around £150 and that was for the Home edition (read, crap edition). Leopard came with FIVE licenses (all for the same household) and cost a mere £129. I dread to think how much it would cost to upgrade a family’s PCs from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The second advantage was the installation process – absolutely perfect. The third advantage was that the upgrade works on every Mac hardware we own and that’s including some items from a few years ago. Vista hardly works on new hardware, let alone hardware that’s over a year old!
Anyway, that’s just my very quick review of the installation of Leopard, maybe I’ll write with some of my findings with Leopard soon.
[Can't wait to get an external hard drive and try out Time Machine!]
I have decided to create a new blog because my old one was getting pretty old and I didn’t really like the theme. So, I deleted the old one and started again with a brand spanking new WordPress installation.
The theme I’m using is a Mac style theme called GlossyBlue made by “n.design studio”.
I guess that doing this today has been some sort of procrastination as I’m meant to be job hunting… But more on that later – I’ll post all about it soon!
