Jen got her Mac mini on Saturday! The Apple store guys called Friday night and she was so excited! Since everyone seems to be posting pics of the unpacking and setting up of their Mac mini’s, I thought Jen would like to as well. (Did I ever mention that Jen’s nickname is “Mach”, pronounced “Mac” - fitting, eh?)

The only issue we had was the little PS2/USB keyboard/mouse adapter the Microcenter guy sold us - didn’t work with the keyboard. (This is the second time in a row that a Microcenter guy gave me bad info - I know more than these guys anyway so why do I listen to them at all?) A trip to Circuit City and $25 later, Jen had a good working USB keyboard and mouse cable.

I’ll post more as Jen explores the world of the Mac and moving from Windows to OS X. (And continues her love of Steve Jobs!) If money permits, I might have to get one of these things too! Especially since I found out that opening the thing doesn’t void the warranty, well unless you break it, of course!

Oh yeah, Jen’s hasn’t let me touch the thing at all yet, so I can’t comment on it, except that it’s tiny and very cool.

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This post is just in order to clean out some bloglines links that I’ve “saved for later” - which is getting a little out of control!

From a post from the guy who came up with Google Suggest:

The project stemmed from an idea I had a few months ago, and since then I’ve been working on it in my 20% time, which is a program where Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose. What’s really amazed me about this project is how in a matter of months, working on my own, I was able to go from a lunch table conversation to launching a new service. In my opinion, this is one of the things that really makes Google a great place; that the company’s systems, resources and, most important, people are all aligned to make it as easy as possible to take an idea and turn it into something cool.

Some info on how it’s done - XMLHttpRequest. More on auto complete.

UPDATE: More info on how it’s done: Google Suggest Dissected, Part II (Slashdot) and the direct link.

I’ve posted before about XMLHttpRequest and it’s possibly one of my favorite things in the coding world - so I guess I can’t hate Microsoft too much since they’re the ones that first implemented it! I’m just really glad that Mozilla choose to incorporate it too!

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My old buddy Henry has been touting rsync for a long time now, but only recently have I got around to setting it up - and now I must say it rocks!

I’m using it to backup the main stuff - configs, code, content, etc. - from our other servers to our main server, which has a hefty amount of RAID5 storage.

After a few tweaks here and there and a couple of cron jobs later, we’ve got a nice simple backup system up and running without a lot of the headaches of tape or the cost of commercial packages. It was even pretty painless to setup rsync on our Win2K database boxes to rsync the MS-SQL data dumps. (If you didn’t know, rsync is standard on most Linux distros.)

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I love good free software. apcupsd is one such item.

Even though our APC Smart-UPS 3000 RM XL came with the “Business Edition Basic” of APC’s PowerChute application, I wanted something a little more flexible - and, if possible, free. After a few minutes of searching, I came across apcupsd. I think I found some other open source project that would work for an UPS, but we only use APC anyway, so this looked like it would fit the bill perfectly - and it was available at dag!

I would be sure to test it first using the safe.apccontrol script - due to a slight misconfiguation, after I started the service, the machine promptly proceeded to shutdown! (This is documented, but I didn’t read the docs first! Who does?) FYI, the cable that came with the UPS is a 940-1524C which is listed as a SIMPLE type in the config file, but defining it as SMART is what is needed:

…snip…
UPSCABLE smart
UPSTYPE apcsmart
DEVICE /dev/ttyS0
…snip…

Of course I love having web access for monitoring:

What’s great is the Master/Slave configuration so that the main instance running on our main server can send a signal to all the other servers. Also, since it’s pretty flexible, and open source, I can customize it if I need too!

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Ok, finally got some snow pics to post! Cincinnati officially got about 9 inches of snow right before Christmas, but as you can see the snow drifts were huge. We had three feet on the deck and about four on the front porch. I forgot to get pics of Jen and myself doing a massive amout of shoveling - doh! The UPS guy didn’t deliver some packages we needed for Christmas Eve, but things worked out in the end.

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