iPartition, uPartition, heePartitions…

Wow! It’s been a while since I last updated this blog… As everyone knows, I have been trying for some time to turn one of my computers into a webserver so that I could run Moodle – or a similar course management package – on it. I was endlessly frustrated by the absolute lack of results despite my biggest efforts, but things are moving forward now, so I’m in a better mood.

I recently bought iPartition, which is a neat little Mac programme that allows for non-destructive repartitioning of hard drives. I used it to partition my iBook’s hard drive, so that I could restore the OS X 10.4 install DVD on one partition and reboot from that one to install OS X on the other. (Then I wiped out the install DVD partition and expanded the other one to take the whole drive.) Since the Intel and PPC Mac use different partition schemes, I could not install OS X over FireWire from my Mini – or, at least, I didn’t know of any way to do so. With iPartition though, it was really easy. I’ve been partitioning everything happily ever since!!! One of the programme’s suggested use is to keep your system files and your personal files and data on separate partitions so that you can do a clean install of your OS without wiping all of your music, videos, documents and settings from your drive. It seems like a great idea. I’ll try that sometime soon. Another obvious use of the programme is that it will allow me to install and run Ubuntu natively rather than in a virtual machine. Whether or not I manage to get Moodle running under OS X, I’ll also need to get it running under Ubuntu so that I can have a truly free solution. Moodle did not work in a virtualized Ubuntu. I guess Parallels networking isn’t quite up to that task yet, although it might simply be my lack of Linux skills.

It seems that my RSS feed reading is not a complete waste of time after all. About two weeks ago, I discovered a cool tutorial for using Macs as servers on freemacblog.com. It starts with the very basics and is intended for the average Joe who doesn’t have a computer science degree. It shows you step-by-step everything you need to know. As of now, I can serve a webpage from my iBook to my Mini or vice versa, but I need to set up port forwarding on my router before I can share the websites on my computers with the rest of the world. Sadly, my router’s software seems to be Korean only, so I’ll probably need to ask a teacher at the school to help me with that. I’ll run a few tests using a direct connection (without the router), but I still need to figure out port forwarding to make course management software truly usable and useful in the settings I have in mind.

Anyways, reading a previous blog entry, I recalled that the latest official version of Moodle is supposed to work on PPC Macs with OS X 10.4, so now that my iBook has been updated, I’ll need to run more tests. I have looked for other course management packages, but I still feel like Moodle will be the best – if I can get it to work properly.

Moodle is running… but not working properly!!!

Ok, it seems I still have a long way to go before getting a Course Management System (CMS) online and working the way it should. Moodle does not work on Intel Macs as of now – which really should have been mentioned on the main download page!!! – and there is only a beta version that will work on OS X 10.3. I haven’t been able to update my iBook to 10.4 due to my broken CD/DVD drive, so I only have a 10.4 Intel Mac and a 10.3 PPC Mac, neither of which will run Moodle properly. I’ll try to find a CMS that works well on Intel Macs. Moodle just lost my vote… for now, at least.

In other news, I got Synergy running. I can use my Mini’s mouse and keyboard to control both my Mini and my iBook. My iBook’s trackpad and keyboard still work normally, and I have a keyboard shortcut to turn the feature on and off, so I can detach and re-attach the Mini’s keyboard and mouse from and to the iBook with a simple press of *apple-f1*. I had to write a short script to configure Synergy the way I wanted it to work and I’m rather proud of myself on that one. I still haven’t succeeded in using the iBook’s keyboard and mouse to control the Mini, but that’s much less useful to me, so I don’t think I’ll waste a lot of time on that. (The Mini’s keyboard and mouse are just so much better.) I haven’t managed to make Synergy start automatically when I reboot, but I’ll look into that when I have a bit more time. It’s such a cool little app! I wish I had twenty computers with 80 screens to test it with!!! By the way, it works fine with Linux, OS X and Windows computers and you can hook up computers with different operating systems easily. I guess it’s not that big a deal, but I find it even more mind-blowing than Google Earth. If you have old computers around, Synergy’s an easy way to turn them into something useful again.

I’m not happy with the way I manage my bookmarks. I want to tag them, share them among computers, share them with whoever’s interested in them, and have an easy way of finding the right ones when I’m looking for one. Yahoo’s del.icio.us probably isn’t too bad, but I’m still not entirely convinced. If anyone has suggestions for that – or for any other cool tech toy -, leave a comment and let me know.

Moodle is running…

FINALLY!!! I got Moodle running. I stii haven’t tested anything and I expect it will take some time before I’m able to do anything really interesting, but at least it is running, which means Apache, MySQL and PHP are configured properly. I’m pretty happy about that!!! (Understatement of the year…) Now the real work can begin.

I’ve freed some space on my Mini’s hard drive and I was looking into partioning it to install Windows Server 2003 and/or Ubuntu Server natively instead of running them in a virtual machine using Parallels. I haven’t tried Windows Server in a virtual machine, but Ubuntu Server simply stalled during the reboot after the installation. I have no clue what the problem is. Windows XP and the desktop version of Ubuntu both work fine, although I couldn’t get Moodle running in those either, nor in Mac OS X on my Mini. Anyways, after reading a lot in Moodle’s forums, I learnt that Moodle doesn’t run on Intel Macs yet. What?!? The website never mentioned anything about Moodle not running on Intel Macs. It just said: “Best used on Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later.” My software’s up-to-date and, usually, running PPC software isn’t a problem on my Intel Mini. It just works. There are, however, a few specialized applications which do not work well – or at all – in Rosetta (Mac OS X’s PPC-to-x86 translation tool). It would have saved me soooooooo much time if I had known from the start that Moodle was one of them!!! But hey! Moodle is free… so I’m just happy it’s working now.

Since I’ll be using my old iBook to do all my Moodle-related stuff and my Mac Mini for pretty much everything else, I’ll try to install Synergy and set up a software keyboard-and-mouse switch. If it works well, I’ll be able to drag my mouse from my Mini’s screen to my iBook’s and cut-and-paste from one computer to the other easily.

In other news, there is a RSS feed for new blog entries, but there is also a RSS feed for new comments. You might want to suscribe to that feed as well as I’ll use it every now and then to post updates to certain entries. (If you click on the title of any of my blog entries, it will show that entry and its related comments on their own. The RSS feed for comments is right above “Leave a comment”.)

LAMPs, AMPs and other home essentials…

The rain season has been over for a little more than a week now. It’s been —>H.O.T.!!!<— ever since. Not quite the “Sahara desert certified” kind of hot, but the temperature has been steadily between 32 and 35 every single day since the rain stopped. I’m really looking forward September…
I went to another beach last weekend. Gwangali. I like it much more than Haeundae. I’ll post my pictures soon, I promise. I’m just too lazy to do it now and I’m working on other things at the moment.

Do you think I’ll finally get my LAMP working? If I had another hard drive, I’d set up a dual-boot machine with my extra operating system – or systems – on a hard drive other than the main one of my Mac mini. Ok, so I have *one* external drive at the moment, but it is my media drive. Therefore, if I mess it up, I lose all of my pictures, movies, important documents and software. I’ve used Parallels Desktop to create virtual machines to install additional operating systems, but Ubuntu Server Edition will not complete its reboot after installation. I tried twice and faced the same frustrating result in both cases. I’ve tried Fedora Core 5 and did not get far. Maybe I should buy an English PC keyboard so as to have a keyboard recognized by Fedora. Fedora Core 6 (test 2) is supposed to add support for Intel-based Macs, so hopefully I won’t face the same problems I did with FC 5. FC 6 is still in beta though, so it probably has problems of its own. Oh! Well… I guess it just goes to show that it is not easy to set up a server on your home computer when you’re not an expert in the field. I was really hoping Ubuntu would make it easy for me, but it seems I was wrong.

I expect stuff to just work and LAMP is making me seriously mad. Hasn’t anyone done a basic package that will just f*#king work?!? I’m losing it… I can’t stand defeat on that most important battlefield. I don’t give a damn that I’ll never be a good dancer, but I freaking need a web server that works!!!! I can’t give up now.

Every single one of my pictures… (Videos coming soon.)

Google has released a Picasa uploader and an iPhoto plugin for the Mac. The plugin is really nice and automatically transfers my iPhoto comments to my Picasa page, so I don’t have to cut-and-paste the comments for each picture. If you looked at my Photobucket pictures, you’ll have already seen a few of the ones I posted to Picasa, but most of them will be new. I posted them all on Picasa so that those of you who haven’t looked at my Photobucket pictures yet – which I assume will be most of you – can see all of my pictures in just one place. Just click the link below.

Picasa Web Albums

I still haven’t uploaded the rest of my videos to YouTube, but they’ll show up on my blog once I have, so keep an eye on it if you want to see more.

As an aside, I might switch my blog to another place at some point in the future. After some tests, I realized that a WordPress blog would make it easier for me to keep all my entries nicely organized. Since you can attach labels to each entry and browse all entries using these labels, I could have links in the sidebar for the various labels, allowing visitors to check all my entries that have “Pictures” or “Video”, or that are related to “Computer Stuff” or whatever other category feels relevant. I’m still testing various things though, so the switch won’t happen anytime soon. Anyways, I’ll let you know through this blog if you need to update your bookmarks. *grin big*

:P

Another test page.

The ScrapBook Tutorial
My pictures

This is a test page…

I want to see how categories work and if they might be useful enough for me to switch from blogger.

Here’s a pdf that I linked. I wonder where my description is supposed to show up. My guess is that it will show up if you put your cursor on the link and leave it there for a few seconds. Let’s test it and see.

The ScrapBook Tutorial

Hello world!

Well, I just got Flock, a cool browser based on the code of Firefox. It integrates seemlessly with a wide range of blogging sites, so you can easily use the built-in blogging tool to post to all of your blogs. It’s neat to have everything in one place. It also handles RSS/ATOM feeds very well. Since Flock supports WordPress, I thought I’d check it out. My “Blogger” blogs aren’t too bad, but they aren’t all that I wish they could be. Maybe I’ll be more lucky with WordPress. It seems to be more flexible. Time will tell…

Concerning Flock, it still is in the relatively early stages of its development – it is beta software – so it can be rough around the edges sometimes, but if you take some time to configure it the way you want it to work, you’ll be happy you switched.