anchorite.org

We just got new Macbook Pros at work so I am selling my personal machine…

Asking $1,250.

Original Order from July 15, 2009:

Order Details
Product Name		Product Number	Unit Price	Qty	Subtotal
MBP 15.4/ CTO		Z0GG	$1,923.00	1	$1,923.00
With the following configuration: Processor 065-8453 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Memory 065-8457 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRM-2x2GB Hard Drive 065-8462 320GB Serial ATA Drive@7200rpm Optical Drive 065-8466 SuperDrive 8X DL Display 065-8668 MBP 15" Glossy WS Display DVI Adapter 065-8467 No DVI Adapter VGA Adapter 065-8472 Mini DisplayPort – VGA Adapter Remote 065-8475 None Apple Keyboard & User's Guide 065-8481 Keyboard/Users Guide Country Kit/AEX 065-8484 Country Kit

Recently I have had a few friends who have expressed interest in getting more into building web sites.  They aren’t sure exactly where to start or where they want to end up, so I put together a list of things to do and tutorials to follow so that they could get a better understanding of all the various pieces of the web ecosystem – hosting, development, design, user interface, content, etc.  I am big fan of learning by doing, so have at it…

• Setup a WordPress.org web site, check out TentBlogger’s list of recommended hosting platforms and follow the WordPress Install Guide, also see Mr. Nifty’s post on installing WordPress.  If you would rather start out with a local install on your own machine, see Setting Up a Local Development Environment, Part 1 on ChurchCrunch.
• Pick a theme, tons of good free ones out there and lots of awesome premium themes.  A good place to start: Smashing Magazine – 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition
• Learn how to tweak your site – Think Vitamin: HTML & CSS
• Additional reading: Digital Pure – Web Design Done Right and WordPress Web Site Design Quick And Easy

What else would you recommend to someone starting off in the world of web work?

Guest post by John Youssef.

Recently, Ustream has changed the way they do advertisements. We were blessed enough to be able to use them for the amount of time we did, but this new changed prompted us to look for a more reliable and professional streaming provider. When considering a new provider we had several criteria in mind:

• Affordability
• Flash Streaming
• iPhone Streaming
• Simplicity
• Reliability
• Quality of service

After considering several options, it was an easy decision to agree on Mediaserve as our new streaming provider. They offered several options that many other streaming providers do not offer, and they do it at an extremely affordable price. Their biggest advantage is that their streaming service is built on Wowza Media Server. This allows us to run a flash stream, and an iPhone stream simultaneously, as wowza automatically encodes into iPhone format in real time. Wowza also has the ability to encode using Microsoft Silverlight technology, but it is not something we are currently implementing at the moment.

At the time of registration, we were required to register a domain with Mediaserve, to use as our streaming hostname. We decided to go with the .net version of our current domain name for simplicity’s sake. The registration process was very simple and straightforward. Within a couple hours of registration they had everything setup for us, and had emailed us very detailed step by step instructions to get everything setup and running.

Everything is done through Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE). Once you download it and install, you simply need to follow the instructions emailed to you to get it properly configured. With Mediaserve’s setup, streaming is as fast as clicking start in FMLE. No more pesky browser windows to open like in Ustream’s setup.  In order to get the iPhone streaming working properly, you need to purchase a third-party plugin to encode the sound in AAC format. We purchased ours from Mainconcept for a one-time fee of $249.

To setup the embedded stream window on your website, you need to download Flowplayer from Mediaserve’s download page. The free version of flowplayer has a small watermark in the top right hand corner and does not have any functionality in terms of customizing how the player window looks. Since we were changing everything around, we decided to purchase a commercial license for a one-time fee of $95. This allows you to remove the watermark, add one of your own, and completely customize how the player window looks and feels.

The iPhone streaming is done through your Ipod’s/iPhone’s built in video player. The only thing needed is to setup a piece of embedded code using the instructions Mediaserve provides in order to get it working properly.

I have to say, Mediaserve’s support was amazing through the whole setup process. They respond in an extremely timely manner, even on weekends, and their responses were always very polite and helpful. They made the setup process a breeze, and answered any questions I threw their way.

Now I know the last thing you all want to know is the price. They offer two payment options. You can choose to pay a monthly fee of $39.95, or if you pay annually, the monthly fee is reduced to $30.95 a month. We decided to go the annual route since it was a savings of over $100 annually. This price includes 30gb of storage space, and 300gb of monthly bandwidth. This price also comes standard with 100 simultaneous connections. You do have the option to upgrade the number of connections on a per-need basis, but the only time we feel that we would need to do that would be during Holy Week when our number of viewers more than doubles. Other than that 100 is more than sufficient for our needs (for now anyway!) All in all, for the amount of features they include, and their price, and level of service, I would highly recommend checking out what they have to offer. We’ve gotten nothing but compliments since we made the switch.

While debating pros and cons of giving users local admin right at the DC CITRT last week, I brought up slick setup that one of our volunteers had ported over from his day job.

David Mikhail, one of Fairfax County Public Schools’ top Windows engineers had put together a master list of software to blacklist via GPO.  This gives us the flexibility to allow users local admin right with some comfort that known bad software can’t be installed.

David has graciously provided an export (backup) of the GPO so that you can use it as well.  You should be able to restore the following into Group Policy:

Blacklisted Software – GPO Backup (zip)

HTML file for those of you who want a quick peek

Kaweem, a good buddy of mine and extreme gadget aficionado has recorded an awesome 3-part video review of Google’s Nexus One.

Google announced support for push email for Gmail and Google Apps User today via ActiveSync. The feature is already active and works well. Google now offers a somewhat complete mobile sync solution supporting contacts, calendar and email. Syncing is supported on Windows Mobile, iPhone and S60 platforms, Google Android already supported push Gmail.

Push mail for iPhone and Windows Mobile: the choice is yours

I know I am long overdue for an update on what’s been going on with OrthodoxSermons.org, we launched the new site on July 12th.  The team at Mustardseed Media did a wonderful job and we are continuing to work with them for additional features on the site.

One of the features I am most excited about on the new site is the ability for other Orthodox Churches to easily upload their sermons, once uploaded those sermons can be embedded back on the church site.

For the techies who may be interested, we are currently hosting the site on a Virtual Private Server at Slicehost and and all the media is stored on Amazon S3.

Last May we started thinking about the next version of OrthodoxSermons.org, we took comments from our users, studied the market, did some of our own brainstorming and put together a wish list.  We spent six months getting quotes from vendors and evaluating “out of the box” solutions.  We narrowed all the possible options from a list of 20 to 3 and then with some intense comparison and prayer we were able to select Mustardseed Media as a ministry partner for the development of OrthodoxSermons.org 2.0. There are a few things that stick out about Mustardseed:

• 99% of their work is done for Christian Churches & Ministries
• They support the online Christian technology community via their podcast community Geeks & God.
• They are a Drupal shop and are active contributors to the Drupal Community.

You are probably wondering, what did make the final cut on that wish list for OrthodoxSermons.org 2.0?  Here is some of what you can look forward to:

• Improved navigation and search.  Sermons will be categorized and tagged.  Transcripts (if available) will be searchable.
• Ability for churches and organization to upload their own content and feed their content back to their own sites via RSS.
• Support for attaching transcripts of sermons, users can volunteer to transcribe sermons.
• Full audio and video podcast support, compatible with iTunes/iPhone/iPod as well as site wide RSS feeds and RSS feeds on all tags.
• iPhone based site for browsing from mobile Safari.
• Audio and video of sermons can be embedded on your own site, also can be shared by emailing to a friend.

We started the development process a couple weeks ago and are making good headway, we are hoping for launch around the beginning of 3rd quarter, 2009.  If you want minute by minute updates on the development process, I suggest you follow us on Twitter: @amitry, @mustardseedinc, @rob_feature, @suydam.

A few of the early mockups:

Home

Sermon with video and audio

Sermon with only audio

Yesterday, I made a few mistakes and learned a few lessons.  I was at a client site helping them move to VMware.  We decided to switch one of their virtual machines from one VMware ESXi host to another.  They have shared iSCSI storage (EqualLogic SAN), so it should have been a relatively simple procedure.  I made the mistake of not taking a snapshot of the volume before the switch.  While making the switch, something happened to the volume (not sure if it was accidentally removed or if it was some kind of corruption).  We could detect the iSCSI target but it wasn’t showing in the storage list.  When we went to add storage it showed the volume as blank.  The web interface on the SAN still showed the data there, so we knew (hoped) it wasn’t gone.  After a bit of searching I found this forum thread that hints at a possible fix but lists the solution as a call to VMware support.  We called VMware and successfully used this process to restore the volume.

Via console or SSH access:

login as: root
root@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX’s password:

Tech Support Mode successfully accessed.
The time and date of this access have been sent to the system logs.

WARNING – Tech Support Mode is not supported unless used in
consultation with VMware Tech Support.

~ # cd /tmp
/tmp # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:1:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Partition table entries are not in disk order
/tmp # dd if=/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0 of=/tmp/ddout bs=1M count=2
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
/tmp # hexdump -C ddout |less
/tmp # fdisk -l /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/tmp # fdisk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 524295.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e   extended
p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-524295, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-524295, default 524295):
Using default value 524295

Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): fb
Changed system type of partition 1 to fb (VMFS)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 549.7 GB, 549763153920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 524295 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:1             1    524295 536878064   fb  VMFS

Command (m for help): x

Expert command (m for help): b
Partition number (1-4): 1
New beginning of data (32-1073756159, default 32): 128

Expert command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/disks/vmhba32:0:0:0: 64 heads, 32 sectors, 524295 cylinders

Nr AF  Hd Sec  Cyl  Hd Sec  Cyl    Start     Size ID
1 00   1   1    0  63  32 1023        128 1073756032 fb
2 00   0   0    0   0   0    0          0          0 00
3 00   0   0    0   0   0    0          0          0 00
4 00   0   0    0   0   0    0          0          0 00

Expert command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
/tmp # vmkfstools -V
/tmp # esxcfg-vmhbadevs -m
vmhba32:0:0:1   /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba32:0:0:1 42240509-d9375061-f3bd-0018fe7e542e
/tmp #