Category Archives: Technology

Apple iPhone

Happy (belated) New Year everyone! I’ll start the new year on this blog with a little tech-post reflecting upon the Apple iPhone which was revealed during Steve Jobs’ speech at MacWorld just a few hours ago.

Let me cut right to the chase: I predict that Apple’s iPhone will be a smash hit! There’s no way around it – the new “multi-touch” interface is revolutionary and leads the way for all “smart-phones” in the future (that is unless Apple has got all the patents covered – in which case most of them would be iPhones anyway ;)). It’s got so many features it’s almost overwhelming, but hopefully Apple has found out the right way to make it truly user friendly, which in fact would be the most revolutionary aspect of it since almost all current phones and “smart-phones” are really lacking in that department.

Anyhow, I see myself owning an Apple iPhone when it arrives in Europe (unfortunately not before the end of the year, I could really use a replacement soon for my current Samsung (talk about bad usability…)). Plus I am actually one of the few people who don’t own an iPod (!), so this would combine both my need for a new phone and the usefulness of an iPod. Exciting stuff.

As a funny side note, some of the Danish so called technology “experts” are predicting the iPhone’s failure according to the news agency Ritzau, in a news article which is touring all Danish papers. That is a hilarious but also tragic testament to the lack of vision when it comes to some journalists and analysts. It’s quite sad actually. Probably these same fools predicted the failure of the iPod. And in the past they would have predicted the failure of the personal computer, the television, the telephone, electricity, the theory of gravitation, etc…. 😀

New Server…

Once again I have switched server, but this time it’s for the long term.

I have set up a dedicated Mac OS X server (running on a “Mac mini” with Intel CoreDual (2x) 1.66GHz processor, 2 GB RAM and 80 GB HD), and it’s seems to run very well. This blog is the first of my sites to go live on the new server. I will move all my sites over to this server during the next 5-7 days. Crossing fingers for a smooth transition…

Major transition of music forums almost complete

The last couple of days I’ve spend many hours doing a major software transition of Magle International Music Forums from the now old and obsolete software UBB.threads to the modern and much more advanced vBulletin.

The switch itself took place in the weekend and went well besides a few glitches. I imported all threads, posts, attachments and members to the new forum and that went well, or at least as well as could possibly be expected. However, I must admit that one thing I had significantly underestimated is the time I have to spend updating all the links pointing to the old forum. It may not sound like a big deal (which is probably why I underestimated it in the first place), but it needs to be done (or else people will keep ending up in the old forums and the new forums will not be indexed as well by the search engines), and it takes a looooooooong time to do… So far I’ve only done the most important links and that have taken at least 12 hours of my time in the last three days – just editing links. There are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of the nasty little buggers that needs to be fixed! Aaaarrggh!

The activity has not yet taken up on the new forums. There can be several reasons for that just after a major switch, but I expect (*crossing fingers* ;)) that it will return to the normal level soon, and in time grow to surpass it. Anyhow, go take a look. It’s really nice and a lot of care and work has been put into it 🙂

A dedicated server…

This personal music blog is running on a new dedicated server that I have rented. »Dedicated« means that I control the entire server (computer) and can set up as many websites as I like, or the server can handle. It’s my plan to move my major music sites over to this server in time. But it’s not quite ready yet…

WARNING [Geek Talk]
The solution I selected is not a so called “managed server” – instead I have to set up most things myself, which have forced me to learn a little about Linux and networks the last couple of weeks. I chose to install Linux Debian Sarge LAMP. That has actually gone quite well, and I find setting up the basics: “Virtual servers” in apache, MySQL databases, Log-file rotation, adding IP addresses, etc. etc. to be relatively easy – especially through a control panel called “Webmin”. All these things work like they are supposed to and in a generally logical way. But there is one big problem, and it’s causing me headaches and I don’t want to spend any more time trying to get it to work properly: email!

I installed something called “sendmail” and it works sortof-kinda, but mails sent from my server is only received when using a so called “-f parameter” and sendmail is basically impossible to reconfigure unless you’re a serious Linux-geek. So, I tried to uninstall sendmail and install something called “postfix” instead. No go. This is a big problem with many Linux programs – when you install something it tend to overwrite a lot of other stuff so it can’t be uninstalled without breaking other things. And sendmail won’t let go. Postfix seems a little easier and “friendlier” to use, but perhaps I should look at a commercial package. Only thing is it must not be too expensive because if I spend too much money trying to make things run, I should probably have chosen a “managed” server to begin with (on a managed server everything will be preinstalled and ready to easily setup – and you get support).

I’ve already spend too much time on this whole mail problem. When things work, Linux can be excellent, but as soon as something goes wrong it can become extremely problematic, espeically compared to Apple’s Mac OS X. I must admit that when trying to setup – and uninstall – sendmail I missed the simplicity of Mac OS X and the way Mac OS X packages works and behaves (which, for example, would have allowed me to remove sendmail without any hassle).
[/Geek Talk] …end of rambling 😉

Anyhow, I’m sure I’ll find a solution, but not today. Today is music day, not tech-day.