Phil Central

So my girlfriend just got a new Windows Vista powered laptop. I’ve been supporting Windows Vista for Sprint since before it was officially released, but I’d never actually used a computer that had Vista on it. It’s not bad.

I’d say for the average computer user, like Kelsey, or anyone who isn’t majoring in Comp Sci or MIS Windows Vista is a worthwhile operating system, perhaps better than XP. It simplifies everything for things that people want to do, including listening to music, viewing pictures, browsing the web, etc.

It’s pretty slick and took Kelsey only a few minutes to get up and running by herself, I was there to help advise her, but she had a pretty good handle on it. And while she’s as computer-savvy as a college bound teen might be, she’s certainly not the type that knows computers inside and out.

Due to hardware incompatibilities, I wouldn’t recommend upgrading an old computer yet, but if a new computer is in your future, you probably won’t be disappointed to find Windows Vista on it.

So, I’ve been kind of neglecting my PSP in favor of my DS for a while. Mainly because a man can only tolerate so much Lumines. But, while I was away, Sony released a new firmware that allows you to play PS1 game rips on your PSP.

And because I’d been away for so long, this firmware had already been hacked to allow you to play homebrew, umd isos, and ripped PS1 games (normally you have to pay) on the PSP. So, score. AND the guy that is behind all this firmware hacking, Dark-AleX has done something truly incredible. It used to be that you had to reboot your PSP into different firmware, use loaders, and many other less than stellar methods to boot non-official software. Now, Dark-AleX has released complete firmware replacements, with all the great features and compatibility of the newer firmwares as well as reduced security so you can run whatever you want on it. Fantastic.

I use to dread the release of the GPS and Camera for PSP, since it meant I would have to upgrade my PSP to a firmware that would not allow me to run non-official software, but now I can’t wait. It truly is a good time to own a PSP.

If your part of a middle class or higher household, you probably have an mp3 player. And if you have a lot of music, you probably have a hard drive player. And if you have a hard drive player, you probably have an Apple iPod, Creative Zen, or possibly a Microsoft Zune.

My first hard drive based MP3 player ever was a 30gb Creative Zen. It was a fantastic MP3 player for the money. I think it came with some computer software, but you didn’t need it, it installed itself as a removable disk, you copied MP3’s over to it, it organized them via id3 tags itself and presented you your library. It worked very well, had good battery life, and suited me perfectly. Then I dropped it.

So I was in the market for a new mp3 player. My music library had grown considerably at this point, I wanted the biggest player I could buy. Creative at that point wasn’t in the business of large hard drive players anymore. Microsoft had the Zune coming up, but only in a 30gb model. However, Apple had just released the 80gb iPod. So I decided to get the iPod.

After about 6 months with it, lets go over what’s good about it. The main reason to have an iPod, is that EVERYONE has an iPod. It’s not about being trendy, it’s not about fitting in, it’s about having support for your device. Accessories, troubleshooting, software. It’s all available for the iPod. This is pretty much the only reason to have an iPod. The interface is ok, the clickwheel is cool, yeah, whatever. Quite frankly, the Creative Vision:M is much slicker on all fronts, but it simply doesn’t have the 3rd party accessory support. If you have a newer car audio deck, chances are it has iPod support. Not Zune or Zen support… iPod. Want a car mount? They are easy to find for the iPod, not so much for the Zune or Zen, sorry. Also, I like the TV out cable accessory. So, that’s why I still have an iPod despite everything you’re about to read.

iPod problem one: lack of sorting options. It seems like sorting by album artist is such a simple feature for an mp3 player. Your iPod doesn’t have this. In fact your iPod doesn’t have a lot of things as far as sorting goes on the device. Apple’s iPod is extremely accessible… but this comes at a cost to those of us that really want to use the device we want to, not the way Apple wants us to. Oh well.

iPod problem two: it’s slow. You might say, “hey, my iPod is fast”, but I’m willing to bet you have less than 40gb of music on it. If you load a full 80gb iPod up with 5 minute songs… it will not go fast. The processor simply cannot handle the advertised 20,000 songs. From what I can tell is that the iPod is designed to hold about 30gb to 50gb of music, and then some videos, in which case it works great, and is now how I use my iPod. But video is never really what I wanted. Oh well.

iPod problem three: iTunes. iTunes is a horrible piece of music management software… if you have a large library. Once your library breaks 100gb or so, your iTunes will not go fast. It will take up more than 150mb of system memory. It will not be the “killer app” it may have been. It also takes forever to process and add music to the library. Oh well.

iPod problem four: video. Good luck getting your own videos on the iPod. Unless you shell out the cash for one of the commercial “dvd to ipod” or “video to ipod” converters. If you want to this for free, there are a couple alternatives but they aren’t “user friendly”. iTunes will also convert certain QuickTime compatible formats into iPod compatible files. Assuming that you take an entire TV series and convert it to an iPod compatible format, your in for a treat as you go through iTunes and individually tag each episode as a TV Show and also set the Season, Episode Number, and Episode ID. VLC is useful for converting, and Atomic Parsley helps with tagging, but these are not for your average iPod carrying teenage girl. Oh yeah, or you can buy everything from the iTunes store.

Despite all this, iPod will be the only option until by some miracle another company gains enough market share to spawn third party accessory support like the iPod has.

So, compared to a few years ago, I’ve become extremely proficient with managing domains and getting web sites set up. I recently switched my domain from nine-one-eight.com to thedonfiore.com. The whole process took me less than an hour.

Basically, I bought thedonfiore.com from GoDaddy. I immediately went to ZoneEdit.com and added it to my DNS, and pointed my DNS to my host… also added all the Google mail MX records, and forwarded mail.thedonfiore.com to my Google Apps. After that I headed over to my host and added thedonfiore.com as a parked domain to the transition would go smooth. Set up a new Google Apps account for it, and set up was all set.

Because it takes about 24 hours for a new domain to set up in the TLD registry, I added thedonfiore.com to my hosts file so I could start developing and testing it right then. Everything went really well… woke up in the morning, removed it from my hosts file and everything was good to go, email was also good go. All was well in the world.

Recently, I had to change my web host from a free host that gave me IIS with PHP and MySQL access, to a host that runs linux+apache with cPanel, PHP, and MySQL. I’m not really sure if it was just this host of what, but IIS had almost no way for me to administer my hosted space myself, every time I wanted to make a tiny change, I had to contact someone that ran the server and wait for them to do it. I couldn’t even change permissions on my directories. My other quip with IIS was the lack of support for .htaccess files.

As I moved further and further into Wordpress, I found it leveraged it’s dynamically published system with judicious use of .htaccess files for pseudo redirects. With absolutely no support for this, it quickly became apparent that the features I wanted to implement simply would not work on a Windows based server.

So I’m back on a linux system where I belong, it’s $10 a month, but that’s bad, especially since I can set up and test new ideas on the fly without having to wait for new features to be enabled or configured for me. Hopefully their uptime is solid, we’ll see.

I have to say that after fully setting up, customizing, adding plugins to, and configuring WordPress, it’s very easy to recommend it. If you are not hosting your own site, and you have PHP and MySQL on your host, there isn’t a better solution out there than WordPress.

WordPress feels like it is designed from the ground up to give bloggers on 3rd party hosts features as if they were hosting themselves. With other blogging solutions I have tried, there were always three hurdles getting them configured. Setting up, customizing templates, and email posting.

The first was always creating the databases and setting up the software. Basically, with WordPress, you create a database, configure a text and WordPress does the rest fully filling in workable default settings without asking you for input. Literally takes less than 5 minutes as advertised. I think this is ideal for both novice and advanced users. Novices will enjoy being able to jump into a fully featured blog with no fuss. For advanced users, like myself, it’s easier for some to customize something if they already see the default value. The management system is intuitive enough that you can click through every option in the first 10 minutes. So that’s the setup, it was painless.

Next up is the template and customization of appearances of the blog. I’m not gonna lie, WordPress doesn’t excel any more than any other blog software in this department. It took just as much time to perfect my template than it did with MovableType or Blogger. I will give it this, the system is intuitive and well documented. Anytime I wanted to do something, the WordPress Codex helped me quickly find a solution. I was able to get my site to behave exactly as I intended after I figured out WordPress’s odd template structure. In the end, I grew to appreciate it and I feel it is the ideal way to template any dynamically generated blog.

Finally comes my favorite feature. Email posting! I love to post by email. I’m actually gonna break this down into two separate reviews: email posting before plugins, and email posting after plugins.

The core of WordPress’s email posting goodness comes from the fact that it requires absolutely no special configuration on your web server. With other solutions, I have had to install special scripts, create cron jobs to call them, configure procmail, and other such nonsense. WordPress’s core configuration allows you to configure it to go out, check a pop3 inbox (you can create these for free with almost any ISP, I use cox, or several other free services), and post the mail it finds in that inbox to your blog… absolutely genius. There are some limitations, it does not let you use SSL pop3 servers (gmail), it does not let you assign categories on a per email basis, doesn’t have image support (as far as I can tell) and it does not strip line breaks at all which creates some funky looking posts. Here is a quick hack I added to wp-mail.php to strip line breaks: wp-mail.php. Back up your current wp-mail.php and try this one, see if it helps. This is from WordPress 2.1.3.. One more note before I move on, because most people can’t set up cron on their server to have WordPress periodically check for new mail posts, there is a plugin wp-cron that basically runs anytime your site is accessed and performs specific tasks every 15, 30, 45 minutes or every hour. Pretty neat.

Anyway, moving on… here’s where WordPress really shines, plugins… and here is one of the best: postie! This improves the WordPress email posting ten fold. It lets you customize everything directly from the email you send. It strips line breaks. It lets you check SSL pop3 accounts (gmail, etc). It processes attachments and posts images inline, it’s pretty fantastic. It also has a plugin for the above mentioned wp-cron plugin to allow it perform it’s tasks every 15 minutes. So, if your using WordPress and email posting, you should be using Postie!

The plugins for WordPress are top notch, really worth checking into, and the documentation for every feature of it is accessible and easy to read and process with several examples for every function. Overall, I highly recommend it over many other blogging solutions, especially if you don’t have low level access to your server. It has many features not documented in this article, and is suitable for many uses besides straight blogging. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

So, I decided to go back to managing my own blog rather than having Blogger do it for me. After doing a little research, I decided to settle for WordPress. I needed a PHP/MySQL solution and WordPress was right up my alley.

They advertised a 5 minute installation, I was skeptical, so I downloaded the files, and timed myself. It actually took 7 minutes and 32 seconds until I was able to make a post. That was mainly due to slow phpMySQL access… So, not too bad. It’s default template is nice, but not my cup of tea, so I took the next 5 hours customizing the template to my site.

Overall it’s a solid system, I’ll have to wait and see how it handles when more people than me access it at once. But for now it works well.