Smart Cookie Dad

Been waiting for Boxee Box (by Dlink) forever.  CNET has an article about it early this year.  They said Boxee Box should be available by second quarter of 2010.  Perhaps they mean by end of June?  No one knows about its availability yet and it’s always been vague.  I hope I don’t have to wait for another year for it.

In case you don’t know what Boxee is about, I will fill you in with a little information.  Boxee is a media center that’s similar to WD TV, CinemaTube..etc.  Currently, it’s software only and you can download it onto your computer.  It’s based on the popular XMBC (that was build for the original XBox).  So, it has a very solid base that’s it’s built upon.  You can download it free and it runs on various platform including Apple TV.  It has many features which will make you drool.  Give it a try.

How does Boxee Box compare to other alternative such as Tvixbox, WD TV, CinemaTube?  It’s all about the user interface.  Again, Boxee is based on XMBC (which was a fine piece of software already), its interface is clean, responsive and intuitive.  The expansibility aspect of Boxee really stands out.  To name a few, you can run Netflix, web browse, online radio, news site, Twitter, Facebook with very minimal effort.  It’s a great piece of software.  I can only hope this project will remain active and of course stays free.

I have done some research on integrating Lightbox 2 for my Gallery 2 set up.  I come across the tutorial on Gallery’s website but it over-complicates thing a little.  Although their instruction is the proper way to do the integration, an average person is going to have a hard time to follow their instruction.  You have to hack the code anyway, why not following an easier hack.  Here is my little instruction:

• Download and extract lightbox in your web root folder assuming all necessary files are extracted under the /lightbox directory.
• Modify theme.tpl (/themes/<your theme>/templates/local/theme.tpl) by including lightbox right before </head>.  It should look something like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/lightbox/css/lightbox.css"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/lightbox/css/lightbox.css"/>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="/lightbox/js/prototype.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="/lightbox/js/lightbox.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="/lightbox/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>
        {* end stylesheet and javascript for Lightbox JS *}
  </head>

• Modify album.tpl (/themes/<your theme>/templates/local/album.tpl) by adding “rel=lightbox[photos]” to each photo.  It should look something like this:

    <a href="{g->url arg1="view=core.DownloadItem" arg2="itemId=`$child.id`"}"

    title="{$child.title|markup}"

    pageLink="{g->url arg1="view=core.ShowItem" arg2="itemId=`$child.id`"}"

    rel="lightbox[photos]" >

• Note that there may be multiple places where you need to modify depending on your theme.  You may want to search for keywords such as “child.id” that’s within the anchor tag (”<a href=…”).
• Also note that if the /thems/<your theme>/templates/local directory does not exist, you will have to create it and copy both theme.tpl and album.tpl over.

Voila! Your Lightbox integration is done.

My company is trying to save money so we are moving off of renting servers to buying our own servers and host them ourselves in a co-location space. It was a quite stressful process from drafting machine specs to putting servers together and installing them at the data center. It took me a month to decide on all the parts to buy, 2 days to put the servers together and 2 days to install them at the data center. Why 2 days to install them at the data center? That’s because the rails (Antec 20″ rackmounting side rails) I bought weren’t really made for 1U servers. They are too tall (wide) to stack on top of each other. I believe these rails are probably made for 2U. The rails itself is very solid though. Here is what the rails look like:

We were juggling on our first day at the data center moving servers around trying to fit them in without wasting space. Basically, in order to fit this rails, we need to skip one nut on the rack. Which means, we would loose 1U for every 3 servers. That kinda defeat the purpose of purchasing 1U cases. We ended up only using two of these rails and stack 5 machines on top of a set of rails. This rails is very well built and it hold up very well. We are shopping for 1U rails now to refit the machines once we receive new rails.

Here is a couple pictures of what our rack look like:

Front of the servers on a rack

Back of the servers on a rack