Got a new MP3 player – iRiver X20

Lately my 3rd generation 20Gb iPod battery started to die very early. It barely lasted for 2 hours. Changing a battery through Apple’s israeli representatives is not a very nice thing or easy to do and I didn’t want to wait for a replacement do-it-yourself battery from eBay so I’ve decided it was time for a new player. In addition to that a 3rd gen iPod has only 32Mb of RAM (it optimizes the battery life by loading ~32Mb from the drive every time, thus reducing the need to go back to the hard drive every time) and Apple recommended to have files of 9mb or less for best battery performance. [Read More]

OAuth C# (very) Basic Library

I know it took me a while (sorry) but I had a couple things on my plate. At first I wanted to release a more complete integration of OAuth within ASP.NET, but that will have to wait to the next time frame I can allocate to work on this. In the meantime, there is some basic C# code in the OAuth code repository which generates the OAuth signature, which is the most complicated thing to implement in the spec (not that it’s that difficult to implement :-) It’s actually quite easy). [Read More]

Assembling a Linux based Home Storage Server

I’ve decided that I have enough data I want/need to store and backing it up with removable drives and/or burning DVDs is getting less useful each passing day. I also like to have everything available all the time instead of going through backup DVDs searching for the right one and extract the information from it. I have a friend who takes too many pictures in RAW format and have greater storage needs than I do but have little time or nerves to mess with installing and configuring something so he got a Thermaltake Muse NAS-RAID. [Read More]

OAuth 1.0 Public Draft – Another brick in the wall

Others have made such great explanations as to what OAuth is and what it does like Eran Hammer-Lahav’s post so I won’t repeat it. I will say that OAuth should make the Internet a little bit safer by giving the technical means to remove the need of a certain service asking the user to give his/her username and password to access another service that that user is also using. OAuth is to credentials delegation what OpenID is to authentication. [Read More]

VmWare Server 1.0.4 on Ubuntu Server 7.04 (a.k.a Feisty Fawn)

2 days after my previous post about installing VmWare Server 1.0.3 from Canonical’s repository, VmWare released version 1.0.4. I tried using its built-in install script on a vanilla Ubuntu Server 7.04 (a.k.a Feisty Fawn) and it worked flawlessly. Aside from certain libraries which it needs to compile the vmmon and vmnet kernel modules (the installation script will tell you which ones are missing and you can get them from the repositories using apt-get), you’ll also need to install xinetd. [Read More]

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04), VmWare Server and Authentication problems

If you are going to install VmWare server (a great and free server virtualization product from VmWare) on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and you’ve followed this post showing how to do it using Canonical’s commercial repository, make sure to read this post at the Ubuntu Community Docs. Basically, if you encounter authentication problems at the Server’s Console after installing the VmWare server and until this bug is fixed, you need to edit /etc/pam. [Read More]

Google Reader Search is here!

I fired up Google Reader this morning and to my surprise I found a search box: This is one of the last missing features I wanted Google Reader to have. I actually have a friend that didn’t want to switch from a desktop feed reader until Google Reader added search. Now he can safely move to it :-) You can limit your search to all items in all of your feeds, all stared items, all shared items or items from a specific folder. [Read More]

Israeli Shortage in High End Laptops

At Yedda (my day job) we recently ordered 3 new laptops. Our spec was very specific (that’s how we are ;-) ): Core Duo 2 running on at least 2Ghz 2Gb of RAM 100Gb or more hard drive WXGA+ screen (1440×960 resolution) 14.1″ screen Non shared memory video card DVD burner The reason we want 14.1″ screens is due to size and weight (some of us, not me, rides on bikes and/or motorcycles to get to the YeddaHQ). [Read More]