nathank.com

One of the greatest apps I have purchased to date, SMB Music. This app allows you to play mp3, mp4 and wav files from a Samba (CIFS) network share. This is beneficial to those folks running a NAS server such as FreeNAS. I had been using Subsonic when I had my collection in a Windows based environment, but I recently setup a FreeNAS sever (BSD based) so Subsonic was out. The SMB music app fills the void, at least for the times I am connected to the WLAN, but I would still like to find a good streaming server for FreeNAS over the WAN.

You can find the SMB Music app here.

It’s a real shame that the Iphone4 compresses the video before uploading to Youtube. I was quite upset about this whole thing until I found a work around that will suffice for now.

Download the PixelPipe App. Add Youtube to the sites to share with and it will upload the video in HD.

Finished building / configuring the new music / movie / picture storage place for the house. It’s a re purposed old computer running FreeNAS.

Motherboard : ASUS M2A-VM
Memory : A-DATA 2GB
Drives : (2) Western Digital 1TB Caviar Blue in RAID 1
(1) Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue

The OS is running on a 1GB USB drive. I’m not a huge fan of the neon lights in the hard drive cage fan, but the big fan keeps the drives nice and cool.

In my daily work I do a fair amount of coding for student information type applications.  This almost always involves using a student identifier (most commonly the student id) within queries.  We have multiple systems on campus that house student information, so this usually becomes a linking by id exercise.  I have always used the practice of coding and housing the 9 digit identifier as an Integer datatype, but for some reason we have one system on campus that houses this 9 digit id as a String.  It works fine within their system (obviously) but when it comes to linking in with others, its a mismatch.  Almost all the stuff I have done lives in a MySQL db, but the String type lives in Oracle.  Most of the time this becomes an issue when linking with Crystal (I’m on version 9).

One thing I can do in Crystal is create a command for my MySQL data which includes a type conversion within the SQL statement.  It looks something like

SELECT firstname, lastname, cast(studentid as integer) FROM tablename WHERE lastname = ‘Smith’;

That way, when I link the table with the Oracle table, the datatypes will match.

Give a baby a laptop and they will go straight to the pools.  Happens every time.

I HIGHLY recommend FreeNAS for anyone looking into network attached storage.  In simple terms, it’s freakin awesome!  I can’t think of a single thing I would add to what they have done.  I set this up a couple of weeks ago and I have been very pleased with what I have been able to do with it. 

http://www.freenas.org

I took these time lapse photos every 20 mins or so during the shop build process, but just recently got around to making a video.

At the end of the semester that is.  As I finish my research paper today it hits me that I am only two weeks away from the end of my classroom work.  I’m not out of the woods yet though!  I’ll be presenting my Graduate project next week, and working on it through the Summer.  If everything goes as planned, I will graduate in December!

We had a baby!

Kyle Maddox Smith. Born Dec 21st, 6lbs 7oz, 19 1/4 in.

Things have been pretty wild here the past couple of weeks. Neither of us knew what to expect with a newborn, and we are learning everything as we go. He sure likes to party at night! All his information can be found on his website, kylemaddox.com

I can’t put into words how elated I am to be finished with this semester. Having so many things happening at once, I was putting my school work on the back burner. It’s no secret. I’m sure my professors were pleased to see my applying myself. Oh wait, they knew me in undergrad so I am sure anything is an improvement over that.

Now onward to more important things, like having a baby. We are hoping it will be within the week. It would be fantastic to have Kyle home for Christmas. Check out everything Kyle at www.kylemaddox.com!