ucantblamem

Musicadium has been a fairly significant focus for the development team here at SM2 for a while now. One of things I’m working on at the moment is putting together a library to manage the cross-coding of sound files for the various stores we supply content to.

Although we’re not actually going to be using this tool, I was playing around with the FAAC/FAAD encoding/decoding on Ubuntu-server and ran into some issues which I thought I’d share in-case other people have had them also. (more…)

Knowing perfectly well that there’s been tonnes of new stuff added to Leopard and needing a VNC client, I went fishing the deep blue sea [read: Google] and found this post which was exactly what I was looking for.

In a nutshell, the “Screen Sharing” feature that you may or may not have experienced in iChat is in fact simply a VNC client.

 Aside from the method the author of that post plainly points out, you can also access the “Screen Sharing” application itself from /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app 

Some of you may or may not have noticed that my hosting-plug link (in the footer of this website) changed mid last week. The change came about from a very odd series of events and made for one very stressful week.

I had long been a Steel Pixel customer who was lucky enough to nab one of their “Lifetime” hosting accounts (pay once; hosting for life). Their support has always been very good and the features of their hosting were great. Unfortunately, it seems their backups weren’t so great and when the drive that contained the control-panel, user accounts and mail packed it in two weeks ago, it left the guys with a big headache and very few possible fixes. In fact, it left them with no fixes - all the sites were running, but no one could administer anything, nor was any mail getting through the server.

As customers, we all sat patiently on our hands for a week while the guys clambered to get the limping server back up with no success and subsequently they posted this announcement.

I had long been eying off a Grid-Service account for myself after being blown away by the service while setting up an account for a client. So, over the course of a week I transitioned all my sites to Media Temple and outsourced all the mail handling of these sites to Gmail.

I’m actually quite glad that I was semi-forced to make this transition as the new setup is a lot smarter and has much better redundancy. While it’s certainly not the cheapest hosting in town, the Grid-Service is super feature rich and support is lightning fast. I definitely do not consider it the type of hosting you get if you’re a non-techy with a single website, rather it’s for power users who need ultimate control, redundancy and such features as application containers, clustered load-balancing and a wide array of scripting languages.

… I think all this power’s gone to my head…