Yeah, I had a goal of keeping the blog posts coming, but then I got sidetracked. While I’m not entirely ready with any complete new posts, I’ll at least bring you up to date for those of you that I know don’t keep track of my twitter but read my blog in your RSS reader. I’m offering you this post as kind of an apology for not bringing you the “Regularly Scheduled Programming”. It should provide enough for you to snack on until another post follows later this week (I hope!).

P90X Workout Regimen

Monday was the first day of my P90X workout. I’m doing a different track as Molly (she’s doing the Lean Plan, I’m doing the Classic Plan) but at the same time as her for encouragement, as well as getting me a bit better in shape for the wedding and some backpacking trips I’ll be planning or am planning. I’ve been sore since I started, with emphasis on different parts of the body for the different days which is the way this program claims to work – by “muscle confusion”. I can already tell to the touch that my back, quadriceps, and triceps are toning up and I’m only 3 days into it. Today is “Yoga X”. I’m not doing the daily pictures, but I’ll probably end up doing a weekly picture digest. Right now I’m posting them privately to my Flickr account. At the end of it all I’ll share my Day Zero through Ninety improvements with a week delta, 13 in all if my math is right. If you’re interested in it, send me an email, IM, or Direct Message and I’ll try to hook you up. There’s some equipment you’ll need to procure on top of the videos, so you’re going to be financially dedicated to it from the beginning. I’m dedicated to it right now because of that “hurts so good” feeling – I guess I’m a masochist when it comes to self-improvement.

Fileserver Research

I’m brainstorming a couple of ideas for a few of my friends and I to have our own server for everything we’d use one for (Games, Streaming Media, Private Web Hosting) and the most promising option requires us to have a storage tank attached to a separate VMWare ESXi server. So when I read this article on Monday and it got me thinking about it a little more. I had been thinking about a Drobo as the solution, but wasn’t ready to make that the choice without weighing other options. Of course Mike, my supervisor at work and fellow geek, planted the bug in my ear about Sun’s ZFS which lead to me investigating Solaris/OpenSolaris as a potential solution in lieu of a Drobo.  The DataRobotics stuff is fancy, and would operate exactly as we would need it but it’s a bit pricier than we’re really wanting to get into initially. A couple of the other articles I’ve found on the topic which have helped me formulate my decision:

• Expand-O-Matic RAID-Z
• Build your own multi-terabyte file server with OpenSolaris and ZFS
• Build your own Drobo-Replacement Based on ZFS
• and a handful of others on my other computer

Anyways, this means that I’ve been geeking it up which derails the progress I was making on my other articles.

Gear Guide Research

My next article is going to be about sleeping bags what materials their made of, pros and cons, and of course – my methodology in choosing a good one. I did some here-a-little-there-a-little research regarding the materials over the weekend when I wasn’t cleaning house, doing dishes, doing laundry, watching my Netflix queue (Big Bang Theory – TV Series), or napping. I’ll probably get back on to that by the end of this weekend which should yield a post before Monday (which may have some significant sales on Camping gear). I haven’t forgotten about it, I’ve just been derailed with other things stewing in my brain!

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I don’t fall asleep easily when I’m on-call so I decided I’d watch Dexter Season 2. I didn’t want to download 4.1GBs of xvid/avi’s from my parents house to my place because it’s entirely unnecessary to have the videos in two places. So, let me explain how I got a Streaming Media daemon working on my server.

I did some searching and there wasn’t anything super awesome out there that would keep me away from using the command line interface of VLC. So, the first step was to install vlc. I also use screen so I can log out of my SSH session and just use the web interface available on VLC, so I’ll include steps for using screen.

sudo apt-get install vlc screen

During or after installing vlc, you might as well set up the port forwarding on your router for access to the web interface. Log into your router and open up port 8080 to your server. If you are not trying to stream over the internet or don’t have a persistant dynamic or static IP address, you can skip this step. Check http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm for information on how to port forward on your router. (more…)