HYPERAXE

While searching for some multimedia downloads in the Internet that I can view with my iPod, I decided to try out video podcasts. Actually, I’ve been quite curious about it since I bought my iPod, but didn’t have enough time or interest may be to try it out. It was only last weekend, during some boring afternoon that I finally got the chance to try it out.

Basically, here’s what video podcast is based on Wikipedia:

Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures. The term is an evolution specialized for video, coming from the generally audio-based podcast and referring to the distribution of video where the RSS feed is used as a non-linear TV channel to which consumers can subscribe using a PC, TV, set-top box, media center or mobile multimedia device).

To start things off, I tried searching for sites that offers free video podcast subscriptions and here’s what I found:

CNN Now In The News Commuter Edition - Here’s where I get my daily dose of news around the world while enjoying a cup of coffee in the morning.

GeekBrief.TV - This site offers interesting updates on the latest trend in computer and technology stuffs

National Geographic Video Shorts - I’m really fond of watching National Geographic and Discovery Channel, so I decided to subscribe to National Geographics short video podcasts so I would be able to watch some of their interesting short documentaries even when I’m mobile. Sad to say, Discovery Channel still doesn’t have a video podcasting service, but I do hope they would soon.

PC Gamer Video Podcast - Thanks to Pakner, MRT, and Tseri, now I started to gain interest on PC games.

Well, that’s all the video podcast subscription I have for now and I am now making it a habit to check for updates every morning before I leave for work. At least I don’t have to worry about boring moments again while I’m away from my PC. I usually view my videos every morning during my coffee break, and also late in the afternoon while waiting for Aphilo in the parking area.

[tags]Podcast, Video Podcast, iPod, iTunes, RSS, Mobile Video[/tags]

A few weeks ago, I came to realize that I’m still a jack of all trade even here in my new job. It’s not meant for bragging, but I really didn’t expect that I can still be of much use even in Windows based services, when I am more of a Linux/Unix guy.

There was this problem regarding our Team Foundation Proxy Server that even our Windows Administrator cannot figure out. The problem was that after starting the TFS Proxy service on our Windows 2003 server, the service just stops and throws out some errors that is not really useful at all. Well, what’s new with Windows errors, they always give out those weird characters not readable by ordinary men.

One of our managers decided to throw me into the problem, for the intention that I’ll learn things and be the one in charge of such things in the future. I guess what everyone didn’t expect was for me to solve the problem. It was really quite easy, the initial finding of our Windows admin is that the user account used to run the TFS Proxy server was corrupted, so he created a new one but still the TFS Proxy service stops after around 3 requests. That’s where he got stuck, and was simply at lost on how to resolve the issue at hand.

After creating the new user, the TFS Proxy still exhibited the shutting down problem. That’s where I came in and after a few tinkering of the IIS configuration, and analyzation of the logs, I found out that the problem was simply due to the fact that the new user was not included in the IIS group that’s allowed to run applications in its application pool. So I simply configured the new user to be a member of the said group and walah!, TFS Proxy Server was fixed.

I guess that most of the administrative stuffs either on Linux or Windows can easily be resolved if you understand how things work and how the components relate to each other.

[tags]Team Foundation Server,Team Foundation Server Proxy, Windows 2003, Internet Information Server, Microsoft Windows, Windows Administration,TFS[/tags]

I decided to try registering a domain with NameCheap just to confirm the good reviews I see all over the Internet about them. Moreover, they offer one of the cheapest domain registration services around. True enough, I was amazed of how fast and easy the registration went.

I can’t believe that in less than 30 minutes, I have everything setup with my new domain. Registration was pretty instantaneous, a few clicks and then I received a confirmation of my order in just a couple of minutes. Their online ordering web interface was easy to use that you can move around pretty quickly to complete your order. Even their domain management interface is pretty cool and simple.

What I really liked the most with them was the propagation of the DNS entries for my domain. I decided to use their name servers, and after configuring some basic DNS entries such as my web servers and email servers, my new DNS records propagated quite quickly in the Internet. Considering that I reside on the other side of the globe from where they are, I was able to resolve my domain’s IP addresses in no time.

Well, that’s just the registration, web interface and DNS server part. Let’s see if they can keep up with a good start! Especially, with customer support just in case I experience any problem, which I hope won’t happen.

[tags] DNS, Domain Registrar, NameCheap, DNS servers, Domain Management[/tags]

If there’s one thing I miss the most in my old work, it’s my morning dose of brewed coffee.

What we have right now in my current office is a coffee vendo machine. Most people might appreciate it since you get to have different varieties of coffee and chocolate mix, namely:

But for coffee drinkers like me, that is really not a great fan of instant coffee, this machine doesn’t satisfy my daily caffeine needs. Oftentimes, I rather have a juice (which by the way we also have a vendo machine for it), than drink instant coffee the whole day. If it were only brewed coffee served in the office, I might be more active and lively especially when I get my average dose of 3-4 cups of coffee during office hours.

[tags]Brewed Coffee, Instant Coffee, Vendo Machine, Juice[/tags]

I just finished a my C# and Software Architecture Training yesterday that spanned for 2 weeks. The first week was spent on basic C# .NET programming, while the second week was on the company’s software architecture standards and design. It was a very useful training as I may say. I can’t say that I’m now an expert on C# programming, but since C# coding is very similar to Java, I think it won’t be long ’til I become competent with C#.

Regarding the software architecture side, it’s actually not very new to me. As far as I know, it’s more or less just like what we have with my previous employer. The N-Tier architecture, the separation of the UI and business logic, and the components of the data layers are all the same. I think most software companies adapt this kind of architecture which provides a lot of advantages when it comes to interoperability, usability, scalability, maintainability, manageability, and security. The training just provided me some useful in-depth information on design patterns and how the components of our product line fit together.

I’m now trying to understand our source code based on the things I learned from the training. I may not be a developer here, but then as a Configuration Manager, it’s still useful to have a thorough understanding of the codes and it’s architectural design.

[tags]C#, .NET, Software Architecture, Design Patterns, Training[/tags]

This is one error which can be attributed to a lot of things. The first time I encountered this, there was not much help I could find on Google that would specifically pinpoint to my problem. Some sites tells of limitations to virtual hosts, some to DB failures, and there are still some forums wherein the problem was not even answered accordingly. So I just tried to connect the dots of every bit of information I can find from the search engines in order to fix this error in one of my Apache web servers.

As a background, HTTP 503 errors or a “Service Temporarily Unavailable” error page is commonly caused by a problem with web services components or modules. This simply means, that the web server is up and running but it can’t service the request due to a failure somewhere in the web components, DB server, or application server integrated into it. There are even times wherein only specific virtual hosts are affected by this. If found it quite weird, but then it’s happening.

In my situation, I found the problem to be in my Resin application server which I use for JSP/Servlets support for my web sites. I can’t really remember what caused the web server restart, but when it started all of the components of my web services started except for Resin. It didn’t take me long to fix the problem, with the knowledge of its probable causes. Basically, since I’m pretty sure that the problem is not within Apache’s core itself, I tried looking at the different modules loaded with Apache. The first thing I checked is if my MySQL server is running fine and it was ok. Then I tried checking PHP support (mod_php), then moved onto checking Perl (mod_perl), and then some other modules such as mod_security but have seen no problems with it.

And then I noticed the following lines:

LoadModule caucho_module /etc/httpd/modules/mod_caucho.so
ResinConfigServer localhost 6802

So I checked if the Resin application server was running, and found out that it didn’t start. So.. BINGO!!!.. there’s the culprit! I then started Resin and everything worked fine. That was pretty simple, but then the information from the Internet or search engines would never make sense at first glance, but if you just try to understand the nature of the problem, and the possible solutions, then you’ll be good to go in not time.

[tags]Java, Linux, Apache, Resin Application Server, HTTP 503, Service Temporarily Unavailable[/tags]