It is now time for me to explain why my blog has been abused…

The biggest change this past year has been getting married to the woman I love and adore, @hopeproctor. Hope and I got married on June 6, 2009 and moved the following week to a brand new duplex in Greenville, NC. Marriage has been an amazing experience and I look forward to the many years to come.

In October 2008 I launched GreenvilleTweets.com to bring the twitter community of Greenville, NC together through hosting and planning tweetups each month. I never knew the amount of time and energy this venture was going to take until I was entrenched in it. The venture has been completely worth all the effort since I have met some amazing tweeple and recently was offered a job.

The job I have been offered and accepted is with Round Table Toys, an internet toy retailer that is opening what is going to be an amazing retail location here in Greenville, NC.

I have been hired as the Director of Social Marketing, so look for me and Round Table Toys in late July to blow up the social media scene. In Gary Vaynerchuk’s words, “We are going to crush it”.

I had several changes I wanted to make to the default install of Radmind to help with load on a particular server. Our current setup and some changes I made are documented below;

By default Radmind installs config files, transcripts, files and command files in /var/radmind on the boot drive. I wanted to move this to our external RAID since this is our main file-store. Luckily this RAID is on a SAN that connects to our two redundant file servers. To move this without any overall config changes I simply created a symlink from  /var/radmind to the newly create folder on the RAID.

For example:

ln -s /Volumes/FileRAID/radmind /var/radmind (will have to be ran as root)

This will create a symlink in /var named radmind that points to /Volumes/FileRAID/radmind.

The neat thing is that now I am able to run Radmind on all servers connected to the SAN and share the same Radmind config between all.

Also in OS X there is a suite of GUI applications that help with administration of the server-side setup. While setting up the server and loadsets I noticed that I had to run the GUI app on the server that was hosting the loadsets.

In the UNIX and OS X arena this is a very uncommon thing, so I came up with the simple workaround below to allow you to run the Radmind Server Manager suite on a remote machine;

Create an AFP share of your radmind file location on the server hosing the Radmind server. Create the symlink on your remote machine as above but with some changes;

ln -s [path to mounted AFP volume] /var/radmind (AFP volume must be mounted first)

This will now allow you to access your Radmind sever config directly from a remote machine.

Overall I am very impressed with Radmind as a system imaging tool. I will post any other tips and tricks I come across concerning this as the actual implementation occurs later this month.

-Brad

About a year ago the company I work for decided to jump onto the “Green Bandwagon” with an initiative named, Cox Conserves. At first I laughed and said how can a media company that prints newspapers daily be environmentally conscious? I thought wrong and realized steps had already been taken to reduce the impact, some being the use of recycled paper, soy based inks instead of petroleum, reduced page size, and the real power we posses - informing the public on what they can do to live green.

Now this trend has spread like wildfire and is in every aspect of the media that confronts us daily. There is now a 24/7 TV station dedicated to living green, aptly named Planet Green. Planet Green has become my favorite station to watch and I TiVo a majority of the shows including my favorite, G Word.

…But media itself cannot make this change - it takes us, the consumers, to push this movement forward….

So being the “hippie” my boss likes to refer to me as, I have been on a personal mission to reduce my footprint and live a better life in the process. This is a daily decision from planning trips, eating organic and local food, using plant-based cleaners and detergents, and stopping and thinking to myself, “How will this affect the earth?”

So I challenge you to ask yourself daily - “How will my plans today affect the earth?” If you need some help in the process check out the 365 day pledge at http://www.wecanlivegreen.com 

Post your thoughts in the comments and let me know - What going green means to you…

-bproctor-

Both of those situations are possible with an awesome application called Simplify Media. Simplify Media works on both Mac OS X and Windows, with iTunes and Winamp.

Simplify Media states their service is free, easy, safe, legal and universal.

Free – No hidden charges. No spyware. Links let you buy music you want to own.
Easy – Set-up is fast. No need to upload files to a website.
Safe – Only your group can access what you are sharing, and no one can see your other files.
Legal – Files are streamed only within your private group.
Universal – Connect iTunes and Winamp and PCs and Macs without worrying about music format.

I have it setup on both my iMac at home and the Powerbook I use for work. It is nice to have instant access to my entire music collection.

There is even a test application for jailbroken iPhones that allows you to stream your library to your iPhone as long as it is connected to a wifi connection.

Overall, this is an awesome way to share your iTunes library and very secure as Simplify Media states all traffic is encrypted form end to end.

Do you want to listen to my taste in music? Just send an invite to un: bradproctor and we can start sharing our libraries!

Check out their blog for updates and future enhancements.

Download Link.

On the computer you want to sync your info with just check the items you want to sync under the info tab and leave the rest of the tabs unchecked. Hit apply and perform a sync.

Now go connect the iPhone to the other computer you want to sync photos, music, videos, ringtones, and podcasts with. Once the iPhone is recognized check the remaining options you want to sync with this computer. You may receive a message saying this iPhone is connected to another iTunes library and all data will be reset, hit ok. This is exactly what you want it to do. It will overwrite only the iTunes library content and keep the info from the other computer.

Once your sync is done you are all setup to sync your info separately from your library.

I hope this helps you out since it is a hidden feature of iTunes.

-bproctor

Server Setup

The development setup:

Drupal 6.2
MYSQL 5 and PHP 5
Mac OS X Server 10.5.2
Quad 2 GHZ PowerMac G5 with 2.5 GB of memory

Authentication

Drupal by default has its own built in authentication system that consists of users, roles and permissions. Users are placed into roles, which are similar to groups in any other directory system. Permissions allow you to limit or grant access to items by role. If developing a public website or blog the standard authentication is great, but for the use as an Intranet, it needed more. I decided to tie the authentication into our Active Directory system using a LDAP authentication module which also allows to use AD groups as roles.

Once I figured out the correct port numbers and misc. settings to get an LDAP module to work with AD, it worked like a charm.

To come – Part 2: Modules

-bproctor

Twitter is making news all over the place. A recent story on CNN described an instance where a one word “tweet”, arrested, helped a student in Egypt get out safely. Once out, the student just simply responded, free, and everyone following him knew he was okay.

I am now using Twitter, and updating several times a day.

If you want to join in on the wonderful world of Twitter, just head over to http://twitter.com and create an account. Make sure to follow me at http://twitter.com/bradproctor.

If you are new to twitter here are some helpful tips;

Updates can be performed from the web, im, text message, desktop application, and many other integrated solutions that tie directly into Twitters API.

@replies are how to publicly “tweet” a reply or simply mention someone else on Twitter in a post. Don’t want your @replies public? Well then, direct messaging support is built in which are private messages between users.

You can be followed or you can follow other users on Twitter. If you are being followed, your followers see your public tweets in their timeline. If you are following someone, you will see their tweets in your timeline.

-bproctor

I almost forgot the pink ones! The famous pink ribbon slapped on every female driven car in the country. Before I go any further – I am not against trying to find a cure for breast cancer, but is a pink ribbon going to do that? NO! Take your money and effort it took you to find the magnet and put it to use. Donate 100% of the money you spent on the magnet to the cause. In most cases, a majority of the magnet purchase goes overseas to the company who created the magnet in China. The majority of the people behind you do not need a reminder to, “Find a cure”. The people working on the cure already know, so whom are you telling?

-bproctor-

If you have never heard of Monsanto, well maybe you have heard of one their products, the herbicide, Roundup. Roundup, which kills unwanted weeds in yards all across America, is also used in commercial agriculture. Monsanto created what is called Roundup ready seeds for soy, maize (corn), sorghum, canola, alfalfa, and cotton, with wheat still under development. These Roundup ready seeds are genetically modified versions of traditional seeds that prevent Roundup from harming them. Once Monsanto “creates” a new Roundup ready or genetically modified seed, they patent it. Yes, they in essence patent life.

Monsanto has also been known to sue farmers that accidentally used their patented seed in their crop, even if it entered into their field without the farmer’s knowledge. The seed could have gotten there by cross-pollination, wind, animals, and any other natural way.

It really hit home when my local newspaper wrote an article about genetically modified seeds that can survive in drought stricken areas. Why not look at why we are in the mess now anyway; we changed nature, which caused global climate change. Is it necessary to change something else that naturally has the ability to change itself?

Besides the controversy surrounding Monsanto, there are health concerns, mainly because no one knows what potential harm we face.

“As we move on into this so-called biotech revolution and we start producing more and more transgenic manipulations, we’ll start seeing pieces of DNA interacting with each other in ways that are totally unpredictable…
I think this is probably the largest biological experiment humanity has ever entered into.”

- Ignacio Chapela (microbial ecologist and mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley)

The experiment has started and continues to spread and we are the subjects.

You, on the other hand have a choice, buy organic. All food that is stamped with the USDA Certified Organic logo has gone through strict testing to prove it contains at least 95% organic ingredients, meaning no GMOs.

“Organic food is produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations. Organic meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products come from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones. Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation. Before a product can be labeled “organic,” a Government-approved certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards. Companies that handle or process organic food before it gets to your local supermarket or restaurant must be certified, too.” - USDA (US Department of Agriculture)

-bproctor

It all took place in April 2004 outside of Via Cappuccino, a coffee shop in good ol’ Rocky Mount, where I was talking with some friends after getting off work. There was this one particular girl that I had never seen around so I started watching her as she made her way around my car pausing in the back. I am wondering what she is looking at as she jumps up and says, “You know about ThinkGeek.com?” She was reading my license plate holder that reads, “Will work for bandwidth”. Still in a state of shock as to why she would ask that I replied, “Well, Yes”. She got giddy and started describing a shirt she had that said “QT” in binary, O ya I started paying even more attention now.

As the night went on, we talked more while sharing stories about geek stuff. She continued to tell me that she had finally found her geek in North Carolina, since she had just moved from Louisiana. Two months went by as we continued getting to know each other and on June 6th, 2004 we both realized – the geek got the girl!

-bproctor-