CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

After a month of silence I finally managed to get out a new version of app for the milk. Along side with the new version comes my new hosting platform for all my coding projects. it is still under development but should work well enough for a test run.

Christohp Peter – Applications

please go and check out: www.chrillo.info/applications/appforthemilk/ to find out whats new in the current release!

the platform includes:

• documentation for app for the milk
• information on known bugs and possible solutions
• a new download section
• a small forum for feedback and bug reporting

you can sign up but it is also possible to post without an account.

Version 0200

advanced search:

I am almost done with implementing all advanced search methods that are also provided by the rtm website. the application now supports most search functions except for location and sharing based searching. please check the docs for details.

icon:

I came up with an icon, but I am not yet 100% happy with it. please let me know what you think and what should be improved.

Next Version:

the next step is to implement a detail view for tasks that will allow editing of notes, tags and other detailed information. the next release will also include a postpone function that has be requested several times.

I originally planed to get the application into beta before 5. of july and before I go abroad for three weeks. As so often I did not get nearly as much work done as I wanted and the beta will be delayed to the middle of august. I will not be able to check my email every day but I will spend several hours in a boring class which will give me lots of time planing out features and their implementation. When I am Back at the end of July I will release a new update alongside of my application hosting platform which has a forum for bugs and requests, documentation and FAQs, so please stay tuned.

Download

download: app for the milk 0170 alpha

Changes

I just uploaded the third alpha release of app for the milk. there are again only minor visible changes but under the hood already lies the implementation for the filter system that will make advanced search and smart lists possible. I implemented 3 basic methods as a proof of concept. the search also now works in both views.

• inList:YOURLISTNAME (shows only tasks in specified list, behaves strange in the list view since tasks are already sorted by lists)
• dueBefore:DATE (filters tasks due before this date)
• dueAfte:DATE (filters tasks due after this date)

dateparsing for the american date format has also been improved and will now also work in the search field.

Icon

The icon is still a ugly blue square, and since I am not capable of producing a decent icon( I tried) I would like to invite everybody to help me out and create on for the application. I can not pay you since the application is free but I hope I can encourage some people to contribute, and every body who contributes will certainly be credited for his work publicly.

Thank you

I also want to thank everybody again who sent me feedback that helps improving the app.

I recently discovered that the apple remote app is capable of waking up a computer from sleep if it has wake on lan enabled, and it can only be woken up from sleep mode, not if the machine is entirely turned off. So if you keep your media server on all the time this is a handy way to wake it up without paying for one of the numerous wake on lan apps in the app store.

A sad but typical story about why one needs to use backups when dealing with computers

Last Night a friend of mine gave me his almost full 2 TB Western Digital Studio Edition that has a 2 drive RAID 0/1 built in. He told me that he used it with his mac and everything worked just fine. When he connected it to his PC and tried to move some data to the drive it stoped working, which is no surprise since the drive is formated as HSF+ in a RAID 0 configuration. Windows can not handle HFS and somehow managed to serverly damage the pratition table on the drive. After using all tools known to me such as TestDisk, Mac OS X disc utility and Ubuntus partition manager i gave it up as damaged beyond repair. The next step will be to use a data recovery tool to pull out the data, that is still intact on the drive, but all of these programs cost at least 100$. In addition we have to finde 2 Terabytes of free space to recover the data to which also will not come cheap.

Since he used the drive in a RAID 0 mode there was no backup anyway but the very same thing could have happened if it was set up as a RAID 1.

When putting together my home server setup I was considering using one of these RAID drives vs. two stand alone drives and I am glad I chose the two single drives.

Pro RAID

• the consumer versions like the western digital ones are really easy to set up
• good protection from hardware failure
• automatic data restoring
• only Raid 1 will give you some sort of backup
• RAID 0 gives you speed gains
• usually the read feature is a bit more costly than two stand alone drives

Contra RAID

• no protection from software errors
• if the RAID it self craps out on you there is very little chance on restoring things
• if you delete stuff it is gone on both RAID discs instantly
• if the partition is damaged both drives are affected
• the physical proximity of these raid drives makes it more likely to die together in case of power surge for example
• not very flexible – I can always grab one of my two storage drives and go to a friends house to get some data and when I get back home it just syncs to the other drive and everything is fine unless the unlikely case of both drives die at the same time

I do not recommend a single RAID 0,1 or 5 setup as a sufficient backup solution. Backup often, on different devices in different locations!!

Finally Apple released an update to the mac mini product line. I finally got mine and its already up and running. I set it up to be my HTPC, file server and web server. I want to go through each of these three topics and describe the configuration I used.

Hardware:

The mac mini is way too expensive for the hardware you get. I was really disappointed at first because they even raised the price from 439?(with student discount) t0 526?. For 550 euros I could get twice as much ram and way more disk space, eSata, blueray and hdmi output easily with a linux or windows machine. BUT OS X makes it still worth the money FOR ME. I do not agree with the back and forth disccussion about macs vs. pcs. A computer is a TOOL, like a car is for transportation. There is diffrent cars with different uses and different prices. Some cars are easy to drive some require a skilled driver… Everybody has to decide for himself if its worth the money and if it will do what you want it do in the way you want it to be done. Be glad there is a choice!

1 mac mini 3/2009, 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM

mac mini

Mac Mini – The mean reasons I chose the mac mini over other more powerful computer were that its really small and really really quite. The mini is inaudible and I really hated the constant buzz from my old server, even though I already spent way to much money on expensive CPU coolers. The power consumption is also quite low and since the server will be always on its a big plus. The display output options are sufficient. I use the included mini DVI to DVI adapter and connect it to an DVI to HDMI cable. As soon as reasonably priced mini display port to hdmi adapters hit the market I will change to that. I like the built in SPIDIF audio connectors and the built in Firewire 800 port. In combination witth the 2 FW800 enabled drives it is really faster than a USB 2.0 solution and not much more expensive.

2 Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1 TB

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition – Even though I had some problems with this type of hard drive before I chose them because of their low price and their ability to shut down when not in use. For a HTPC noise is a key factor. The new drives are really quiet in the first place but if the server or just the drives are not in use they turn off and are therefor completly silent. The only downturn to this is that when you want to access the drives it takes a couple of seconds to wake up from sleep but that is not a realy problem. The drives come with a 5 year warranty. Since I already experienced the rather smooth and fast exchange process of such a drive I do not expect any major worries in the next 5 years( In 5 years I hope we will be carrying Terrabytes on our thumb drives).

(more…)

I am replacing my old server / htpc with a mac mini – hopefully with a new model if they appear on 14.10.2008.

I am looking for a external mass data storage solution that offers me at least two terabytes of storage distributed among 2 or more drives in order to achieve a secure and redundant storage capacity of 1 terabyte without data loss in case of the inevitable hard disc failure.

I am looking for he following features – ordered by importance

1. Security through redundancy. I want to have all my data stored twice on two separate drives. Raid or regular back up software are both fine. I do not want to pay for backup software, there is enough free software to get the job done. It has to be automatic.

2. Noise – the system will be in my living room and I don’t want loud fans without running the risk of overheating. This is one of the main reasons I am dumpping my current pc.

3. Power management – I want the system to have some sort of idle state where the discs spin down on order to cut noise an usage of the discs. This should be automatic. I do not want to turn the drives of manually.

4. Accessability through out the entire network and over the internet – FTP is a big plus. I have a gigabit lan airport extreme base station and the mac mini that will always be on plus I also consider NAS an option.

5. replacability and expand ability. In case of a broken drive I want to be able to buy a new drive in a local compute store in install it. Even more important is that even though 1 terabyte is an insane amount of storage the day might come soon where I want to add more storage to the system without having to repurchase the entire setup.

6. Warranty - it should have decent warranty on the drives from the manufacturer.

8. Speed – I did a lot of reading and I think for my purposes of backup and media storage / streaming USB 2.0 and faster are good enough. FireWire would be nice since I have macs.

Things that ate not important.

1. Design – I can hide it all in a tv table so it does not have to be pretty.

2 .Many connectivity options – the system should be connected to my network only at one point – AEBS ,mac mini or via Ethernet.

3. right now I have two fairly new 500 gb SATA hard drives I would like to reuse but it’s not a must. I am willing to drop cash on new terabyte drives.

Most importantly the pricepoint. I figure I can get the 2 terabyte drives + enclosures for arround 350 euros which is about what I want to spend. But since this should be a longterm investment I could be convinced to spend a bit more.

These are the options I have in mind right now.

1. Buying two terabyte drives and putting them in decent enclosures, although I would not know which enclosures, and just hooking them up to the mini on 2 usb ports. –>probably the cheapest and can easily upgraded but problemantic in terms of noise and power management.

2. Getting a two bay raid enabled enclosure like the LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ Dual –> quite expensive – but excellent quality and feature rich. Are there cheaper options?
3. Getting a nas device like the dlink DNS 323. since I actually already have a mac mini always running or the airport extreme basestation I am not sure if its a good idea to bring in another stand alone device.

Please tell me what you suggest and about solutions you use for your self.

 I just recently bought the book Essential Actionscript 3  by Collin Mook. I havent gotten really far into the book yet but there are few things that one must understand in order to get even started with actionscript 3. The first thing is AS 3 is pretty much OOP only, which means for you to forget about timeline code which i personally used very often especially for small projects. So where do I put my code now, was the first thing I asked my self. The answer to this question is the document class. When using the flash authoring tool you find this setting in the document preferences.

so none of your code will go to the timeline. You will need to follow a few simple steps:

• create an actionscript file, save it to the same folder where your fla file is at
• inside this file you have to create a package that will hold the document class
• inside the package create the document class
• place the code you would have originally put into the first frame of the timeline in the constructor function of the document class the following code:
• then place the name of your document class in the designated field in the document preferences as shown above
• you may use this sample code to start from:

package{
	import flash.display.Sprite //
	public class yourClass extends Sprite{
		public function yourClass(){
		// your first timeline frame code goes here
		}
	}
}

Now this is a very simplified approach to this topic, there is a lot to know about the naming of packages, classes and the scope of objects and methods within them. I highly recommend the book i mentioned above. just note that the document class must either extend the sprite or the movieclip class, and you have to import every class you want to use. In general Actionscript 3 is a lot more strict but thereby a lot more effective. It forces good OOP programing, and won’t let you get by with several hundred lines of code in you first frame.