Gamers Unite (No, I mean go hang out with your friends)

Ok so you have a PS3 Slim, Xbox, and PC, How many of your games allow you to actually utilize that dusty second controller in the corner of the cabinet (I don't mean as a backup when your controller dies because you played for 8 hours strait)? You know what I mean, multi player.

Recently my wife procured some loot for a present, Skyrim. If you haven't played it, I'm sorry. Its an awesome product of fantastical dragon slaying, magicka casting and sword swinging fun. It's probably the closest people in our time can come to living in the middle ages without having the short lifespan (as long as you save early enough) and sickness and ailments that would have come from our real world middle ages. And it has dragons!

Here's the rub, if you have someone play this game for any amount of time past the intro hour, you quickly see they take a helper into dungeons. While you are twiddling your thumbs (because who can read a book with that game on as a distraction) you think, how hard could it have been to add a controller to the game and let someone play that second character?

Here is what I'm asking you to do, pick up and look at the back of your games and see if they are multiplayer. Do some quick math. How often do you come back to that game, Skyrim is fun for other people to watch what you are going to do next. (Like using your dragon voice on the annoying preacher in Whiterun or loosing consciousness and shooting everyone in whiterun in the knee with arrows.) But how many of you return to your games after the first few weeks of play?

The thing I remember about my first console, that I helped pay for, My siblings and I saved and saved; we accumulated butter buckets of coins and went in together to purchase a Sega Genesis. Sega had Sonic and Tails and other multiplayer games that would allow us to bond, and we would play for hours after school when we were allowed to.

Growing up a gamer was no different. I played RISK and Scrabble with my pals after work or on weekends. We would play D&D and eventually, after the DM killed off the entire group, we would retire to StarCraft. I recall some of the best times hanging out with my friends yelling "Your bases are belong to us!" (Often my bases were out first, even though I had a backup plan to swing back and bite them later).

My wife and I started our young relationship playing Baldur's Gate on the PS2, we would play for hours, and when we finally put the game down it was probably because we had class or work to get to, but then WoW came along and sorta allowed us to play with friends, until for one reason or another they all went to different servers. Now WoW is growing long in the tooth and less and less interesting... we are looking for some fun games to play together that don't involve setting up a calendar for 10 or 25 people.

I don't really remember many of the one player games I own, I don't play them. I don't get as much out of games without the social interaction with a friend or family member. I mean sure, I love having a single driver race in Motorstorm now and then, to satiate my need to drive like a bat out of hell. But all in all, most of my time in game is on something with other players.

Here is my point, if you have a game you really love to play *cough* Skyrim *cough*, let someone else play it for a while. Just sit and watch them. When they are really into it and you are itching for the controller to help them, sit down and write a nice letter to the developer. Ask them to make the next iteration Multiplayer capable. Thanks Gamers, remember they make the games because we buy them, if we tell them what we want to buy, hopefully they will listen.

Photographs

There is something to be said about holding the final print in your hand.

I recently got a iPhone controlled helicopter for a present. My wife, who is every bit the gadget freak I am, got a digital picture frame. She loved it because we are both photographers, but she wanted the helicopter too. So the thing is still in a box (the digital frame) because neither of us has the time to sit at the one computer we have and comb through 8 years worth of images. Sure we take pictures but we rarely have (MAKE) time to edit and post process.

We shoot everything in RAW, since we had our first camera with RAW. We were combining HDR images old school like in PS Before it was all the rage. We have some pretty good stuff in there, but like the pile of negatives from our photo classes, they never see the light of the luminescent display.

I'll get to my point. I came to work today to see a print (of my wife and I at the company Christmas party) sitting on the break room table. I thought, "We don't really have too many of these with both of us." It was an awesome gesture from the wonderful folks in the parent company to print these out and send them to our office. It's always a picture of her because I'm behind the camera or a picture of me because she's composing. But unless we set up a tripod and stage something we don't often see candid shots of ourselves.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you snap a picture of your friends, family or co-workers that you think they might like. Print it out and give them a copy. You might get one on your desk or in the mail one day in return.

Who's to blame

Scrap the whole system and start over. Isn't that what video games have taught us. The ultimate lesson of the reset button. Unfortunate that a whole generation of kids are being raised to believe that when things go wrong; just reboot. Can't really do that in government or the economy; both living entities. We have to work the problems out and unfortunately compromises are not meant to be a benefit to all, they should be only what is necessary to make as many "happy" as possible. Sucks that no one seems to learn that in government class any longer. The President seems to have become the same as the IT Person. No one wants to thank them when things are working, but by god they will hear about it when something isn't. Even when they are already working on the issues to the best of their abilities. If their abilities aren't good enough then why did the majority vote think they are? or was it you voted simply to keep that lady from Alaska out of office? Because, frankly her running mate looked like he would keel over doing that thankless job... I'll leave that open ended.

I have to say it. Step off your high horse. If you think you can do a better job; too bad, likeness is you smoked POT when you were young, and you wouldn't stand a chance against todays politicals/media trash diggers. You're just glad to get to be blowing smoke when you're unhappy. Get out there and get in politics and make a change if you don't like it. Put up or shut up. we voted for the government in charge and if anyone is to be blamed it's ultimately the VOTERS. Perhaps you should start researching who you are voting for instead of casting an open ticket to party members.

I once told a friend of mine. We have the "Left Wing" and the Right Wing" and we have to balance them. If you keep following the bird analogy; it boils down to this. An Eagle with unbalanced wings cannot fly. Nature weeds them out. We —as humans— choose more freely than natures selection policies. But if nature came in and chose the way most people vote: I'll leave that to your imagination.

You live in our nation, you need to choose more wisely before going out and spending money on something you can't afford. It's bad enough that things have gotten so out of hand that (unless your filthy rich) you have a mortgagee on your life when you get out of college. You add a mortgage on your house and suddenly you have slavery to the economy. An economy created by our forefathers voting practices. Don't even get me started on how the heck can anyone afford to have children? But nonetheless we go on doing it and expecting "SOMEONE" to pay for it. the doctors need to get paid too, they have to pay for their ridiculously expensive education.

You want to blame someone. Blame the voters, or a mythical creature in the sky. whichever makes you feel better, but don't you dare lay all the worlds problems at the feet of one man. Not if he's the President or the IT Guy.

Fixing 0.0.10.in-addr.arpa in Mac OS X Server Admin

Okay, so you hit save, and for those of you who have the problem and have read about it, you know what I mean.

Here is what I have done to "Fix" the issue. I don't claim it to be the definitive answer. But it worked for me. First off, Forget using the DNS settings in Server Admin. Making your settings in there Still Sucks even in 10.6. For a company that has it all figured out you would think they could make a program for beginners to use since all us hard cores would just go write it out by hand anyway.

Well they did, sort-of make it easy if you understand DNS you can use the Server Admin to set it up pretty well, but it is still borked, even in 10.6. For Me, starting out on 10.4 Server years ago. DNS was a lion to tame and I had to do it quick. When I setup on a 10.5 Server I Migrated Mail Manually. Everything else was setup clean and of course the DNS was a lot easier to work with than 10.4 Server, but it's just not there yet. Some visual tutorials on setting up a DNS would be keen, but then the trainers might be out of a job. I digress.

I use su to login as root, but be careful with this as you can mess things up if you don't know what these commands are. Lets Get started, and I'll sudo the following commands

First copy the file so you have a backup if you make a mess

sudo cp /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple.backup

sudo nano /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple

password: "enter your admin password"

This opens a simple text editor called nano in terminal. Using the arrows on your keyboard scroll your cursor and place it in front of the following entry.

(If you are not familiar with nano, get to know it first with man nano)

zone "0.0.10.in-addr.arpa." {

type master;

file "db.0.0.10.in-addr.arpa.";

allow-transfer {none;};

allow-update {none;};

};

Hitting the "Ctrl-K" key combo in front of each line will cut the text

once you have removed the zone entry, Ctrl-O will write out the changes to the file

and Ctrl-X closes the nano prompt.

Hint if you skip Ctrl-O and go strait to Ctrl-X Nano will ask you to answer Y for YES or N for No to save changes

N closes the nano prompt without saving

Y prompts you to verify the filename so ENTER writes the changes to the file and closes the prompt

Allright

sudo serveradmin stop dns

followed by

sudo serveradmin start dns

and you should not see the 0.0.10.in-addr.arpa zone entry in Server Admin GUI any longer.

Have fun and don't forget to backup before you make changes.

Snow Leopard Server Upgrade Hell

Let it be known my last words were "Remember the DNS" as I go stark raving mad after upgrading to Apple 10.6 Server. What I am saying with so much drama is remember that working DNS is paramount. There is no log file for it, but if you don't get it right the first time you are screwed. Not completely but it will likely be painful once you get to the end.

I started on a Saturday morning like any other only I had to go to work an extra day when no one was in the office. I have a brand new Xserve ready to migrate to and had already installed 10.6 Server two days prior. I read through the upgrade instructions over and over to make sure I had it down and I began the process.

Here is something you may want to remember. If you are moving to a new machine Please unbind the old machine from your Open Director Master First. This will help when you want to bind the new machine under the same name.

I followed the instructions for upgrading from Mac OS 10.5 Server, but the Mail migration didn't succeed correctly it turns out the New Mail server "Dovecot" needs to rename the user files when it is done importing them from the old server. Well Mine didn't do this. So I wound up using the Migration script on Page 42 of the Upgrading and Migrating Instructions.

Turn off Mail

Before I run the Migration command I do the following because I Just want to make sure I backup the original migration in case, you don't have to do this, but I recommend it if you want a clean Mail DB.

Sudo MV /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail.old

sudo mkdir /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail

sudo chown _dovecot:mail /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail

sudo chmod 775 /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail

(APPLE's Script to run copied directly from Pg. 42)

sudo /usr/libexec/dovecot/migrate_mail_data.pl —moveMail 0 —cyrusBin "/

Volumes/Leopard Server/usr/bin/cyrus/bin" --database "/Volumes/

Leopard Server/var/imap" --sourceSpool "/Volumes/Leopard Server/var/

spool/imap" --targetSpool "/var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail"

(My Script to use)

sudo /usr/libexec/dovecot/migrate_mail_data.pl --moveMail 0 --cyrusBin "/Volumes/10.5 Server Volume Name/usr/bin/cyrus/bin" --database "/Volumes/10.5 Server Volume Name/var/imap" --sourceSpool "/Volumes/10.5 Server Volume Name/var/spool/imap" --targetSpool "/var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail"

Here is some fun news, If anything is wrong in the script above it throws errors telling you what to do. For instance, I inferred to replace the three places where it says "Leopard Server" in the script with my Hard Disk Drive Volume name from the Old 10.5 Xserve, No Problem, but what I didn't read into it was the quotations are there for a reason. I put in "/Volumes/Server\ HDD/" Being that my volume was called "Server HDD" It threw an error saying "Server\\ HDD" could not be found. So that meant the locations with space in between the quotations would be automagically escape character-ed. Easy Nuff. I just went back and pulled the backslash. But there was another typo or two. Thanks to the copy/paste from PDF the script has some spaces that don't need to be there at the ends of the three first lines of the PDF so make sure to pull those out. Lastly the part that says "—moveMail 0 —cyrusBin" Needs to say "--moveMail 0 --cyrusBin" Two dashes in front of each instead of a hyphen.

Run the script and wait forever while the 40 GB of mail is transferred a second time. Hopefully you don't have 40 GB of Mail.

After your migration, you should notice the user names on the folders in /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail have changed to a hash. This is something that Dovecot uses to secure the e-mail. If you super user into terminal and change directory to the aformentioned directory and run an "ls -l" command you will see the user names as the owners; one for each of the hash folders. So you can tell who is who.

Anyway. Now is a good time to check your DNS Records.

Go to Server admin and make sure nothing looks wrong after the migration. I didn't notice anything off hand, but this got me later.

So long as your DNS is good, you should be able to bind the server to your OD Master to get up and running. Tell you the truth I wish I had skipped the Upgrade part all together and Migrated the mail separately onto a clean server.

After my migration the Mail stopped delivering about two hours in. This should have told me something right off bat because I had this issue two or three years ago, but it didn't because I had already checked the DNS records.

Binding to the Directory Server kept throwing issues, I assumed because the old server was still bound, so I booted it up and unbound it. While that stopped one issue, the new server still wasn't talking to the director server. Four days later, after rebooting the server every two to four hours I went back to the DNS records using nano (pico). To read the files from /var/named/zones . I found settings in there were incorrect,

sudo nano /var/named/zones/db.company.com.apple.zone

Sure enough, Here was my problem somehow my DNS records were misconfigured. I don't know weather to blame myself, two years ago, or Apple Server Admin. Whatever the problem, the issue was here.

So I clean the zone file up, making my internal Server the DNS SOA instead of the external SOA. I made sure mycompany.com was my main Nameserver. I aliased mail.mycompany.com to mycompany.com and made an MX entry for mail.cvaadv.com, I aliased several other names to mycompany.com and just to be on the safe side all entries were in FQDN.

Finally! Stability. The server has been up a week now without hiccups. Next, re-training the junk-mail filter.

Identity

Who are we?

Are we tweets? Who cares what we are doing at 3:37... 3:43... 4:28...?

Are we blogs? Your opinion matters, your story matters... Right?

What is all this information we post saying about who we are?

Psychologically we want to be accepted – by someone – but who are they?

Is your identity sacred to you, do you even exist on the internet? Have you removed yourself from living so much you can only define who you are by your posts? I want to be known for my ideas, for my vision for my unstoppable voracious hunger for life, not for my, my schedule... my daily routine. 

It's networking you say. Well so are churches, so are chambers of commerce, so are associations, SO IS SCHOOL. We spend all this time telling one another everything at all hours of the day, what is there to say when you get face time? 

"Did you read my blog? Well everything that has happened to me since we last met was posted there, go check it out and follow me..." 

Who has that kind of time?

Are we really dooming ourselves to Idiocracy: to a future as seen in Pixar's Wall-E, where ROBOTS we create have more passion for life than our future lazy-ass society.

Communication is Key to any relationship. I realize you would never have that friend in another country who lives another lifestyle, yet shares the interests you do. Our world needs to share information, about rights, freedom, religion. We need to communicate with our neighbors. Why else would the President-Elect Obama want to carry his Crack-Berry into the Whitehouse? I know we need to communicate, but don't do it at a cost of having social relationships with those around you. Put down the phone when you are with your friends and family. IT CAN WAIT!!!