Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Author: nosilver4u

  • frozen

    Here at the college, we used to have a streaming media server running Windows Server 2003 for the purpose of broadcasting our athletic events. At some point, it broke, and it became apparent that it would be necessary to rebuild said media server. Being the fan of Microsoft that I am, I decided to go a different route, and try my hand at running Icecast on Linux. Originally, I intended to use ogg for audio encoding, but given our user-base, I decided to do mp3 instead. I didn’t want the headaches of dealing with plugins, and weird file associations on Windows, and making the user jump through twenty hoops to listen to our games. My initial concerns were with licensing, since mp3 is a proprietary format, and typically looked down upon with scorn by the linux community. So I went to the source. The licensing for mp3 explicity permits using the mp3 format without licensing fees if you are a non-profit, and are making absolutely no money from your use of the mp3 format. If you aren’t sure about that, see http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html.

    So now for the fun stuff. Ices2 doesn’t support mp3, so it was off to find an encoder that supported mp3 and would talk to Icecast2. In case you’re not too familiar with Icecast or Ices, you must have 2 parts to stream audio. A front end (Icecast) to serve the comressed audio to clients, and a back end encoder (Ices, darkice, liveice, etc.) to compress the audio from whatever source you are using.

    We are running on actual server hardware, which doesn’t have any built-in audio capability. It also only has one available PCI slot, which is used by the RAID card, because it is a 1U rackmount chassis. So we bought a Startech USB Audio Adapter from newegg.com for our input source. We’re using Ubuntu 9.04, although 9.10 is coming out in several days.

    (more…)

  • journey

    Sometimes my devotional life just plain stinks. Sometimes it isn’t too bad, and every once in a while, it reaches fantastic. More often than not, though, I skim through a chapter of the Bible each morning, eat my breakfast, and go to work without ever giving what I’ve read a second thought. Today, that changes, and I’m giving the world the opportunity to keep me accountable to this. I’m starting a spin off of my website called God Impact.

    Here’s the plan: Every day, starting at the beginning (Genesis 1:1), I’ll read a small portion of the Bible. I find that if I try to read too much, I forget what I read at the beginning, or I rush through it, and don’t get anything out of what I’ve read.

    Here’s the interesting part (hopefully). I’ll post what I’ve read, and then follow that up with some sort of commentary/insight into the passage. I’m not promising anything profound, but I’ll leave that up to God. If you like what I’ve written, or if it encourages you in any way, feel free to subscribe via the RSS feed. You can even leave comments on what you took away from the passage if you like.

    For those of you on Facebook, Multiply, LiveJournal, or Blogger, I don’t intend to cross-post any of this to those sites, sorry. If you want to read it, you’ll have to visit http://godimpact.shanebishop.net. Of course, that all may change, but that’s the plan for now.

  • baby

    Some of you already know, and some of you have heard inklings trickling around the etherspace. Now, we can officially tell you… We’re having a baby! The first ultrasound was today, and according to the doctor the little one is eight weeks old today. After much finagling with the old scanner I bought this summer at a garage sale, I was able to scan the printout we got from the doctor. Somewhere around here, we also have profile pictures of Amanda, although she’s not showing yet, so I won’t bother posting any until she is. She might post them on her Facebook page if you’re lucky…

    I was in such a rush the first time, I forgot a couple things I was going to mention. Our due date is May 25, and as you can see in the picture, the baby is 1.64 centimeters long, about the size of an olive. Amanda likes to call the baby ‘our little crustacean’ because of how it looks in the picture. We should know if it’s a boy or a girl by Christmas time, which will be nice timing.

  • speed

    A couple weeks ago, my site was super slow, and wouldn’t load properly. I did some investigating, and found it was getting hammered by a Chinese search engine. I kept tabs on it throughout that day, and there were either different search engines indexing various portions of my site within 24 hours. Yikes. So I set about to enhance the performance a bit. Finally, I think I’ve pretty well nailed it. I’ve moved everything from Gallery to ZenPhoto (except photo descriptions), disabled some extra plugins, and implemented various other tweaks. Enjoy.

  • foliage

    This year we have more flowers than we’ve ever done before, and I even did a little vegetable garden on the side. The wife wants to make salsa, so we brought home some Garden Salsa peppers and a couple Roma tomatoes from Nebraska. We planted a couple rows of carrots for our guinea pigs and a watermelon plant. We rounded it out with a few strawberry plants that we brought from Nebraska, and a few more that we transplanted. In short order, the dogs dug up just about everything, except a Roma and some of the strawberries. Well, we bought some more Romas and a pack of peppers, and figured the carrots were all but lost. Then my dad dropped off some cherry tomatoes. And I put up a fence to keep the dogs out.

    After about a month, the garden was in full swing, but one thing seemed to stick out above all the rest. The Roma from Grandy’s Greenhouse (my father-in-law owns it) was consistently twice the height of the ones we bought locally. The were all planted within two or three days of each other.

    We’ve had a few strawberries and twenty or so cherry tomatoes already, but the Romas finally were ripe enough to pick tonight. A few of the carrots (six or seven) actually survived the dogs, and I pulled a couple of those as well.

    And now, the main event… Most of the flowers we planted were from my father-in-law’s greenhouse. We brought back over eight hundred plants plants, most of them were in seed trays still, and were the castaways. We put them on shelving units with wheels (should have taken pictures, maybe next year) so that we could put them in the storage unit at night, since it was below freezing many nights.

    We finally put them in the ground (and some in pots) in mid-May. The first pictures we have are from mid-June, and parts of the garden seemed to be stunted in their growth.

    Boy have we been surprised this month. Most everything just took off, particularly the parts that seemed like they wouldn’t do very well. So I took a bunch more pictures for your enjoyment.