With Office Live and many new and old web services (aka web 2.0? I need another post on that...) like blogroll/Google reader/blogmarks/what not, I am still a bit hesitate to use these on-line services. You can say I am a conservative geek or a backward person, but I am really a control freaks that want all my data under my total control. Therefore, I prefer to run my own version of the service and re-invent the wheels.

why?
- Privary? maybe
- Availability, I guess. Services running remotely is subject to outage and down time.... yes, my server running all my data present is a single point of failure....
- I like to have a copy of all my data. Having them scatter around on the net is hard, even sometimes impossible to archive them. It makes me feel uncomfortable. Yes, one copy for all is also one copy to lost and if it got destroy..... I lost them all.... but then I need a secondary backup mechanism anyway.

Read on reality about suggestion by Kai-Fu Lee to comp sci students: Improve in hard skill like algorithms, OS, data structure; Code more; Pay attention to details; Mathematics; Team works; Work on things that enhance your resume.

Yeah, I like to do that, a lot. My excuse is that I got to get my hands dirty and learn all the technologies behind it. That's what all behind my Republic of Admun. It's a learning platform.

When everyone is using wp, I picked a small player in the field calls NucleusCMS and write plugins and do development.

Instead of using blogroll/technorati/del.icio.us/blogmarks, I wrote my own. Yes, it's not using tag and there is no cloud, but next version will.

When people are posting on Flickr, I put my albums on gallery.

If it's too trivial, I got to try something else. So, I use Feed of Feeds instead of Google readers or bloglines.

I don't run Windows at home (only has it on my deal-boot laptop). All my machines are Linux box. So I got to install Apache, PHP, sendmail, FTP, NFS, NTP, and all the fun stuffs.

I have a PVR at home, but it's not running MythTV.

I guess I just don't trust my data w/ others on the net. The only thing I am missing is a fast pipe to home. Where is FTTH?

Maybe I am just a sick mind that want to suffer or marginalize, and have too much time at hand.

Just tried out Icecast to stream my MP3 on the net. It is an audio streaming server that similar to Shoutcast. The audio stream is generated by ices (v0.4, only version that support mp3).

You can tell I got too much time at hand currently.

Ed's Internet Radio

Next try: TV streaming over the net.

If you're able to see this post, that's mean you're served by my new server (AMD Athlon 64 3000+, MSI RS480M2-IL m/b, 1GB dual channel DDR RAM, 1x20GB ATA, 2x10GB SATA running s/w RAID-5)

Performance (in term of processing time) improved quite a bit: blog from ~0.9 sec to ~0.3 sec, My NUDN from ~0.6 sec to ~0.2 sec.

I'm still flushing out problem as it goes, and yet to move TV capturing, setup MLDonkey/Torrentflux and etc to the new server.

I always reinstall my linux setup from time to time, sometimes things just get too messy after you play around with new rpms and you know what to do.

I've been playing around with various repositories such as AtRPMS, FreshRPM, DAG, Dries and Livna. It's always a tricky business to pick the right repos to use in FC, because some of them does not mixed well. FC Extras seem to be compatiable to the rest. The most problem I found is Livna vs DAG/Dries/FreshRPM (soon RPMforge) vs AtRPMS. I didn't use other repos like Jpackage, Nrpm, and such since I do not need those rpms usually.

After some playing around, I think FC Extra + RPMforge provides the most benefit to me. I'm kind of scare of AtRPMS as it replaced a lot of libraries.

After that, I reinstall with a fresh copy and start using the repos for application. I just hate patchy installation.

I download FC4 just before I went on vacation. This is the first time I tried DVD as the install media, it works quite well and more conviencent (no more 4 CDs set).

Again, I tried upgrade from FC3 first, but things didn't work too well as I use many 3rd party rpm on my laptop. Then I do a full install to overwrite it.

After install successfully, I struggled a bit to setup the Wifi and NIC. I also play around with the Extras and Linva repository, aka the semi-offical rpm repositories for Fedora Core. They have a lot of packages that not/can't come with the core distribution, I think they still lacks many useful packages other 3rd party repos have. I can only hope they will be one day more compatible to each other (or even better, they all merged). A side note is many rpm like xosview, koffice, xsnow and such are no longer in FC4, and not yet add to the Extra. This is kind of suck since I use them.

After upgraded, I spotted a few problems in FC4, mainly the sound card didn't fully work. There are static noise mixed in. Upgrade the kernal didn't fixed this.

I'm going to try x86_64 version on my new AMD64 server after I come back from business trip next month. Let's hope the new MySQL 4.1 + PHP5 + SELlinux in FC4 didn't break any web app I use right now, mainly Nucleus, which I suspect will not work since PHP 5 uses mysqli interface....

Just put together the computer I got on Friday. It's a AMD Athlon 64 3000+, MSI RS480M2-IL m/b, 1GB dual channel DDR RAM, with a 20GB ATA HDD. All these are construct in a AOpen case. Total damage is CAN$550.

Fedora core 2 (x86) installs alright, updated all RPMs and it seem even able to detect the SATA IDE. NIC is detected without a problem. The other problem I encounter so far is the computer struck on reboot during shutdown. I will try out the sound card later, as well as the firewire and USB2.

I'm going to wait for FC4 for AMD64 come out in few weeks, then I'm going to move all old server function over here one by one.

Yeah!