What I Learned Today

1. Evansville and Madisonville are on the same time as Chesterton in February.

2. The cavalier is back home, but I am out $500.

1. So here we go. Beth asked to get "skin" by madonna on her page. So I will fill you in on how that is done.

The easy way --- there are sites out that the will provide the html code for you to add videos and music to your site. Two I found are www.discoverclips.com and www.musicvideofun.com Be careful at these sites though as there are a ton of pop ups and shady sort of things going on .. so make sure you click "No" or "don't install" to any prompts you receive. Once at the site, find the video you want and copy the code from the box and then paste it into your blogspot template under the " !-- End of Profile --> "line, then republish the blog an you will have the video show up on your side bar. You might need to adjust the width of the video so that it fits properly , this can be down by lowering the number that is indicated after "width" in the html code you copied from the website.

The more challenging way..

First - the music that you hear when you go to a blogspot page is not actually stored on the blogspot webserver. The music file is "hosted" somewhere else and you put a link to the song on your blogspot page, so that when your page is visited by a user, their webbrowser goes out to the location that the song is hosted and downloads it to their machine. So that means that every time someone visits your site they will download the song to their machine. This is not always the case depending on some factors, but it is good to keep in mind.

So there are two ways to host the music file you want use on your webpage. The easiest way is to just find someone else who has hosted the file you want to use. The other way would be to sign up for an account somewhere and put the file up there yourself.

You might be thinking - I have the music file on my machine, why can't i just "host" it from here ? Most of us have consumer level broadband accounts, with limited upload speeds and restricted inbound ports. So it would be a big pain in the butt to get it to work -- not mention you could potentially irritate your ISP, which is never a good thing.

For beth's song we will go with the first option, just finding it out on the web somewhere and linking to it.

A great place to find publicly hosted files is www.altavista.com, then select MP3/Audio and type the name of the song and artist you want to use. The search yielded the following site.
http://www.coachb.net/goldengirl.htm

If you go to this site you will see that the song skin plays - so we have hit the jackpot. Now we need to extract the HTML code used so that we can use it on the blogspot page. You can do this by clicking "View" From the top of your Internet Explorer menu bar then select view source. Most likely notepad will open with all the source code from the page. Hit ctrl+F to open a find window and try typing in the song name, if "Search string not found" pops up, try searching on "embed" that should yield the beginning of the code that you need. Of course if this particular website has mulitple songs linked on it then you need to make sure that the the "Embed" tag that you find is actually the right one for the song you want. Then highlight and copy a few lines of code until the code looks like it talking about something else. I copied the following code out of the source of the site that links the "skin" song that beth wants.

EMBED SRC="music/skin.wav" WIDTH="256" HEIGHT="111" ALIGN="BOTTOM"

SRC is the location where the file lives. In this example, its a relative path which means that the entire path to the file is not listed. So I'm guessing that the path is http://www.coachb.net/music/skin.wav If you click that link you will see that the song just plays in your broswer (depending on your browser settings). So will need to use the absolute path (the full path listed above) when we reference it in our Blogspot code.

So now that we know where the song is, we can drop it into the blogspot page. After logging into beth's site, I click "configure site settings" and clicked on "Template" Then I hit ctrl + F and searched for " !-- End of Profile --> " Directly beneath that line I pasted the link code. I had to adjust the "Width" tag to a smaller number so that it would fit on the side bar of the page. Save the template and republish the blog and there you go.

However - heres the problem. Most hosting sites have a limit to how much you can download from your site each month or they charge you more. So if you link your page to someone else's hosted file, and then your page gets a lot of traffic, you might end up costing the person who is hosting the file some money. So its always a good idea to get permission to link to a file on someone else 's site.

If you are ambitious and want to open an account with a free web hosting service, you can do that too, then you can upload whatever music you want and link it to your site. I opened an account with www.freewebs.com and uploaded a music file , however I got the following error message :

FreeWebs accounts newer than 7 days are provisional and can only upload files up to 750K. Provisional users also can not upload .exe files. You can remove this provision immediately by signing up for a premium service

So I can't try the whole hosting thing for another week.

Also - Its not exactly legal to host copyrighted music for everyone to download for free. Am I worried about that ? Not really as long as you are doing like one song and not a whole album. You do run the risk of your files being deleted on the hosted site if they find out you have put copyrighted music up there.

So there you have it.. there are a ton of different ways to get music on your page, it just depends on how obscure the song is that you want to use.

Also, you can add a lot more then just music and videos, there are codes out there for games, polls, counters, etc..

1. The closets are truely 47 inches deep. Not 48. Which meant I had to cut an inch off the shelving I bought. Not cool. Not to mention that I couldnt' use my 48" level. Who makes 47 inch deep closets ?

2. I forgot to mention that while ColdPlay is no good on the treadmill it is good for stretching.

1. I need to post a sign above the thermostat in my server room. It should say "This thermostat controls only the temperature in this room. It does not control any of the private offices on the floor." I learned that I need this sign because when I walked into the server room on Friday some brainiac had pushed both units all the way to 90 degrees. I later learned it was the Chairman of the Board who was having cooling issues in his office and decided to adjust "any thermostat he could find" The thermostat had been adjusted for about 30 minutes before I walked in and the temp had already reached 80 degrees, and my VMS cluster had shutdown from the heat. Luckily no one was using the cluster on Friday, as when I brought it back online one of the disks would not mount. So I let the whole thing rest this weekend. Hopefully it will come to life on Monday morning.

2. If you change the password on the anonymous IIS user, it is wise to remember to change it on all of your sites that use anonymous access... if you don't .. the sites will no longer work !

1. It is possible to eat bread sticks at the Olive Garden w/out Alfredo sauce. I had no idea.

2. Despite the fact that my Dl320 G3 has a weak array controller - it still works, sort of, manually 0f course. Meaning if a drive fails I have to shut the machine off and flip disks, then power back up. If the server I'm building wasn't so critical maybe that would suffice. But it is very critical so I can't settle for a half way cooked RAID1 array. I think I am going to buy a new server with a real SMART Array controller.

1. I'm a bad, bad blogger.

2. Turns out that my inital fears were correct and they will have to remove and possibly replace the head on my cavailer.

3. I restarted the DHCP Client service on my mail server ( the machine whose DNS A record was magically disappearing). I haven't had any trouble since.

4. Rosetta is not emulation.

5. The raid card in my DL320 G3 is kinda crappy - it looks like it needs software drivers to work correctly. I'm trying to setup Fedora Core 4 on it and it is seeing 2 hard drives even though they are technically in a RAID1 config.

6. My Dad's computer is pretty well hosed. It won't allow me to create a page file. I went into the registry and specified the page file size etc and the machine booted properly ... once. After that it takes about 20 minutes to logon. So I'm going scorched earth on it.

1. I forgot to mention on Friday - that I learned that Coldplay is terrible treadmill music. Not that I expected them to be good.. They work much better when walking to and from the train as sort of "cool down" music. The White Stripes worked much better on the treadmill.

2. I had to LOL at Tracy's comment on Friday's post.

3. I talked to my neice's dad who happens to own a car shop and he said that removing the spark plug shouldn't be too expensive since it is very accessible. (its in the very front of the engine.) So I will have it towed there tomorrow.

1. It is very possible to "break" a spark plug when removing it. I have the Chilton guide on my cavalier and I read the section on replacing the spark plugs. It said to never use a flexible extension as you might end up putting direct pressure on the plug and cause it to break, which would end up in "frustrating and costly repairs". I figured I had no problem since I did not have a flexible extension, my extension was steel alloy. I got the first three plugs out without a whole lot of effort. The fourth plug wouldn't budge. So I pulled a little harder. Then it snapped. Without knowing for sure , I am guessing that removing the head and having the plug removed is going to cost more then the car is worth. So frustrating as the car was working just dandy this morning, but I was trying to get to the bottom of the whole "not starting when it is wet" thing.

1. Never try to run on the treadmill in 3 yr old shoes (unless you really like blisters)

2. Beth is the best to go shoe shopping with.

3. I was correct to be wary about rebooting my machine as it did not properly detect my IDE devices upon reboot. I had to leave it sit all day and try it again. Viola. Works fine. Also ports 25 and 110 are working again so all the spam to my inbox is coming in properly.

4. Somehow I talked myself into giving a presentation next week on SharePoint. I should probably learn how to use it soon.

5. I also have to give a presentation on those fancy new Intel iMacs. Probably should turn one on soon....

1. Today I learned that in order to view an .ini file via IIS6 I need to Open the Virtual Directory properties, click configuration in the application area and point the .ini extension to C:\windows\system32\netserv\asp.dll. When viewing the file with the web server, 's seem to be ignored, but we will worry about that later.

2. Jack Stands for my car only cost like 10 bucks.

# posted by Brian @ 3:44 PM 0 comments

1. You must respect the UNIX command line . You can do some pretty sweet / dangerous stuff there. Today I used # find /$PATHTOCHANGE -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \; to traverse a directory structure that I needed to set the special bit on the group perms so that all files created in the directory structure will be owned by the group that owns the directory.

2. In the training room the DNS server was in a fuzzy state - meaning it would resolve for all domains except one, I cleared the cache to no avail and then restarted the service, that did the trick.

3. I can't send or receive emails on my desktop at home. Outbound TCP Ports 110 and 25 are being blocked locally by my machine some how. All other machines on my home network have no issues with these ports and I can not telnet to the usual servers via these ports on my desktop which leads me to believe they are being blocked locally. As far as I know the Windows Firewall is inbound only so I dont' think its a windows thing - it should be a third party app thing.. I think a reboot might fix it , but I don't want to reboot. I'm looking into the norton antivirus as a possible culprit...

1. Its not a good idea to suggest that someone go to the BMV on their birthday. While I had a pleasant experience in January, poor Bethie did not fair so well today.

1. There was a rodent nest in the engine of my car. The white stuff on top of the engine isn't snow, its the insides of some unknown object that the mice or whatever ripped up and used as a nest. It doesn't look like they did any damage, but the car still doesn't start when its wet.

2. Replacing the wires on a 97 cavalier isn't easy. The spark plugs are right there in the front, but the ignition coil is underneath the intake manifold on the back of the engine. So I would need to get under the car to do it.

3. On the As/400 it is possible to create a library such that no one, not even QSECOFR can edit its members. In such a case you can rename said library, then create a new library and copy all the objects from the original library into the new library and then will be able to edit the objects.

1. Well it worked like a Champ for 2 years, but the VOIP card in the Inter-Tel phone system has really been causing headaches lately. We now have 5 users on it so whenever it has problems, the emails start flooding in. Since its still under warranty Inter-Tel replaced it in December, but with a refurbished card; which until today was working alright. But it was sporadically disconnecting today so we have ordered a new card. Hopefully this will do the trick and bring VOIP (and me) back into everyone's good graces.

1. VMS Part II - so we finally got the cluster master to come online w/out it trying to mount the dead disk. The other cluster member was still trying to mount the dead drive though. So I had to go into a conversational boot. Luckily I noticed the conversational boot flag for the Alpha 4100 is -flags 0,1 so in order to boot our machine I did boot -flags 0,1 dkb0 then we went in and tried to find the disk_names.dat file that the Alpha used when booting. After locating the file we found that we couldn't edit very well due to the terminal type setting, Nothing we tried worked so we ended up using edit/edt and just deleting the line in question. The cluster is back online but minus the broken disk.

2.I learned that I have no idea where the permissions are defined for access to CIFS shares on the AS/400. I also learned that iAccess isn't working on our NT4 system that is running on a card inside the 400.

3. I forgot that on Monday I learned I'm offically at 20/20 vision ! My left eye is definitely weaker then the right, but hopefully it will catch up soon !