A couple days ago Daniel Shapiro offered 10
people Virtual Servers hosted by Rack Force.
I jumped on the offer, as I’ve been wanting to migrate this website to it’s own privately
hosted server. It really came down to never having the time to test out hosts,
so this was a perfect opportunity. Shortly thereafter I found out Exchange 2010
hit beta, and I wanted to run it through it’s paces.
After installing Active Directory, I installed the beta, which went really smooth.
Given that it went smooth, I decided to update the DNS MX records for syfuhs.net to
point to this server.
One thing I didn’t realize is you have to set up Receive Connectors and Send Connectors.
The wording is kinda misleading, so I ended up setting my first Send Connector to
only route mail going to syfuhs.net from syfuhs.net. Not so useful. The
Receive connector was the same way. However, this is all similar to Exchange
2007.
Now some pictures:
Outlook
Web Access
Exchange
Management Console
IIS Manager Hosting Outlook Web Access
A few weeks ago, six or so, I was offered a position as a Software Developer for the Woodbine
Entertainment Group. The position looked appealing so I accepted the job
offer. I am in a probationary period for the next four months and a bit.
Anything I say can be grounds for firing me. Never liked that part about non-contract
jobs. Ah well.
Woodbine is an interesting company. I knew very little about it until I got
word of the job. Seems I was the only one in Canada who didn’t know the company.
My grandmother, who moved to California 50 years ago, knew about the company.
Even used to bet there – well, the Woodbine Race Track, before it moved. It
has an interesting history.
It is migrating to be a Microsoft shop, from a more Novell focused infrastructure.
We are working towards standardizing on .NET for our custom applications.
The one thing that caught my eye with Woodbine is that the company is the technology
leader for Horse Racing. Not just in Canada, but throughout the world.
Our services can let you place a
bet live, on a track in Australia, and see results immediately. Can you
imagine the infrastructure required for such a feat? It’s sweet! The business-people
behind this are really keen on letting technology do it’s thing, so we can make money.
Lots of money. See our Annual
Reports on that. Check back for latest numbers.
Now, some of you may have noticed that our Corporate Portal is written in what looks
to be Classic ASP. For all intensive purposes, it is. Archive.org shows
the portal went live in 2001, and had a major rebuild in 2003. Since then incremental
changes have taken place, most of which have been built using ASP.NET. We are
working on the new portal. All I can say at the moment is: it’s going to be
awesome. So awesome that a new word will need to created to contain all of its
awesomeness. HorsePlayer Interactive is
pretty amazing, but I’d like to think this new site will be just that much more awesomer.
Yes, I said awesomer.
As for the nature of this site, it won’t change. I’ll still post my thoughts
and experiences. I might need to change stories a little to protect the innocent,
but it’s all in good fun. I may be forced to post details of how horse racing
actually works, because I’m still not sure I get all the facets of it. In time.
More to follow.
I am not a podcaster. I do not think I have the voice for continued listening.
However, I am a sound guy, and I am anal about it. I did a search online to
find out what equipment is necessary for podcasting and every time I came back with:
-
Microphone
-
Pre-amp
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Digital Recorder
-
PC Editing Software
For each item on this list I have heard some very disturbing suggestions for what
type/brand to use. I thought I would dispel some myths about each piece of hardware.
Microphone
Behringer is not a professional product line. They say they are; they are NOT.
I said it, and I will say it again: Behringer does not make professional equipment.
No way, no how. They market the products as professional equipment that all
the big stars use, but in actual fact the equipment would never make it on a tour.
It can’t. It’s not stable enough, and it’s not reliable enough. It WILL
break.
Enough ranting about that. There are two main types of Microphones you will
be dealing with when podcasting. Dynamic and Condenser. They both have
their merits. Dynamic microphones are usually cheaper because they are easier
to make. The sound quality is theoretically lesser than a Condenser Mic.
And a Dynamic Mic does not need an external power source.
Sound quality is always an issue when recording. However, a podcast is 99% vocal.
At least on the recording side it is. On the frequency spectrum vocals range
between 80 Hz and 1100Hz. You do not need a super-ultra-fantastic microphone
for this job. In some cases you do, but generally if that were the case you
wouldn’t be reading this article – you would be talking to an audio recording professional.
You also have your choice between a Cardioid and an Omni-directional Mic. An
Omni-directional microphone will pick up sound from 360 degrees. It’s great
for dealing with multiple people talking at once, but horrible if you are talking
in a loud environment. A Cardioid (pronounced: car-dee-oid) microphone is directional.
It will pick up sound from a single direction, and is excellent if you are the only
person talking in a very noisy environment.
My two cents: go talk to a sound guy directly and tell them what you are doing.
They will understand. Brand-wise I like Shure and Sennheisser. By all
means contact me if you want more help.
Pre-amp
A pre-amp will do one of two things, but first I need to explain how a microphone
works. Essentially a microphone works by producing a very small electrical signal
that is a representation of the sound hitting a membrane within the microphone capsule.
Different types of microphones (electret, condenser, dynamic, piezoelectric etc) capture
and translate the frequency patterns differently. The important thing to know
is that the electrical signal coming out of the microphone is extremely low.
The voltage is so low that most recorders cannot handle the voltage. They need
more. A pre-amp takes care of this problem. It amplifies the signal just
enough so the recorder can use it properly. In some cases microphones need voltage
going to them before they can actually produce a signal. Condenser microphones
are notorious for this. The required voltage is called Phantom Power.
It’s a long winded explanation of what actually happens with the phantom power, but
for all intensive purposes, the pre-amp will usually take care of the phantom power
too. This is definitely something you need to talk to a sound guy directly about.
Digital Recorder
I never got into digital recording, but just from basic analog to digital conversion
theory, here are some thoughts:
-
Get a recorder that converts to a lossless format. .Wav files are the most standard.
When recording you want the highest possible quality available.
-
Get a recorder that has a balanced audio input. XLR is balanced. Get a
microphone that outputs through XLR, and a pre-amp that takes XLR and outputs XLR.
You will end up with better quality. Balanced connections do wonders for interference.
It won’t remove interference already in the system, but it will prevent any other
from getting in.
-
Get one that is durable. You will drop it. You just will.
PC Editing Software
For editing the podcast you want a piece of software that can handle multiple tracks.
This allows you to layer chunks of audio without losing data. It also gives
you more wiggle room to move parts around. I like Adobe Audition. There
are many others out there though.
It seems just like yesterday that some government was telling Microsoft that the bundling
of Internet Explorer with Windows was unbecoming of an industry leader, because it
screwed other web browsers out of market share.
The European
Union has made a decision stating Microsoft cannot bundle Internet Explorer with
Windows anymore, if they want to sell in any European countries. This decision
was the result of Opera Software ASA, the people behind the Opera browser. The
complaints are two-fold.
-
Market share is nearly seized completely by IE because it comes preinstalled with
Windows, which is the dominant operating system.
-
Because the majority of browsers are IE, websites need to conform to IE’s html rendering
which is “non-standard”.
I’d agree with the first statement, but I find it bogus. Regardless of whether
or not IE has dominant market share, you still need a browser. How would you
get your hands on the installation files for the new browser? Certainly not
by downloading it from the internet… You can get the software from the store.
Not likely. That just means one more piece of software to worry about.
You can have the browser company mail it to you. Is Firefox a company?
Do they have offices? Seriously? WTF? Oooh, or maybe Microsoft can
have a basic version of a web browser, that all it does is go to one specific site.
The site then has a list of all available web browsers on the market, which you can
then download. I’m actually at a loss to say for once.
With regards to the second point, Internet Explorer certainly does not have a great
track record for sticking to HTML standards. But I have to say Firefox, Opera,
Safari, etc, don’t conform either. None of them conform to the HTML standards
completely. With that being said, Internet
Explorer 8 is supposed to be ACID 2 compliant, meaning it is compliant at least
as much as everyone else. In other words, it shows the face:
I’m going to keep an eye out for news from the EU, because I suspect they will overturn
the ruling in some way or another. Some people say Internet Explorer is only
to be used to download Firefox. Now that it’s not there, how the hell do you
plan on downloading Firefox, eh?
In my previous post I started
talking about part of my personal history with software development, and when QBasic
got me hooked. I ended the post talking about the move to Canada. We arrived
in Canada literally a week (7 days exactly) before Grade 9 started. After getting
enrolled in school, I tried to find something to keep my mind occupied. It was
either that or contemplate what Grade 9 would be like for someone who used to live
3000 miles away in another country. And winter. Still 4 months away, but
definitely something I didn’t want to think about. Being that we moved to a
house in the country, I couldn’t just walk around town either. Mental occupation
was harder than I thought.
So what does a 14 year old boy, new to the country, living in the middle of nowhere,
do to keep himself from going crazy? Install Linux of course! I needed
something to keep my interest, as well as to keep the gears in my head moving.
If memory serves, I started out with a vanilla copy of Red Hat Linux. It was
pretty easy to install, but being new to the OS architecture, the device mapping was
a little confusing. After a couple months of studying the Linux architecture,
I started writing shell scripts, and even delved into the source code. After
testing some minor modifications to different components I started to learn the basis
for the C/C++ languages. Imagine that, a 14 year old kid understanding the basis
for C++.
While trying to keep my mind still occupied, I came across an interesting find: The
National Security Agency’s Security Enhanced
Linux Kernel. If compiled and installed wrong, you will destroy the build.
Learned that the hard way… And seeing as I couldn’t find a proper driver for
my modem anyway, I gave up on Linux and moved back to XP. Not that the internet
was all that useful anyway; I was connecting at 28.8 half the time.
Going back to the image in Part 1,
I met an interesting character in school. He turned out to be one of my best
friends, and fellow developers, Greg. We started working on some odd projects here
and there in VB, until I was tasked with building a web store. Since I had never
actually brought HTML and Dev together, I was a little nervous about what I was getting
myself into. Going with what I knew well, I started in ASP with VB code.
This was not ASP.NET. Earlier, I had said I never found VB all that
intuitive as a language. The syntax never really made sense to me. So
my friend suggested I take a look at PHP as an alternative. I liked it.
PHP had the flow of C, and the usefulness of VB. With PHP I got the store finished
and launched. The site worked great. I was 15.
Once the first spring of my existence in Canada rolled around, a couple friends and
I decided to start a band. We sucked. But seeing as one of the other members
was Greg, we had an awesome website. We had media streaming, custom modified
forums, and full site statistics. The statistics were built around the forum.
The site pulled data from recent posts, recent events, and recent user logins, and
compared the data to the media streams. We could see who was doing what.
Mind you, there was only about 50 people who loitered around the site, but the site
was a great proof of concept for what we could do.
Following the demise of the band, Greg and I were invited to a Microsoft hosted event.
It was here that I fell in love with ASP.NET. Which I will discuss in Part
3.
Boredom is a bad thing! Especially when you are putting off work.
So what do I do to waste my time? Check out local user groups. The websites
at least. A few days ago I posted a few links to some promising groups.
To my disappointment there really aren't that many Microsoft oriented user groups
in Toronto. I wouldn't call it a bad thing. More of an opportunity.
I have determined that TorontoSql.com, TorontoSql.net, and TorontoSql.org
were not registered. So for $30 I registered all three of them. Now I
have to put them to good use. Currently they are pointed to
www.syfuhs.net,
until I find a proper home.
More to come on that front!
Since moving to Toronto I have been looking for user groups that I
think I could benefit from. So far I have found a couple of interest:
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I'm
still looking, but these look promising.
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