A while ago, I installed Fedora Core 5 on my server. The only problem I had was that my gigabit ethernet card wouldn’t work for some reason. It was really frustrating because my Mac has a gigabit controller, and I wanted to be able to transfer files between the two really fast. Instead, I had to settle for using the on-board 10/100 controller.

Well, the strangest thing happened today. I was logged into my server via ssh when, all of a sudden, I lost my connection. I had no idea what happened. I couldn’t even ping it.

When I got home I tried accessing it from inside the LAN. Still no go, so I hauled it out of the closet and hooked up a monitor to see if I could figure out what was wrong. No LAN connection. WTF?? Just for fun, I tried plugging the ethernet cable into the gigabit jack. It worked!

I hadn’t worked on that in a couple months. I’ve done a couple kernel updates since then, but I didn’t bother trying it. There must have been some update that fixed my problem. The strangest thing though, is that the built in controller stopped working today out of the blue. The link light comes on when I plug a cable into it, but I can’t connect to the LAN.

I just put it back in the closet, closed the door, and backed away slowly. Oh, I put a 40 gigger in for backups first.

Better sacrifice a floppy drive to the Linux gods before they get angry and take away my gigabit again.

For all you folks in the States this Thanksgiving, I’d like to say that I’m thankful for…backups.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but I was having a problem with the MySQL server. It appeared to be taking up way too much RAM, and that was causing problems with some sites on the server. So I restarted the server, only that didn’t fix the problem. Now, the MySQL server didn’t appear to be running at all.

During my testing of this, I went to this page and got a Wordpress error stating that I didn’t have the script installed properly (because it couldn’t find the database). So, I clicked the install link provided thinking that I’d just fill in some info and be up and running again.

Well, that didn’t work. It messed up lots of things. So, after I got the MySQL server up and running again, I had to restore a backup that I had from early in the morning. Luckily, no actual data was lost in the process.

For those of you who don’t do backups, it’s just a matter of time before you have problems.

In an earlier post about iTunes, I wrote about how it would be nice to be able to assign keywords to songs to make smart playlists more powerful. Well, I came across a script called TuneTag for Quicksilver that does just that.

It’s pretty simple. Once you have the script in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions, just do this when a song is playing:

1. Start Quicksilver (Ctrl + space by default).
2. type . to enter a variable and type the space-delimited keywords you want to associate to the currently playing track.
3. Hit the Tab key to go to the second pane, and type tag. Select the tag.scpt from the list and your mp3 will be tagged.

It’s that simple. Now you can make smart playlists using the comment field in the mp3 tags.

It needs a bit of work though. For instance, the comment field is displayed on your iPod when cycling through views, which is annoying. But it shouldn’t take much effort to change the script to use another field in the ID3 tag.

Gotta go. Tunes to tag…

Well, I got a new iPod today. It’s a 1GB second generation Shuffle. I know, I said I couldn’t imagine wanting an mp3 player without a screen, but after using an iPod video for a few months and taking care of my music collection, a Shuffle kind of makes sense for situations like the gym.

I just auto-fill the Shuffle with songs from one of my playlists, and away I go. The feature that sells it for me is the integrated clip on the back. It makes it so easy when I’m doing something active. I just clip it at the pocket of my gym shorts and it doesn’t get in my way. It’s about the size of half a match book.

Now, I know the old Shuffle came with a lanyard, but I can’t stand lanyards. They’re always getting caught on something, and at the gym the Shuffle would be swinging around and bouncing off my chest. Not for me.

Then there’s the armband. Again, not for me. I had one for my iPod video, but it always felt awkward at the gym. You know, sweat and such. I stopped using mine after about 3 weeks. I stopped taking my iPod with me altogether.

There is one odd thing about the Shuffle though. I used it at the gym tonight, and listened to a a dozen songs or so. When I docked it, and the stats for the songs updated in iTunes, all the play times were set to the time I docked the iPod. Not a big deal, but strange.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get many hours enjoyment out of my new gadget.

I love iTunes. No secret there. I tell every random person I meet that I love iTunes. I rave about rating my songs, adding album art, and about smart playlists and how they work so well with my iPod. It really is great software.

However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t things about iTunes that don’t drive me nuts. For instance, I really, really wish there support for smart keyword tagging. It just isn’t enough to assign a genre to my tracks. I need to be able to tag a song like this: acousitc, live, mellow, love song. That way I can create a smart playlist that includes all mellow acoustic love songs. I can take it a step further and say I only want songs with a rating of 4 stars or more from the 80s if I want to.

Now, I know I could just add these key words in the comments field in the ID3 tag, but this is really clumsy. It would be ideal if in the song info pane, you could see a list of all the keywords you’ve used before. That way you could assign as many of them as you want by clicking on them. Even better, there should be a way you could accomplish all this from the main window to make it as easy as possible to organize your music.

There’s a plugin available called Qloud, but it’s not available for Mac right now, and I’m not sure you can use the tags you assign to make smart playlists. I’ve signed up for their service, and they say they’re working on a Mac version. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if it’s any good.