Atlanta Reunion

Last night we were reunited with our niece Ivy in the suburbs of Atlanta. We really haven't been sleeping since we arrived...too much family and too much to see and do.

Atlanta is...very wet today

The Wild Days of MP3's are over

When the RIAA went after Napster and won most of the system's users went underground or turned to alternative services such as Aimster. Fast forward two months and withness the purchase of MP3.com by Vivendi Universal and the fresh lawsuit against Aimster and the industry's strategy becomes very clear.

Lacking a cohesive online strategy, the music industry has used legal action under the guise of copyright infringement to drive the market valuation of new upstarts like MP3.com down so the record labels can buy them, thus buying an online strategy on the cheap.

As I have said many times, this battle is not about artist's rights, but control. The recording industry is attempting to control what you listen to, how much you pay, and by what means. If they had their way it would have been illegal for you, as a paying customer, to make copies of your LPs to audio cassette. I'm not kidding about this, there was a lawsuit over this very issue in the 1970's.

Mad dash to pack

That's right, I am on the move once again. Taking a little trip to Hotlanta...cough, cough, I mean Atlanta. This is one of those trips where I am doing everything at the last minute...including packing. We will be toting the digital camera and PowerBook. Even when we travel by air siteSatellite gets updated and adminstered. Look for photos and updates throughout the week.

Hack your Mac

When Apple released OS X to the world in March they provided the equivelent of crack to the average mac os tech geek. Since the very first beta I have been tweaking the OS on my G4 to make it more like a Mac and enable tons of professional web server features from the open source commnunity.

For the very brave users out there, one no longer has to wait for Apple to bundle a new security update months after they become availble to the rest of the world. If it is available in open source you can go out and get it and then recompile it.

The last three nights I have been fast at work recompiling MySQL, PHP, OpenSSL, and custom configuring Apache to run on MacOS X. Not only do I get a robust web server on my G4 tower out of the deal, but also I get a portable development environment on my PowerBook to build dynamic web sites on while I am on the road.

The next generation sites for the siteSatellite network will all be built in this new development environment. No more guessing how a page will integrate on the server with all the include and database files. :)

artfernandez.com: site update

We have been in a mad scramble at siteSatellite to get all of our servers up and running. We are still working on getting the QuickTime streaming server and our web cam services restored. Hopefully we will have everything running on the new DNS by Monday.

Unfortunately these outages also impact this here URL. All of my streaming quicktime movies and web cam services are down and will remain so until the middle of next week. Personally, I would rather make sure that our customers can get their services and sites connected to the QTSS and web cam servers before I make the changes here to access the new services.

siteSatellite lives

After a very long and painful 6 weeks siteSatellite has secured a new internet backbone provider. Our 'pirate broadcast' to the internet was activated last night with the last transfer of DNS ip adresses to our new backbone provider.

Network services across all of our servers are gradually being restored and all our remaining customers have been given the opportunity to participate in our NorthPoint rebate program.

Updates to this site are going to be rapid and sporadic as we move to get all of our customers back online.