Mark Lewis has compiled a list of the Top 10 Lies told to Naive Artists and Designers. From a lot of (sometimes bitter) experience I would say that this list is not applicable to designers but also for contractors involved in any staged development process with a client. In fact back when I was finishing my architecture degree the emphasis of professional practice was establishing and justifying pre-construction costs to clients.

All too often the groundwork for any piece of contracting such as scoping, quoting and solving the problem takes more effort than the actual solution itself. Most people tend to want advice and answers for free and are only prepared to pay for material things. This is a real danger for contractors no matter what they do, from artists to software developers and Web developers.

Recently I purchased a Philips 37" LCD HD television complete with half a dozen different types of video inputs that range composite video to HDMI. From a quality perspective this is fantastic because I can connect each device (DVD, PVR, cable TV) to the television in a way that will generate the optimum display performance. Unfortunately this complexity when combined with the intricacies of the surround sound system, cable TV decoder and MythTV PVR system becomes a little overwhelming for the technically orientated and down right impossible for those who consider modern toasters too challenging.

Enter the Logitech Harmony range of universal remote controls. Most universal controllers focus on emulating two or more different remotes so that you do not have to juggle each time the channel needs to be changed or sound tweaked. This is fine but the Harmony range takes remotes to the next level by allowing complex processes to be performed with a single click.

Recently I purchased a Philips 37" LCD television (model 37PF7320/79) which is capable of 1360x768 pixel resolution. Unfortunately XFree/Xorg does not recognise this resolution so you must provide the XFree/Xorg configuration file with a working modeline. After quite a bit of tweaking I finally have this working setup for the television via a DVI to HDMI converter cable (put in xorg.conf):

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Philips"
ModelName "37PF7320 LCD HDTV"
HorizSync 30.0-70.0
VertRefresh 50-60
Option "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
DisplaySize 345 195
Modeline "1360x768" 84.750 1365 1384 1516 1792 768 786 792 798 -HSync +Vsync
EndSection

Note: DisplaySize and UseEdidDpi settings force the X-server into 100dpi mode otherwise MythTV has display issues (fonts are too small) as outlined in the MythTV Wiki.

And in section "Screen" of the configuration file add 1360x768 as an available resolution to the relevant colour depth you are using. Restart X and in theory you should end up with a nice, sharp, widescreen display on the television that looks a lot better than the default stretched 1024x768.

Steve Wray put me on to Cacti the other day and I must say its pretty nice once you get over its slightly confusing interface. Cacti graphs statistics from network devices but unlike similar tools it does not try to do anything else. Think of it like bling for your network, good to look at, but maybe not that practical in a network emergency. But just like bling it is easy to put on and even better it is sure to impress your system admin friends, which in those hot and steamy server rooms we all want to do...

Installation is straightforward if you are running a typical LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but it can also run on a number of platforms including Windows if you are desperate. Cacti uses the PHP-SNMP extension to talk to SNMP agents on the network, keeps configuration settings in MySQL and stores accumulated network information as RRD files that get processed by RRDTool. Users can be configured with different access rights and devices/graphs can be clustered together in trees for easy viewing.

Click to enlarge screenshots

Scalix is a powerful, stable and soon to be almost completely open sourced email server. Unfortunately like many commercial products it is still a little rough round the edges when it comes to doing things outside of the supported method. Here is a couple of tips that may help you out when wanting to take Scalix "off-road" so to speak...

I finally had some free time over the weekend to work on the Webmin theme to take into account feedback and problems raised by people. Version 1.81 can be downloaded from here:

http://www.stress-free.co.nz/sites/default/files/theme-stressfree.tar.gz

This morning after making some file changes and performing a server restart I found the Scalix 10 email server would not load. As I have never had to resolve major problems with Scalix determining the cause and solution to this error turned out to be a worthwhile experience.

Manually starting and stopping Scalix

According to the Scalix startup script (/etc/init.d/scalix) the service was successfully starting, but on closer inspection none of the actual processes were beginning. Unfortunately whilst the /etc/init.d/scalix script is a tidy way of controlling Scalix it does not provide any console logging to explain any issues that maybe encountered. For more useful output the two console commands that start/stop Scalix are:

After completing an architecture degree and being a teacher for a number of architecture/design papers at University I must say these two articles from Allan Chochinov were very interesting and something I could relate to:

• 1000 words of advice for design teachers...
• 1000 words of advice for design students...

Picture this, you have your Xen server and a couple of virtual instances configured and you are very happy. That is however until you want two or more of those instances to read or write files from the same disk partition. One way to get around this problem is to use a network file sharing protocol like NFS or CIFS and have one instance operate as a file server whilst the others connect as clients. Sure, a configuration like this works but it requires quite a bit of time to setup and more importantly it drains precious processor cycles as many extra, resource intensive processes must be run.

Thanks to Ted Haegar I came across a piece by Tony Whitmore on a similar topic to my Novell Open Audio review. Tony raises a couple of good ideological questions about the development models at work within Novell, more precisely around the AppArmor and XGL products. Whilst each software project is unique in its own way his questioning of the strategies employed by Novell does beg the difficult question, how open source should product development be?