The idea of having a PC or Mac dedicated in it's life to do nothing more than serve out multimedia entertainment has been one that I have been trying to work with for a while now. There are plenty of devices that can do streaming media to a TV but a full PC as a replacement to those devices has always been desirable. Now since I have a bunch of older PCs laying about I figured I would work with one of them to see how well I could get a full multimedia PC running with one of them. The choice is an older Mac g5 a dual PowerPC system. A great system I figured to a multimedia system.

Lately I have been using a variety of modules in the Boost library as it provides great functionality even when not trying to write code that runs cross platform. The only thing with using the boost libraries for me right now is that I am still learning a lot of the library while coding it into vorilon which is taking a lot of extra time in learning the library and coming up with a good way to incorporate it into the program. But overall I am happy with the current results even if everything isn't completely finished.

In the rounds of looking for a specific syntax highlighting mechanism for Text Wrangler ( a fairly nice but large text editor for OSX). I found what I was looking for there but realized there was a problem with Text Wrangler, it would only start the syntax highlighter based soley on the extension of the file. This is a problem because I was looking for a syntax highlighting for cmake, and the primary build files are usually denoted as CMakeLists.txt files. I really didn't want to start the syntax highlighter for all txt files as I end up processing a large variety of files.

The usual Developer's dilemma here, I went on a hunt to try and find a decent open source cross platform C++ library that offered a good logging system. One that would write proper text logs on mac/linux and write either to the event viewer/text file on windows machines. Well all the systems I found out there worked really good on one platform but seriously lack in other areas. So in typical open source fashion I figured I would write my own that would be generic and fit my current needs.

In network security there is always the drive of creating the most secure network imaginable. To achieve that security risks and vulnerabilities are constantly being assessed, evaluated and fixes being resolved. Also most network security experts would say that the weakest links are the people that use the network. Usually the way to fix the people as the weakest link is with training and sometimes scenarios.

Gawker is an application for Mac OS X that creates time-lapse movies using a webcam. Images from your camera can be shared, allowing other users to record your image stream. Streams can also be combined to create a time-lapse movie with up to four locations side-by-side.
I am contributing to the project, working with the original author to extend functionality and general work on the program.

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Windows is the greatest thing since sliced bread, no wait Apple's OSX is, no wait what about all the different *nix versions out there. The battle of battles that has been going on for some years now I think, which Operating System is the best. Usually when this debate gets started on some forum it usually turns into an impressive flame war that degenerates into a series of personal attacks. Any ways I wanted to take a little different look at it than my previous post about games leading the way even though I still think that is applicable.

So in the rounds that I go on the internet I came across this article: Git vs. Mercurial: Please Relax. Had I seen this back when I was reading up on dvcs it would have swayed my decision on which one to go with back then. But since I have read it and I thought it was a well represented case between git and mercurial I figured that I would at least look into it a bit more.

There are actually quite a few really good resources and good walk-throughs out there. There are a few things that really none of them talk about on any real level and that is what *should* be used or in which way it should be used. First off NFS does work with OS X Leopard and using the directory utility under the utilities folder in applications can be setup to automount. But NFS seemed really a pain to deal with and doesn't offer similar level of general functionality as AFP does.

In the last couple of days I somehow got turned towards Mercurial as a Versioning system, and after a pretty in depth look decided that it would be the better of the versioning system. At least significantly better than Subversion at any rate not sure about the other versioning systems but I decided to go with this one in particular. Some of the things that I gathered that make it better than Subversion is that it is a distributed system and the way these particular ones work is that the whole repository is cloned instead of a revision being checked out.