10/31/2008 in Life Online by micah
It's sometimes hard to remember that "instant" text messaging has been around for a long time, and that text messaging is far older than voice technology for long distance communication. The difference today is that text messaging devices are wireless, and don't require intensive training and study to be used.
My great-grandfather, Rush Webner, was a telegrapher for various railroads, including a 36 year stint as agent-operator for the Wheeling and Lake Erie station in Smithville, Ohio.
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7/19/2008 in Drupal by micah
Matt Farina recently posted a question on FriendFeed about increasing adoption of Drupal among churches.
I'm wondering how we can make Drupal easier for churches to adopt. Drupal for Churches distribution? Documentation targeted at churches? Thoughts?
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7/18/2008 in Life Online by micah
Lifestream aggregation is an issue I've been pondering for quite a while now. I have multiple blogs and web 2.0 services. Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and the list goes on. I've been seeking an effective way to combine all of this crud into a single RSS feed so I can share all of it in one place.
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7/3/2008 in Life Online by micah
There's a lot of talk about version numbers and the web these days. It seems that people are getting tired of talking about Web 2.0, and want to move on to new versions. I've started wondering if the whole bit about numbering web versions is keeping us from seeing how short-sighted our vision actually is.
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2/15/2008 in Drupal by micah
Drupal 6 was officially released this week! When I started my current Drupal installation series, I said that Drupal 5 would be around for a while, and I wouldn't jump to Drupal 6 right away. To be fair, I haven't tried out Drupal 6 at all yet. It looks like a very exciting release, and there are many improvements over previous versions. For simple sites that can use mostly core modules, Drupal 6 is probably the way to go at this point.
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11/9/2007 in System Administration by micah
I just completed my first physical to virtual (p2v) migration of a Linux server. I used cpio, ssh and a rescue CD to migrate an aging server to VMware. Here's how I did it. (I'll try to leave out the steps that didn't work!)
We recently identified several servers that could be migrated to VMware Server, and the first Linux box to be moved is an old Fedora Core 2 box that runs as an instructional Oracle database server. According to the logs, it hasn't been used for student work since last May, so we may be retiring it, anyway.
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10/24/2007 in Tech Arts by micah
I may need to come back and write a better introduction to this, but I thought I'd share my relatively simple podcast template.
There are a number of really good ways to deliver podcasts, but a very simple way is to write a simple directory index using php and the getID3 library.
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7/19/2007 in Tech Arts by micah
When we first moved into our current sanctuary in 2001, we set up a wild assortment of connections to feed cassette and CD recording, FM hearing assist, the 70V system for the cry room, and so on. This short-lived arrangement became very cumbersome until we found a good solution that included sensible use of the matrix outputs on our Allen & Heath GL4000 console and the addition of a Rane SM 26B splitter mixer.

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6/28/2007 in System Administration by micah
Okay, this is a silly rant, but Jason Powell said on the Church IT Discussion Podcast to just do it. Blog about something, at least once a week. So here it is...
Last night was another one of those Microsoft days. A friend of mine got one of those cool Treo 700 phones that would drive me crazy, and needed me to come help him get it talking to his Exchange server.
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