This amazing little gadget combines a 2GB flash memory SD card and a full-blown Wi-Fi adapter into one tiny bundle. With this bad boy in your camera, you can take pictures and wirelessly upload them to your computer or one of a bazillion web hosting sites (like Flickr, Facebook, Vox, Picasa, etc.

With them selling for under $100, I just may need to get two. Grandma and Grandpa may just get one for Christmas. The time saved in not having to be the camera jockey every time someone in my family fills up a memory card could be priceless.

WordPressMU reaching 1.0 is a biggie – I tried an older version about a year ago, and it just didn’t fly. The new version has been used to power WordPress.com for a while now and seems to have all of the bugs shaken out of it.

bbPress is described as: “forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks.” It has also had an extensive shakedown powering the WordPress Support Forums.

Thanks to everyone who contributes to such a fine product!

The only problem is, for webmasters who use adsense (like me) you have to keep toggling Adblock on and off to see what kind of ads Google is serving to your site. That got kind of old for me, and I decided I wouldn’t mind seeing adsense on everyone’s pages.

The problem is, the regexp strings that Filterset.G uses are torturous, and even once you delete the parts that unblock adsense, they just get overwritten on the next update! The solution is Adblock Plus – it has the bonus capability of being able to whitlist URLs.

Simply enter @@URL into the ‘new filter’ form in the Adblock (Plus) preferences and that site is whitelisted. So to un-block Adsense you’ll want to use something like:

@@*.googlesyndication.com

and you’ll be seeing sweet Adsense shills once again.

I’ll be going more in depth to the changes we have made and what I like (and don’t like) about these changes in the near future. For the meantime, here are before and after pcitures of our datacenter:

We just returned from Florida to have my daughter have more visits with Dr. Bradstreet for her Aspergers/Autism. We were down for two weeks and made really good progress. If you have a child with Autism or ADD run, don’t walk to Dr. B – I can’t recommend him highly enough!

On the home front, we are remodeling most of our house all at once. We have a bedroom addition, complete re-flooring, kitchen gutting and basement re-finishing going on all at once – and I’m acting a general contractor for all of it and grunt worker for most as well. This week saw the installation of HVAC to the addition and the last of the old carpet come up out of the basement. I’ll be glad when it is done, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever live to be that old. We also got our first dog, Bastian. He’s a 5 year old Corgi that we rescued. He’s a very mellow dog and easy to get along with. Once we get the housebreaking 100% down, that is…

At work, our infrastructure overhaul continues. I got a quote for all new Cisco switches at our five buildings and an complete overhaul of our data center by APC. We’ll be discussing the Cisco work, trying to figure out to replace the switches all at once or over the next three years. I’m also looking at replacing the fiber between our High School and Middle School (it’s over length and has been spliced three times now due to moves and trenching accidents). We are working on re-working our private IP addressing scheme, and transitioning our public IP addresses as our ISP is switching ISPs and we’ll be losing our public IPs. Finally we are transitioning from our current Chipnet lunch POS system to Horizon’s FastLane system. Since we just switched to the fourth U.S. distributor and support provider since we purchased it six years ago, we’re excited to get to a product that has good support. Infineer, who created ChipNet and supports the product in the UK does a great job of support – but working through a third party didn’t work for us. Once I get our ’06-07 budget hammered out, I should be able to catch a breather and check out SuSe 10.1!

So, I took a Dell PowerEdge 750 server I happened to have available, installed VMWare Server on it and installed an instance of OES (Netware kernel) with webaccess on that. It ran like a charm until this week, when the 750′s SATA RAID controller started shrieking in alarm. A reboot calmed the RAID controller down, but it seemed to have killed VMWare. The console loaded, but it wouldn’t load any virtual machines.

After a little research on the VMWare forums, I realized that the current beta I was running had expired. Now I really have no problem with the beta software having an expiration, and it was fairly stupid of me to be running production software on a beta product, but I do feel a bit let down that the installation gave no indication that there was an expiration date at all. I guess it was supposed to have popped up warnings on screen to let me know a couple of days ahead of time – but I hadn’t checked on the server in weeks – and probably wouldn’t have in months if I didn’t need to.

I now have the image running on VMWare Workstation, and am looking into licensing a full copy of VMWare server (probably ESX). And I won’t be running production services on beta software for a long time – at least not without a very good reason!

Both of the packages, are windows-only, making me wonder if I could make one jump drive work across windows, OS X and Linux.  I know I could probably get locally installed Apache & mySQL on Linux to hostfiles from flash with a little scripting… but what about OS X?  I don’t believe mySQL is installed by default, and I do’t think PHP is either.  Could the likes of Apache Friends’ XAMPP be rigged to run from a memory stick?  This could come in realy handy for me, as I do my developmentabout 50% mac and 50% XP, and would love to be able to test off of my powerbook – even when offfline.

The “key product” is GSX server – their “lower end” software that runs on a Windows or Linux server. The re-branded product is now sinply called VMWare Server, and is completely free.

My guess is that with competition from the open-source efforts like Xen and OpenVZ, they want to get you hooked on their products, in hope that you will eventually upgrade to their more advanced ESX Server. No matter if you pick an open-source or commercial product, the cost to virtualize your servers is now officially $0.00! (With VMWare server annual support starting at $300, it’s still a great deal!)