Setting up Fedora 9 on my Mac mini as we speak. I can’t get over how much of a breeze it is. The mini is going to be used as a local dev server. I’m pretty excited to be able to work locally on our projects — it’s going to speed up development greatly (oh, and I won’t continually break things on the live servers).

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Javascript, AJAX, and jQuery, are all gifts from god.  I still have no idea what I’m doing, but the things I have been able to accomplish, wow, total awesomeness.

…and I’m a huge nerd.

Found a good line by line tutorial on how to set up software RAID within Ubuntu. 

I decided to disable the Mac OS X Dashboard tonight in hopes of freeing up some extra memory.  So far, so good.

Well, I picked up a hard-drive today to install within my Mac Mini. The idea of upgrading the Mac Mini is a pain in the ass, because of how small the system is. But in all reality, it’s really not that much different than upgrading a regular old desktop.

Once you’re able to pry the case apart, it’s a breeze — just unscrew a few sets of screws, remove the wireless antenna, and you’re golden.

As of right now, I’m about 5 minutes away from a clean install of OSX on a new hard-drive. I’m currently shopping for an external enclosure in hopes of restoring the contents of the original hard-drive.

We’ll see how this all works out — hopefully I didn’t lose too much data, but at least my entire music collection was on another external drive.

Update: All enclosures for 2.5″ sata drives are extremely ugly — why can’t they make good looking cases for these things?

This is certainly weird. When I first got my Mac Mini, I installed Windows XP along side OSX — I figured boot-camp would be a nice accessory if I ever needed/wanted to boot into XP for anything. After the XP install, I never went back into Windows. I had no reason to do so, thus I stuck with OSX day in and day out. That is, however, until tonight.

For whatever reason, my Mac Mini was misbehaving tonight. It was very laggy (and it’s never laggy), and applications just didn’t seem to want to work. I tried closing all of my applications (in hopes of running disk utility, and the like), but nothing seemed to work which would help my situation. So, I turned to turning off my Mac Mini completely by holding the power button down for several seconds.

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Today, I invested several hours into fixing my brother’s spy-ware and virus infected laptop.  How one can mess up a system quite like this laptop is beyond me.

It’s been awhile since I had to concern myself with spy-ware and or virus infections.  I use an Apple machine, and have had no such problems with it.  I suppose I’ve taken for granted that Apple has, for the most part, avoided the mess of open vulnerabilities.  Regardless, even my girlfriend, who runs a Windows machine, hasn’t had any problems since she ditched Internet Explorer several months ago.  And let me tell you, I love her even more just for taking my advice and ridding herself of that spy-ware-welcoming browser.   If only my family members could listen for once and take my advice.  Instead, I’m stuck fixing their ignorant mistakes.

As a result, I quickly wrote up a small document for my brother to place near his laptop.  At first I thought it’d be a good idea to write in big bolded capped letters — DO NOT FUCKING USE INTERNET EXPLORER.  But I held back and made a small checklist of what he should do to keep his laptop spy-ware, and virus, free.

All in all, I got rid of his piece-of-shit AOL virus scan.  I found this to be the bottleneck.  As soon as I uninstalled this software, I found myself making progress.  I downloaded, installed, and ran, Ad-Aware 2007.  This picked up most of his spy-ware issues.  Then, I bought Norton 360 to help all his Internet and virus protection needs.  Norton 360 handled all virus issues.

Now, four hours later, his laptop is running a lot more smoothly.  I cannot wait to shut this laptop down and return to my OSX normalacy.

Phew.