Microsoft Musings

If you’re like me, you’ve amassed a collection of CD’s and MP3′s over the years. For some people its quite a large collection, for others its just a few songs. But regardless of how many songs and audio files you may have, wouldn’t it be nice to access them from any computer anywhere in the world? Yea. I would too.

Well, its all possible if you are using a cross-platform program that I just discovered yesterday called Subsonic Music Streamer. Its unbelievably easy to setup, and absolutely free! And for those of you using Fisher-Price toys otherwise known as Mac’s there is a version for you as well. Some other features:

• Listen to your music from anywhere – all you need is a browser.
• Assign ratings and comments to albums.
• Supports MP3, OGG, AAC and any other audio or video format that streams over HTTP.
• Transcoding engine allows for streaming of a variety of lossy and lossless formats by converting to MP3 on-the-fly.
• Control Subsonic from any mobile phone or PDA, using the WAP interface.
• Users must log in with a username and password. Users are assigned different privileges.
• Use HTTPS/SSL encryption for ultimate protection.

And there is lots of other features that are mentioned on Subsonic’s website. Like I mentioned before, Subsonic was extremely simple for me to install. I had attempted to install some other kind of music streaming software (I forget the name) months ago, but gave up after I got lost in configuring databases, etc. Not so with Subsonic. It was over before I knew what happened. If you are using Windows Vista, try it for yourself using the following steps. Read more…

Uh-oh. It looks Vista didn’t win the PWN to OWN contest after all. Although in reality it was a cross platform flaw in Adobe Flash that was exploited. Get a Mac Vista Ubuntu.

I’m not sure how many of you are keeping up with the PWN to OWN contest that is going on right now, but Mac OS X is the first one to go down. Basically its a contest to see who can compromise the three operating systems the fastest. So far Vista and Ubuntu are unscathed. Hmm.. maybe its time for some new Get a Mac ads?
Read more…

I was trying to setup a radius server using mysql authentication and I was plumb stuck on this error message.

Could not link driver rlm_sql_mysql:

Very simple fix as it turns out. You just need to install the mysql enabled version of freeradius. For example in Debian linux, simply type:

apt-get install freeradius-mysql