1. Stop MySQL

   sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

2. Start MySQL with the following command

   sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables &

3. Login to MySQL as root with out a password

   mysql -u root mysql

4. Replace PASSWORD with the new password of your choice.

   UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('PASSWORD') WHERE User='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit;

Solution: Doing some reading you can actually make all of the XBMC instances store data to a central server running MySQL.  Why would you want to do that? Well there are a few reasons, besides having everything in sync across the board it also gives you the ability to resume playback from where you left off in another room.

Since I already had a server on my LAN which is providing the media via Samba and already has MySQL running for a development environment it was a pretty simple setup.  I followed the tutorial here, which pretty much calls for making a MySQL user for XBMC and then I took it a step further and have all of the actor/movie thumbnails being stored on a network share too.  I have included my advancedsettings.xml file which you need to create and add to each XBMC instance.

<advancedsettings>
    <videodatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>10.0.1.100</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>xbmc_video</name>
    </videodatabase> 

    <musicdatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>10.0.1.100</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>xbmc_music</name>
    </musicdatabase>

	<pathsubstitution>
  		<substitute>
			<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>
			<to>smb://10.0.1.100/XBMC/Thumbnails/</to>
		</substitute>
	</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>

I decided to rebuild my whole library, which takes a little but but all said and done its a pretty nice setup and being able to resume playback from room to room is nice too.  If you have a dedicated machine, and multiple XBMC instances I would recommend this type of setup.

What’s new in iTunes 10.5.2
iTunes 10.5.2 includes several improvements for iTunes Match and fixes an audio distortion problem when playing or importing certain CDs.

iTunes 10.5.1 included:
• iTunes Match. Store your entire music library in iCloud, including music you’ve imported from CDs, and enjoy your collection anywhere, anytime, on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, computer, or Apple TV.
• iTunes in the Cloud. iTunes now stores your music and TV purchases in iCloud and makes them available on your devices anywhere, any time, at no additional cost.
• Automatic Downloads. Purchase music from any device or computer and automatically download a copy to your Mac, PC and iOS devices.
• Download Previous Purchases. Download your past music, TV, app, and book purchases again, at no additional cost. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer on the iTunes Store.
• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 5.
• Wi-Fi Syncing. Automatically sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iTunes any time they’re both on the same Wi-Fi network.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

I came across an apple forum post that may or may not help, I just disabled this feature today.

I upgraded my ipone 4 to ios5 and had the same issue.  I did the same thing everybody did and turned all the cool fetures off, I even went to apple.  I could litterally watch the batter drop.  I started looking again and found a new feature on ios 5 called diagnostics & usage under settings, general, about.  If you click on it and changed to don’t send rather than automatic send your battery life will be back to normal.  I looked up the reoports it was sending down where it says diagnostic & usage data, and found my phone was sending out around 200 reports a day back to apple.  This is what was draining my battery and most likely yours too.  Apple uses this to help diagnose problems with the ios and apps.  Good Luck!

Thought I would repost it here as I had a hard time finding it in the first place.

The Las Vegas WordPress Meetup Group is tomorrow at @thebeatlv – meetu.ps/4tgd8

— Shelby DeNike (@sdenike) October 19, 2011

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/sdenike/status/124892752956768256"]

1. Connected my iPhone to my Macbook
2. Opened Image Capture and selected my iPhone from the device list
3. Selected all of the images shown (Command+A).
4. Click the delete button at the bottom of the Image Capture window
5. Sit back, it takes a while to clear off the images

After hearing the specs of the iPhone 4S I really want to get one.  It comes with better talk time, better camera, as well as what really got me the A5 processor.  Since owning an iPad2 I have noticed that when using my iPhone 4 it seems slower than I once though, only when compared to the device using an A5.  Another awesome feature is Siri, I have attached a video of the Siri demo which is just amazing.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4D4kRbEdJw]

What are your thoughts? Will you be getting an iPhone 4S or will you be waiting for the iPhone 5?

Access Denied

You don’t have permission to access “http://www.apple.com/” on this server.
Reference #18.301deb3f.1317756953.ae3bd422

And a whois of apple.com shows the following

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

APPLE.COM.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.WAS.PWNED.BY.M1CROSOFT.COM
APPLE.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.IS.OWN3D.BY.NAKEDJER.COM
APPLE.COM.IS.0WN3D.BY.GULLI.COM
APPLE.COM.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
APPLE.COM

To single out one record, look it up with “xxx”, where xxx is one of the
of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up
with “=xxx” to receive a full display for each record.

>>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:33:53 UTC <<<

Dont know if it would be wise to order anything from apple.com right now ….

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=262369270447952

Below I am going to cover a few things that I have researched(Don’t expect any hard numbers you will simply have to take my word on this of search Google for articles showing full comparisons/numbers), tested and implemented for Fauxzen.com.

Server Setup:  After shopping around I found that RackSpace seemed to offer the cheapest cloud server weighing in at about $11 a month. Originally I chose to go with CentOS, but after create an exact Ubuntu Server install and comparing the CPU/Memory usage I found that Ubuntu Server had far less overhead than CentOS. Keeping with the memory/cpu usage as well as reading many articles about performance from a web server I chose to go with NGinx instead of Apache.  While the initial install and setup was a little more complex than Apache once up and running I haven’t had to look back.  I should clear up that I have been using Apache for the past 10yrs to NGinx seemed a little foreign to me until I did some reading.  Of course the server has MySQL and the only thing I have really customized with it at this point was to enable query-cache. Of course there is a ton more that can be done with MySQL… but thats for another article.  Ohh and for php I am using php-fpm with APC enabled.

DNS: I first debated about using Route53 for my DNS since its cloud based.  After doing some research there were a few things that made me decide to look elsewhere.  First off  keeping with the cheap budget it does cost $1 and if you are looking to go as cheap as possible … well thats another $1 per month for each domain.  Second thing which was not really a deal breaker, but could be for some is that there is no interface for it.  Everything you wish to manage with your DNS with Route53 has to be done via their API or you can use some of the 3rd party services people have created to manage your DNS, just seemed like a bit of a small hassle.
The other option that I found, which I am a big fan of is CloudFlare.  CloudFlare is a cloud based DNS host and then some… ohh and Free.  They help prevent spammers/bots from accessing your site, which in the end saves you X page views over the course of the month as well as X bandwidth which is a huge plus.  They also cache parts of your site to make so that it is always online, this feature is awesome I have actually tested by turning my server off and trying to load my site and it loads a static version.  They also give you a nice run down of stats that are updated every 24hrs, the pro version updates stats every 15mins.

Statistics: Some people will argue thatusing Google Analytics is not as accurate as using something like AWstats, Webalizer or even writing your own which reads the server log files in realtime. This option works good enough for me since I am not running in click tracking ads etc etc.

Email: Google Apps for your domain is an awesome free product and allows you NOT to have a mail server running on you setup.  Besides the performance gain from NOT running this on your server, you also get the benefit of letting Google handle your Spam… which if you have ever done admin work mail can be a total pain.

CDN:  While this kind of goes away from the whole aiming to be as cheap as possible, its a nice feature to have.  The cost involved with using a CDN can vary on who you go with, and the traffic that your site is generating. I chose to go with Amazon S3/CloudFront, the cost is pretty much next to nothing once you get all setup and there seems to be a bit of a noticable

Frontend/Backend:  WordPress is used through the site, with minimal plugins as well as a child theme running on Genesis.  I tested out a few theme frameworks and found that Genesis gives you more bang for your buck as well as seems to be fast when compared to other frameworks on the market, and has a great customer base to help support it…. and yeah I know this is not Free either.  I am using a total of 13 plugins, I could honestly probably disable a few others as I don’t use them often. Speaking of plugins since I didn’t configure a local mail server of any sorts on this install I had to install WP-Mail-SMTP plugin which allowed me to use a POP mail account for WordPress mailing. I am also using Disqus for my commenting, this works great with CloudFlare when your server is not reachable.

So far the site/setup seem great especially when you look at the total price being under $15 a month for a cloud based setup which doesn’t place all your eggs in one basket and gives you an almost true 100% uptime for all of your services.

You can find the PPA information needed to install AirVideo here. Using the PPA installing was a breeze and I now have AirVideo setup and streaming to my iPad, iPhone and soon to Kats iTouch.

You can find the startup script here and there is also some other great information covered little more in depth here.