I'm looking for wiki software for a project I'm resurrecting and I'm mystified by the overwhelming number of fragmented versions available, defunct or otherwise. My requirements are pretty simple: support my server (PHP4, mySQL, CGI), WYSIWYG editor, and free. Doesn't sound too complicated does it? Well apparently it is. I'm still looking. Looking at this comparison, MediaWiki is the closest as it has alpha-level support. Twiki is another possibility, as is Wikka. MoinMoin 1.5 has WYSIWYG, but it requires PYTHON on the server, which won't work for me.

Basically, I'm overwhelmed and frustrated. I guess I'll just have to try a few and see which I like best. The WYSIWYG editor seems to be the most difficult aspect. TinyMCE and FCKeditor are both great, free WYSIWYG editors, but I'm not sure if they are easily integrated into any wiki server. Basically, I believe that users should have to learn some type of odd wiki-tags to contribute and format, so I'm holding out until I find what I want.

I setup a TiVo series 2 today for a friend. There was no telephone jack near the TV, so the only real option was wireless ethernet. Unfortunately, the first activation call must be made via a telephone (or via a wired USB ethernet adapter using ,#401 as the dialing prefix). Finding a compatible wireless adapter was almost impossible because there are so many different hardware revisions, no one knows which adapter contains which chipset, even if you use the cheat sheet on Tivo.com. I got lucky and found an old revision of a Netgear adapter, the only one in the store.

Luckily, this was an open-box TiVo from Circuit City with the latest version of TiVo software, so I was able to skip the initial setup and configure the wireless adapter from the beginning. This made the configuration process so much easier. I then purged the "thumbs up/down database" to remove any setting from the previous user (no season passes to delete). The TiVo finally rebooted after working on the purge for probably 45 minutes. It then downloaded new program data, which took another hour. After that finally completed, I went to search for shows to add their season passes, but search could find no shows. I didn't have time to wait for it to do whatever it needed to do, so I went to the live TV guide and found the 10 shows that I needed and created season passes that way.

Total setup time: 5 hours. Yes, 5 hours! Most of it was waiting around, but still, that is a long time. And it would have been longer if I had to find a phone line to do the activation, especially if it was a Vonage-only house. I could have build a PC and installed Windows Media Center Edition in that time. TiVo needs to get their act together and add an Ethernet port and WiFi to their receivers. Sub-$100 Media Center Extenders have this functionality. It shouldn't be such a painfully complicated and slow process just to setup a TiVo.

I've been wanting to post a photo album on my website for a few years now. I finally got around to doing it. For now, there are just pictures of my 2 home theater projects. The pictures cover the projects from start-to-finish (well, almost finished, I'm not quite done with the latest).

My first home theater was in my first house and was more of a media room because it was in a huge basement room with a bar and pool table. Nicole and I moved about a year and a half ago and went with a dedicated home theater for version 2.0. I still have to finish the front stage and the trim around the equipment rack. I'm close enough to being finished to knock it out in a weekend or two, but I've enjoyed watching it too much to work on it!

We came up with a name for our theater. I think it's stupid to name a room, but we did anyway (even though we never call it that). Our first home theater was accented by two large "towers" covering in the speakers on either side of the screen. The second Lord of the Rings movie was in theaters, so our theater took on the name "The Two Towers Theater". We'll probably add tower covers to our current (version 2.0) theater, so the name will be a little more fitting for it at some point in the future.

For anyone interested, I used JAlbum to create the photo album. It works pretty well for a Java program but I would like it better if it worked more like a standard Windows program. It's free and gives a great finished product, so I shouldn't complain.

I have several WordPress plug-ins installed and working. Unfortunately, WordPress does not yet have a decent site to list, rank, vote on, and download plugins. Here are a few that I'm using:

• Archivist - displays older posts on the front page that would otherwise be lost in the archives
• Subscribe Me - adds news reader subscription links to the sidebar on the right
• WP-TinyMCE - WYSIWYG editor that works for both main posts and comments
• ChenPress - Another WYSIWYG editor. This one based on FCK editor. Does not work with comments as far as I can tell. I'm comparing it to WP-TinyMCE to figure out which I like best.
• Subscribe To Comments - to allow commenters to receive e-mail notification of responses.
• AJAX Spell Checker - fancy (maybe too fancy) spell checker; unfortunately is does not work when using WYSIWYG editors.
• IImage Browser - Allows image upload and inserting into posts. I had to modify the premission on a directory to get this working.
• Google Site Maps - To create a search-engine friendly site map.
• My Netflix - to show which movies I'll be watching

I've given up on the spell checker plug-in because it requires PHP Safe Mode. I'm having difficulty getting Gravatars to work due to my permalinks setup and I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.

I know WordPress 1.6 will have WYSIWYG, but I'm afraid it won't do everything I need it to do. What I really would like to see is spell checking, image uploading and thumbnailing, and some simple formating controls. I'm betting it won't cover all bases, but it has to be an improvement over the existing default text editor. What I've determined to be the best solution is ChenPress + IImage Browser + Ajax Spell Checker. I upload the picture using IImage, then activate the ChenPress FCKeditor to type, then save, then reopen and run Ajax Spell checker in text mode. Not an ideal solution, but that is the best I could find.

I did try WYSI - Wordpress and it does everything except having a Firefox-compatible spell checker. Unfortunately, it can't be easily toggled off to allow Ajax Spell Checker to run, so I don't use it.

Extensions Wish List: A plug-in that would prompt to select a category instead of defaulting to "uncategorized" if you fail to select one.

I've converted my blog from blogger.com format to WordPress. My initial thoughts are that WordPress is much more customizable and powerful. If you have have your own webhost and know how to ftp files to your server, floowing the installation instructions at wordpress.org will result in a much better blogging experience, especially if you like to tinker!

Nicole and I went to see the Diesel Brothers last night at Wild Wing Café in Mt. Pleasant, NC. We were looking for something fun to do on a Wednesday night during our vacation, and these guys were just what we were looking for. We were pretty lucky, because there is not that much live music around Isle of Palms during the week, off-season.

We were lucky to find such a talented duo. Lot's of interesting covers and they have a CD of originals as well.

Their talents go beyond playing well. They can play well while thoroughly intoxicated. True professionals of the late night bar scene, to say the least.

In preparation for an upcoming road trip, I purchased and installed at PhatNoise PhatBox in my 2004 Infiniti G35 Sedan. Initial impressions: holy crap, this thing is awesome! Why did I wait so long?!? Installation was extremely easy, just plug it into the satellite radio harness and it shows up as a CD changer, controlled directly from the factory head unit. To get it hooked-up and working in the car, total time was about 10 minutes (still need to screw it down though).

I know iPods are extremely popular; here's why I think the PhatNoise blows the iPod away.

• controlled by the factory head unit so controls are very easy to reach
• no FM modulators or chargers or cassette adapters required
• Voice Prompts - no need to try to read a little screen on an iPod or try to read scrolling text on your head unit. Audible searching by artist, album, genre, and playlist.
• Direct line-in input to the headunit; no low-quality FM or tape sound degradation

I know, with the right cable and the right head unit, iPods can have some of these features. Also, the iPod is more portable and the initial price is lower. But as with most things, you get what you pay for. If you want to go jogging, get an iPod. To listen to music in your car, I highly recommend the PhatBox. The voice prompts and sound quality make all the difference. It even supports my lossless audio format of choice (FLAC) and it was very easy to sync my music library via USB. The only possible improvement for this otherwise excellent device would be WiFi auto-sync every night for podcasts.

I participated in the PhatNoise user forum for well over a year. Unfortunately, it was shut down. Never fear, there is a non-affiliated replacement already well-established: phathack.com. I had a question and it got answered in a matter of minutes.

It's 2AM and I'm thinking about going back out to my car to play around with the PhatBox. It's that cool. It's TiVo-for-the-first-time cool.

After working on it for several weeks, I finally finished my guide for audiophile-quality extraction of music from CDs. To get the best possible audio quality, it is necessary to have bit-perfect extraction from the CD (with no unnecessary error correction trying to reconstruct misreads due to CD drive offset). Then, the perfectly-extracted audio should be compressed using a lossless format to maintain the original quality. The guide shows how to use setup and use some free programs to do this: EAC, FLAC, and AccurateRip.

To be honest, I'm not positive I could identify the difference between a "regular" extraction and a bit-perfect extraction, and maybe not even between an extremely high-quality compressed file and a lossless file. There would have to be a lot of back-to-back comparisons. However, I like to put the extra effort into projects to make sure they are done "right". Configuring this software and getting it all to work together was not exactly intuitive, so I put together the guide to help others interested in using this process. Let me know what you think!