Temperature monitoring and alerting on a small budget – sounds good, right? In our small office, we have four servers, switches, a telephone system, and several UPS units in a small wiring closet.  I need to make sure that I know if the closet starts to overheat, but most environmental monitoring systems are targeting the [...]

One of the best things about the internet is the availability of all types of data. This would include anything from news articles, to online entertainment, to rich media, and even very expensive software. As I had mentioned previously, I remember when I was younger how I downloaded full versions of very expensive software (like [...]

By now you probably know someone that has essentially “quit” or “deleted” their Facebook profile and account because of some personal issue with privacy or time management (or mis-management) or some other reason. But whether or not you’re a fan of using the Facebook service personally you have to make note and be cognizant of [...]

Sorry Mac people – this post isn’t for you! Ah yes, that new, shiny, and slick OS by Microsoft. They said: More happy is coming! And now it is here, and it was your idea. I mean, look how you can snap two windows side by side! And isn’t it great how you can watch [...]

Wow. Seriously? One of our community members brought this up in a comment and I thought it was a joke until I realized that it was, in fact, not a joke. Someone (or some group) has created a Christian Edition of Ubuntu and it appears to be the exact same thing with the addition of [...]

We wrote about OpenVBX, an open source phone system, the other day and one commenter (thanks Ben!) noted another system that I wasn’t familiar with (but am now!). Enter FreePBX, a free phone system for businesses (and ministries)! Here’s what they say: FreePBX is an easy to use GUI (graphical user interface) that controls and [...]

We’ve written a few times about some cacheing plugins for WordPress and I’ve learned a lot over the last year about optimizing and performancing our systems and setups. I’ve teetered back and forth between these two cacheing plugins for WordPress: WP Super Cache W3 Total Cache We’ve been using the latter for a while now [...]

At this point I’ve upgraded all of our significant properties to the new WordPress 3.0 release and we’ve had only one “bump” so far with a caching plugin that needed to be updated as well. But not a single drop of sweat has been shed as I’ve been able to upgrade all of them without [...]

This could be a godsend for the right ministry (both small and large) that has the technical chops to make it happen. OpenVBX has launched their open source version of their popular phone system software to other organizations for free. The only “catch” is that you’re going to have to use their cloud-based system to [...]

Last night, I was setting up a development environment using Ubuntu 10.4 and a virtualbox virtual machine. And instead of getting to do some actual programming like I had intended, I was stuck chasing compilation errors because PDO didn’t appear to be working in PHP. This never happens to you, right? After five hours of [...]