During this (before now) rare cosmic event, a new  Tech Wired Australia podcast was recorded.

There was much rejoicing and dancing in the streets when it was published to the interweb.

It was done, and it was good.

On a more serious note (me? serious? Geez, there really must have been a rare planetary alignment!) yes, we’ve recorded the first TechWiredAU podcast in nearly 6 months.

We’re hoping to get back on track and get it out more regularly – but we REALLY want to hear from you, the audience, as to what YOU would like from us.

Let us know what you do and don’t like from the show – would you prefer a video or audio version of the show? Would you like to watch it being recorded live?  Do you want audience participation?  Do you NOT want any of those things??

Ultimately, we’re doing the podcast for you  - we enjoy doing it, its fun, but we also get more of a buzz from knowing that you like it too!

So, to get in touch with us an let us know your thoughts, follow us on Twitter – Ben at http://twitter.com/bengrubb and Brent http://twitter.com/ragnarok1971

Or email us feedback at feedback{at]techwiredau[dot}com

If you listen to the show on iTunes, you can also leave a review or comment there

We’re looking forward to creating more shows for you – so get feed-backing to us!!

I did do a live Vodcast on Ustream with Ben and Chris from Tech Wired Australia on Sunday evening – that was a lot of fun – apart from the fact the magnetic power cable for my MacBook kept popping off (and since the battery is dead, it was bye bye streaming).  Special thanks to Ben and Chris for the opportunity – hopefully some more in the near future!

Have just been having a couple of military helicopters buzzing the roof of my building – I expect they are doing exercises to prepare for the Pope’s impending visit for World Youth Day. I took a quick photo from my kitchen window as one zipped past – attached below.

The news last night had a story on the amount of traffic restrictions etc. that are going to be in place for the Pope’s visit – and its outrageous!  More than for APEC and The Olympics combined apparently.  As one wise woman on the news story pointed out “They should ask the public if we WANT these big events that impact our daily routines so much – I’m sure they’d find we DON’T want them” – a very accurate surmation in my opinion.  I just want to know who is PAYING for all of this?  Via a cheque marked “Coffers Of The Vatican”?  I think not.

On that note, I’ll proceed to pour half of my cup of coffee in my lap, to go along with the bowl of 2-minute noodles from lunch.  I seem to have the dropsies today

The other benefit is that you can VERY easily post to it – via the website itself, a desktop application you can install, your mobile phone – and quite possibly many other ways I dont even know about yet LOL

I highly reccomend everyone sign themselves up and get posting – for an idea of what its really capable of, have a browse through some of the other people on the site and see what they’re posting.

When you do sign up, add me as a friend – my ID is ragnarok71

I’ve also added the Pownce widget to my sidebar so you can see the last few posts Ive made here as well

Firstly, the whole shebang is actually a ‘virtual appliance’ I downloaded from VMware – specifically, Jumpbox with Wordpress v2.3.3. For those unfamiliar with what a virtual appliance is, basically, its a self contained operating system running in a virtual environment on a host PC.

I’m running the appliance on my ‘normal’ PC (AMD Athlon 64bit, 2Gb RAM running Vista Ultimate 64bit) which also runs another appliance which is a virtualised server created when one of my physical servers (GALACTICA) died a few months ago (if anyone is interested, I’ll blog about how I actually virtualised that server – its a handy thing to know how to do if you ever have a hardware failure like I did)

Now, back to this Blogging server arrangement – After downloading the appliance, I extracted it and just had to open the appliance configuration file in VMware Workstation, and viola! There were a few easy setup steps to go through initially, basically asking about network setup, name of the server (which I called PEGASUS) etc. but thats hardly worth mentioning.

After that, it was just a matter of pointing a browser to the local IP address, and that was it!

Of course the next step was making it all pretty, and actually creating the first blog post That caused an interesting dilemma, when I found out that I couldn’t save files to the themes or plugins directories on the server, because the unregistered version of JumpBox in the appliance doesn’t allow it.

Well, I wasnt going to let that stop me – so I cheated I created a new virtual machine in VMware Workstation that was just a standard Ubuntu installation, and then added a second virtual hard drive – which I pointed to the files for the jumpbox/wordpress data drive. That then gave me full write access to the drive and the ability to copy across the theme and plugin files I wanted. Its a bit of a pain in the bum as I have to shut down the blog server, boot up the ubuntu one, copy files, shut down ubuntu, and then finally re-start the blog server – but it gets the job done

Once I’d got it to a point where it was working locally, it was time to get it visible to the outside world. That was slightly more fiddly than I had originally expected.

I port-forwarded all HTTP traffic to the servers IP address, and, one would think, that would be it…..well, not quite.

In the ‘options’ settings for WordPress, I had set the address to be my saltwaterit.com domain name – however, that domain name re-directs to saltwaterit.dyndns.org (I use the DynDNS service because I dont have a static/fixed IP address) and because of this redirection, WOrdPress doesn’t get things quite right and sticks your browser in an infinite loop. So a small alteration to the options to say the DynDNS address, and everything now works. Basically, when you first browse to the site from the saltwaterit.com address, it forwards you once to the DynDNS address, which then takes it from there.