It has been a long time in the making, but we have launch our new site design. I have been working on this project at work for the past 6 months or so. It is a complete overhaul of www.ledet.com. If you do not know we I work for an Adobe training provider with locations all over the United States. Our main company owned locations are in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, and Washington.

Adobe CS5 is fast approaching. Adobe calls this the biggest release of the product line ever. They are not saying a lot yet just an announcement scheduled for April 12th, so mark your calendar. Follow the count down at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/

I have dabbled in virtualization of servers for the past 5 or 6 years now, starting out with Microsoft Virtual server. Recently I heard the buzz about Microsoft Hyper-V. It got me interested in virtual servers again. I did some digging and in typical Microsoft fashion I discovered that Hyper-V does not really have much Linux guest support. I started to explore further and discovered VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer, I was intrigued by both products. ESXi supports every os imaginable as a guest but the hardware setup is tricky for a white box machine. I decided to go with Xenserver, got it running in about 15 minutes, no 10 minutes to xen for me, but it was close. The thing that really got me on Xen was the demo video. I am current setting up my first guest (Centos 5.4) to host my websites. My next project will be to setup an openfiler NAS to connect my Xen server to a shared storage device.

Spent this evening upgrading my web server from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12. After about a hour of package downloading, I was up and running. I did everything from the command line without a hitch. I followed the great instructions at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

The guys and gals at Zimbra have been hard at work. Check out the new release of Zimbra 6.0 Release Candidate 1 (release notes). One of the standouts for me is, it now is fully compatible with Fedora 11. I upgraded my mail server running Centos 5 this weekend, no problems. I am contemplating going to Fedora 11 to be able to run the 64 bit release of Zimbra.

Nice little timecode calculator for windows http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/freetime.htm

Just installed Zimbra 6.0 Beta 2 community edition on my mail server. I am using it to run mail for damonledet.com as well as my other domains. So for so go was a very simple upgrade from 5.0.16. Seems solid so far, found one little bug when you create a new spreadsheet under briefcase (I think it should be under documents) it does not same the spreadsheet in your briefcase you can only find it when you goto browse mode in the documents panel, also the spreadsheet does not open with the editor when you click on it, the browser wants to download the .xls.

If you cannot get enough of the new Adobe icons, how would you like to see them on your couch? Grab the Adobe Creative Suite Pillows – http://www.mysuitestuff.com/shop.html [via - Gizmodo]

Well after what seemed like forever. I received my Dell Mini 9 last Wednesday (April 22), I ordered it on May 8. First thing I did was install a 2GB sodimm. Dell did a great job with making this netbook very user upgradeable by putting all upgradeable components under one panel. While some people have had success running Mac OS 10.5 on their Mini (http://gizmodo.com) I opted for Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix initially. I truly feel Ubuntu has a ton to offer (heck dell installs it as an option on the Mini 9) I am not 100% sold it is for me. I am now dual booting my Mini between XP and Ubuntu. I installed Photoshop CS4 mainly to see how it would run and was very pleasantly surprised it runs well. I ran the Photoshop benchmark from Retouch Artists took 3 minutes 18 seconds. I am now considering blowing my Ubuntu away to gain the disk space (I upgraded the SSD but only to 32gb), I want to install some of the other CS4 apps just to see how well they will work. All in all I am very happy with this little guy, I will be taking a trip to San Diego real soon so I will but this guy thought the paces with a little video playback on the flight. Below are some pictures:

I was looking for some free GIS Data to import into Google Earth Pro for a classroom demo. I found this very cool, somewhat free site for GIS Data at http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/

For this demo I downloaded the “Current County and Equivalent Shapefile” at http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/US/61089/group214.html, of course you could download The County Shapefile for any state.

1.    First download and extract the GIS Data you want to use.
2.    Next in Google Earth Pro go to the file menu and choose import

Google Earth Pro Screen Shot of Import

Pointing to GIS Data File

Importing GIS Data

Creating GIS Style Template

Creating GIS Style Template

Georgia County Map in Google Earth Pro

Georgia County Map from Google Earth Pro

I was working on a site and wanted to create author pages for all registered wordpress user on the site. After looking at the documatation at http://codex.wordpress.org/Author_Templates. I came up with this code. It will show the author info as well as last 5 post and last 5 comments. You can see the code in action at my author page.

A really cool new feature in After Effects CS4 is the ability to now take advantage of Photoshop CS4‘s new 3d capabilities. Another new feature of Photoshop CS4 is the ability to open .kmz or .3ds files. If we take a look at the extensive free models we have on Google’s 3d warehouse we find a ton of models to choose from. If you can find the model you want on the 3d warehouse as a kmz you are in luck. Open the kmz in Photoshop CS4 and save it as a psd. Import that psd into After Effects CS4 as a composition (making sure to check the box that says “Live Photoshop 3D”). Now you have a new composition in After Effects with a 3D model as well as a null to control it and a camera to pan around it. If you can only find a skp of the model you want on the 3d warehouse, you will need Google Sketchup Pro to export that model out as a 3ds or kmz. Open the 3ds or kmz in photoshop save it as a psd, import that psd in After Effects and you are set.

About 5 or 6 years ago I found a get timecode calculator for the mac called TC Cal. It was a free utility and great for adding and subtracting timecode as well as converting timecode to frames and vice versa. I was very sad when the author took down his website. Recently I was in need of a timecode calculator and was not at my personal computer. I found a new timecode calculator on apple’s website called Timecode Calculator.

I was on my wordpress dashboard this morning and under recently updated plugins was a plugin called Where I’ve Been. It is a neat little plugin that will allow you to display a flash map on any post or page of the places you have been, livied, or wqould like to visit. It requires that you setup a free account at http://www.whereivebeen.com/. Check out my map at my homepage.

After Sterling turned me on to Yoast, I added breadcrumbs to my site. Notice the new navigation nest to the page titles. I used Yoast Breadcrumbs to do this. I also added Search Suggest to my search results page and Sociable for social bookmarking. Mainly because I like the look of this on better then the social bookmarking plugin I was using.