The change in policy was inevitable after the LDS church (who owns BYU) started its own YouTube channel on August 07, 2008.

What does this mean for BYU students?

As the third most popular website on the internet, YouTube has great value.  YouTube plays a large role in social media, as it is more popular than Facebook.  Social media can be studied and applied on BYU campus in the YouTube context.  Performing arts students can observe and learn from their peers across the world.  People living on campus will get to see what YouTube is for the first time in their lives.

This is a great step for the university.  From me and my colleagues, thank you BYU for opening your eyes.

How do you feel about YouTube being unblocked?

I have been impressed with Hulu Desktop for the week I have been using it.

Pros:

• Use your remote control - Being able to use my remote control means I can watch TV from my couch without having to get up
• Easy to use interface - The interface is easy to use
• Continuous Playing - Once the show you are watching is over, a similar show will automatically play next
• Mac and Windows - Hulu has a client for both Mac and Windows operating systems

Cons:

Hulu desktop is in beta development which means Hulu Labs has plenty of time to fix most of its problems.

• Random Crashing - Hulu desktop crashes once or twice a day for me; with more testing I’m sure this will be eliminated
• Interface - While the interface is easy to use, there still lacks a high level of customization.  The app can be greatly improved with more options and customization.  For example, the continuous playing has no options.  I would like to see option to have continuous playing play similar shows, the same show in order, and the same show in a random order.

Conclusion

Hulu desktop is a powerful application with a very bright future.  It is a program will join the revolution to change television as we know it.  A desktop application for one of the most popular web tv providers is a huge step to getting more television shows and movies onto the web.

If you don’t have it already, download hulu desktop.

Why:
Here are some situations where this would be useful:

• If you plan on using multiple subdomains pointing to the same server (and using your web server to handle them)
• If you want to redirect all subdomains to www or the root address of your domain (e.g., randomsubdomain.thejoerussell.com redirects to www.thejoerussell.com)
• If you want to redirect all subdomains not in use to somewhere

How To:

1. Create a new A (Host) DNS Record
2. For host, input * (this may be different depending on your DNS provider, I use GoDaddy)
3. For ‘Points To’, input the desired destination IP Address

Voila! You may have to wait a while and flush your local dns.

Notes:
The wildcard is only used after all other records have been checked. All A (Host) and CNAMES(Aliases) records will be used before resorting to the wildcard. This is great if you need a few exceptions. For example: http://family.thejoerussell.com forwards to my family website via DNS, my webserver is not contacted for this.

My next article will explain how to handle multiple domains and subdomains on the same ipaddress and server using apache.

Why?

DNS is used to translate a domain name into an ip address.  As a webmaster you will probably change multiple settings within your DNS server while configuring your web sites.  Whenever your OS needs to lookup a domain, it contacts a remote DNS server and then caches the results locally to save time.  This is usually not a problem because DNS entries normally expire within a day and an update is not needed before then.  When you are changing DNS entries on your own website, you will probably need to flush your DNS cache to obtain the new record.

How-To

The process of clearing or “flushing” your local DNS cache is different depending on your OS.  I will go thru the process on Windows and Mac.

Windows

1. (Windows Key) + R (should open a run dialog box)
2. Type in cmd
3. Press enter or click OK
4. Type ipconfig /flushdns

NOTE: If you are running Windows Vista, you will have to open the command prompt as an administrator.

Mac OS/X

• Leopard: dscacheutil -flushcache
• Pre-Leopard: lookupd -flushcache

Notes:

• Even after flushing your local cache you may have to wait up to an hour for your DNS server to update.  You will have to clear your cache after your DNS server has updated to get your new record.
• If you run Linux, your distro may or may not have a local DNS cache.  If your distro does cache DNS locally, you may flush it by restarting the service (sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart).

The requested operation requires elevation

Why?

In my days of tech support, I found a fast way to open the command prompt using (Windows key) + R, cmd, (ENTER). Since upgrading to Windows Vista, this has proven to be a less efficient way. With Vista came security advances. Operations that require an administrator account are protected by Microsoft’s UAC. Many command-line programs are protected by UAC. If you try to use one of these programs (e.g. ipconfig /flushdns) you will be given the message “The requested operation requires elevation”.

Fix:

To open a UAC-protected program from the command prompt, you must open a command prompt as an administrator. I will show you the long way and the short way.

Long Way

1. Start
2. All Programs
3. Accessories
4. Right-click on Command Prompt and click Run as Administrator

Short Way

The short way actually takes longer than the long way to set up, but in the end is faster to use. You may also do this to any other shortcut to have it run as administrator.

1. Create a shortcut pointing to the command prompt
2. Right-click on the shortcut and select Properties
3. Select the Shortcut tab
4. Advanced
5. Check Run as Administrator
6. OK, OK

The shortcut will now open the command prompt as administrator, and you will no longer encounter the “The requested operation requires elevation” message.

Notes:

You must be running an account with administrative privileges to run the command prompt as administrator.

A few things about myself and this site you may want to know:

• I am working on my masters degree in Information Systems at Brigham Young University
• This website is a tool to help me to learn linux
• Thejoerussell.com is currently being run on a Ubuntu Server box

In the future there will be how-to’s, comparisons, and reviews.  So stay tuned!