Who wants to go into business with me? I’ve got a super-cool storage company idea. Load up a metric buttload of cubesats with radiation-hardened {{SSD}} storage, solar power, and [relatively] simple communicaton stacks (secured by {{SSH}} or {{SSL}}, of course), and launch them into orbit. You think cloud storage is cool? What about above-the-cloud storage? Pros: …
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Category:technical
dave winer is wrong
Or maybe he’s right. But for the wrong reason. Over on Medium, which is where I saw his post, Dave said: “The problem of requiring HTTPs in less than 140 chars: 1.Few benefits for blog-like sites, and 2. The costs are prohibitive. There’s actually a #3 (sorry) — 3. For sites where the owner is …
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knoppix remastering virtual appliance
In preparation for an upcoming post on remastering {{Knoppix}}, I have made a {{VirtualBox}} {{virtual appliance}} based on the Knoppix v7.6.1 DVD all set for remastering. /dev/sda holds the raw files. /dev/sdb1 is a swap partition. To use the appliance, download the Knoppix 7.6.1 DVD. You’ll need a boot environment for remastering, and Knoppix has …
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haiku appliance
I have been a fan of Haiku for years – and BeOS since way back in the 90s. I run a Haiku mirror, and try to pay attention to the project’s updates. Today I am making available a Haiku-OS r1 alpha 4.1 virtual appliance! Download it from me here (created in {{VirtualBox}}, but in .ova format, so …
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sap bapis and hp oo
Couple quick notes: {{SAP}} is not designed for automated / programmatic access – their “{{BAPI}}”, or binary application programming interface, requires additional licensing beyond just the product to use I made the naive assumption that a “BAPI” was like a {{WSDL}} – and it is, but it’s proprietary, not open (and it’s binary, not plaintext {{XML}}) …
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enable virtualization in the bios of your lenovo t450s
If you install {{VirtualBox}}, like I did last week, [at least] under {{Windows 10}}, and you have not gone into the BIOS ahead of time to enable virtualization, you will be limited to 32-bit guest OSes. Enable {{virtualization}}, and the 64-bit options become available. Not sure why you have to enable the hardware virtualization extensions to get …
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show only most recent facebook news feed
(Note: I did this in Chrome – it’ll be a little different in other browsers) I have several complaints about the book of the face – not least of which is that it likes to reset your News Feed from “Most Recent” (aka most useful) to “Top Stories” (aka whatever Facebook wants you to see). …
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“like” problems: social ‘voting’ is a bad idea
The news story making the rounds about {{Facebook}} the past few days indicates they’re working on a kind of “dislike” button. The problem with the Facebook “like” button is the same problem {{Google}} has with Google+ and their “+1” button: it doesn’t tell you anything meaningful. Voting on Reddit doesn’t really convey much meaning, either. Stack …
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system-wide proxying with os x (yosemite)
Perhaps you’re at a coffee shop, and want to ensure your communication is secure. Or maybe you are out of the country, and need access to something like annualcreditreport.com. What’s a body to do? If you have a Mac, set up a system-wide proxy setting for a new Location, of course! This is a very …
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on-demand, secure, distributed storage – one step closer
In follow-up to a post from 2013, and earlier this year, I’ve been working on a pointy-clicky deployable MooseFS+{{ownCloud}} atop encrypted file systems environment you can rent/buy as a service from my company. I’ve also – potentially – kicked-off a new project from Bitnami to add MooseFS to their apps list.
automation is a multiplier
Multipliers. They’re ubiquitous – from ratchet wrenches to fertilizer, blocks-and-tackle to calculators, humans rely on multipliers all the time. Multipliers are amazing things because they allow an individual to “do more with less” – a single person can build a coral castle with nothing more complex than simple machines. Or move 70 people at 70 miles …
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reverse proxying from apache to tomcat
After much hemming and hawing, I was able to get {{Apache}} working as a reverse proxy to {{Tomcat}} today. <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName domain.com ServerAlias www.domain.com ProxyPreserveHost on ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/path/ ProxyPassReverse / http://domain.com:8080/path/ </VirtualHost> That’s all you need (though you can add much more). Note the trailing slashes on the proxy paths – without them, …
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pydio has clients now
In update to my recent how-to, I found out from the founder of Pydio there are dedicated clients now. IOW, you don’t have to use just the WebUI. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but good to know they’re now there – it makes comparing Pydio and other tools like ownCloud easier.
what level of abstraction is appropriate?
Every day we all work at multiple levels of abstraction. Perhaps this XKCD comic sums it up best: But unless you’re weird and think about these kinds of things (like I do), you probably just run through your life happily interacting at whatever level seems most appropriate at the time. Most drivers, for example, don’t …
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may 11 bglug meeting 6:30p at beaumont branch: topic – freeipa
We will be meeting at the Beaumont Library Branch at 6:30p on 11 May. Our speaker is the LUG’s own Nathaniel McCallum, one of the FreeIPA maintainers – and all-around nice guy. Come out and support the LUG, learn something new, and meet cool people.
owncloud vs pydio – more diy cloud storage
Last week I wrote a how-to on using Pydio as a front-end to a MooseFS distributed data storage cluster. The big complaint I had while writing that was that I wanted to use ownCloud, but it doesn’t Just Work™ on {{CentOS}} 6*. After finishing the tutorial, I decided to do some more digging – because …
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why do i use digital ocean?
Besides the fact that I have a referral code, I think Digital Ocean has done a great job of making an accessible, affordable, cloud environment for folks (like me) to spin-up and -down servers for trying new things out. You can’t beat an average of 55 seconds to get a new server. There are other …
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create your own clustered cloud storage system with moosefs and pydio
This started-off as a how-to on installing ownCloud. But their own installation procedures don’t work for the 8.0x release and {{CentOS}} 6. Most of you know I’ve been interested in distributed / cloud storage for quite some time. And that I find MooseFS to be fascinating. As of 2.0, MooseFS comes in two flavors – the …
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keep your wordpress installs up-to-date
I run several websites on my server – nothing heavy, just some various vhosts for {{Apache}}. Many (but not all) of them run {{WordPress}}. At some unknown point (and I haven’t kept the crap that was being used around), over 100,000 files were uploaded to the root directory of one of the websites (the only …
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please reply at top
There is a constant war over top-repliers, bottom-repliers, and inline-repliers. If you’re replying to an email, reply at the top. Unless there is some overarching need to reply inline (hint – it is very very rare). Bottom-replying makes me have to reread all the crap that has been left from previous messages before I get to what you …
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ifttt & box drive my desktop backgrounds … with a little cron happiness
I love that {{OS X}} lets me change my background on a schedule (I use every 30 minutes now). But I don’t like having to find pictures to populate my desktop menagerie with. Enter completely SFW backgrounds via RSS feeds! Using IFTTT, I watch for new items from a variety of daily photo feeds, and …
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merging centos iso images
Thanks to @Anon on Unix.SE for the pointer on how to do this. And to @Andy‘s comment on @mmckinst‘s answer for the warning about additional packages you may need. As my three readers know, I run a {{CentOS}} mirror. One of the idiosyncrasies of CentOS, like its upstream {{RHEL}}, is that DVD ISOs aren’t always just one image – …
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columnar “email”
There needs to be a better way of handling group conversations. IRC uses the constant scroll mentality. Email has reply-at-top, reply-at-bottom, and reply-inline. Forums, reddit, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and the like have a scroll-like view – every new post is merely sequentially listed after the last. This can all lead to highly confusing digital conversations. …
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what should an “ideal” support ticketing system provide?
If you were going to create a support ticketing system from scratch – what would you put in it? My initial list of needs (some of which derive from my book, Debugging and Supporting Software Systems, and other from my experiences in ticket smashes): “long” title support (HP truncates at 80 characters – give me at …
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bglug presentation – 04 aug 2014 – basics of initial centos/rhel 6.x server configuration
Attached is the presentation for my talk on initial CentOS/RHEL 6.x server configuring. bglug-2014-08-04-myers