I realize I asked this question a while back, but in reviewing some of my history, I was reminded of how helpful the site has been for a variety of issues. And I’m sure that questions like this one regarding VMware and VPNs is something “I should have known” – but not knowing where to …
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Category:technical
html 5
A list apart has a nice write-up of the forthcoming HTML 5 standard. If you are like most designers, you probably don’t write all your markup by hand. But until the tools you use catch up to the new elements in (X)HTML 5, you will be doing some markup by hand while you learn. There’s …
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tiny code
I ran across the Tiny Code site recently, and was reminded of how many of us started programming on ancient machines that barely had enough horsepower to handle typing – yet we’d spend hours on end writing little games and whatnot that had to be small or they wouldn’t run. I’d love to see a …
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backblaze storage pods
Yet another link I found off Hacker News, the Backblaze storage pod – 67 Terabytes of storage in a rack-mountable unit for <$8k. I’d love one or two or 80 of these in my spare bedroom 🙂
opennms on serverfault.com
While I don’t currently use OpenNMS, I do lurk on the mailing lists to learn about it 🙂 While on serverfault today, I thought about checking to see what OpenNMS questions there may be, and found several. None I’m qualified to answer, but the results are here: http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/opennms. For posts that merely have OpenNMS mentioned: …
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fit-pc slim linux
I just heard about the fit-PC Slim Linux recently. It’s a 500Mhz, 512M, 60G, 8W, 14oz computer about the size of a set of car keys. Looks like it’s be a near-ideal answer for a really light-weight web server for a home.
upgrading ubuntu editions
I’m getting ready to upgrade my desktop tower because whatever version of Ubuntu it’s running (I think 7.04) is too old. Are there any concerns or cautions I need to worry about? It’s the x86-64 release. My data’s already split onto other drives 🙂
now this looks pretty cool
I’m watching some show on the Science Channel while working from home today, and just saw a segment on the Venture One.\ It’s a three-wheeled, enclosed, hybrid car – but it’s classified as a motorcycle for licensing.If it actually does show up on schedule in 2010, I think I want one. Wiki link.
digital radio recording
Figures, what I thought was a new idea isn’t. I love my DVR, but would likewise love a Digital Radio Recorder so I could pause and rewind ‘live’ radio. With a bit of Googling, I found the Shark (see here). The only improvement I could see would be to get something like this into a …
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reevu
I was watching a recorded edition of Beyond Tomorrow (from Science Channel) and saw an awesome-looking motorcyle helmet, the Reevu. It has a series of polycarbonate reflectors that take light coming into the helmet from the back, reflect it over the rider’s head, and display it on a small mirror just above the visor in …
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mysql auto-changes data types
I was making a change to a small table today: adding a field that wanted to be a varchar. The other fields that were of type char all magically changed to varchar when I was done with the alter statement that added one field. I don’t know if that’s supposed to happen, but it was …
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god bless the lugs
I’m a member of TriLUG – the Triangle Linux User Group. Mostly I’m on the mailing lists as a lurker, sometimes as a contributor. But this week I asked a couple questions which the friendly community jumped-on to assist me with. Thanks guys!
metering bandwidth
A horrible comparison has been drawn in the following AP article about TimeWarner: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jwm8wu3jZWZLcKfIlycqFqFegknwD9126HN8A. “You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?” There’s a problem with that statement: lots of cell phone users …
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preparing for change (part the second)
As with knowledge capture, so must any successful organization pursue training. Training need not be formal. It can be self-paced, on-the-job, as-you-go, or formal. I know that I have learned the most about the product I support not from formal training, but from actually supporting it. Part of that is because we have had a …
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what if google took the day off?
A few of my co-workers an I were chatting recently, and wondered what kind of economic (and physical) impact Google could have if they chose to just shut down for a day. There’s no Service Level Agreement between Google and the world that says they’ll be there, at least none that I’ve seen or heard …
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screen… but for x
I’m sure most Linux sys admins are familair with screen – it’s a virtual terminal multiplexer that allows single logins to be ‘detached’, then resumed later. This is fantastic because it means what you’re doing can survive connection failures, you can share it with other users, etc. Windows has a similar tool called ‘Remote Desktop’, …
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computers were made for americans
Or at least, they were built for people who speak English. Evidence for my claim: the first electronic computers were built during WWII by the British and Americans for code breaking; the first programming languages were designed, written, and implemented by Americans and British; the transistor, which led to the IC, was developed by Americans; …
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that’s right – we’re not falling behind
There was an article recently on Business Week (here) on how the US is not falling behind in math, science, and technology. In fact, we seem to be turning-out more technologists and engineers than we can use. I disagree. The problem seems to be that those technically-minded people that US schools are churning-out won’t work …
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a perfect hash function?
As I was walking to get my turkey pot pie today that was cooking in the microwave in our break room, I looked at the parking lot below and realized that parking lots are approximately perfect hash functions. Think about it: cars come in in some semi-random order; spaces are available in semi-random fashion; cars …
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i know why search is broken
Search is broken. Google, Yahoo, Ask, Alta-Vista, and on, and on the list goes. Hundreds of companies, thousands of individuals. I know why search is broken, and I know what needs to be fixed. Now to figure out the how of fixing. When you’re looking for information, you search on keywords. Google’s been nice enough …
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oh vista, vista, whyfore art thou vista?
I’ve been playing with Windows Vista Beta 2 recently on my home computer, and my overall impression is pretty blah. I must agree with many other reviews I’ve read that it’s really XP SP3. The eye candy is nice (taken from Apple and the OSS world), but nothing worth upgrading over. The new Start menu …
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virtually speaking
I’ve gotten very interested in virtualization technology recently. There’s a high probability I will be working with VMware this summer, and several of my websites (including this one) run on a virtual private server provided by Tektonic, running CentOS 3 through Virtuozzo. Virtualization is a fascinating concept. Instead of needing gobs of physical servers, by …
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containerized datacenters
Expanding on Cringely’s posts late last year (first, second), I was wondering why companies don’t offer turn-key datacenters for businesses. Imagine, for a moment, that you were in need of several servers – email, web, hr, inventory, file storage, applications – and support architecture – routers, switches, firewalls, etc. Locating suppliers for all of these …
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RIFd by RFID
My title today is a compact pair of acronyms. From a presentation I saw this week on WalMart’s investments in RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies as a cost-savings measure, they expect to be able to save around $6.7b dollars annually in salary expenditures by moving to RFID tags and scanners to reduce theft and ease …
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A way around the rotational issue
Haha! My roommate pointed out on Saturday that a bit-wise rotation is just like shifting a value X bits, and or-ing it with the same value shifted the opposite direction (word size)-X bits. For example: A = (A << 7) | (a >> 25) for a 32-bit variable. This means I can, in fact, perform …
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