GUI to Plot Driving Speed

Published on May 27, 2008 under Tech Blog

I needed another Python fix, and I need one pretty badly. I spent the weekend wondering why it appears to be impossible to edit the GUIDs inside an Exchange mailbox store (read: NOT the GUIDs stored in AD for Exchange). Anyways, I digress. My goals were simple. I wanted to ... Read more.

ethX Issues with Xen and Ubuntu

Published on April 20, 2008 under Tech Blog

My new guest VMs under Xen seem to be having issues where upon each reboot, the network interface gets incremented by 1. For instance, it starts at eth0, then goes to eth1, then eth2, and eventually ethX. There are two issues to fix: 1) get the count back to 0, ... Read more.

Size of Uncompressed OSM File

Published on Jan. 8, 2008 under Tech Blog

I've been playing around with OSM a little lately, and have been meaning to construct my own slippy map. At first I wanted to do it on my VPS -- but with rather limited storage, and even more limited memory, there just isn't a way. Three problems exists: the ... Read more.

Computex 2007 Review

Published on June 14, 2007 under Tech Blog

The buzz of Computex is finally wearing off, so I'll finally scribe my account of the event. Yan-Shih was kind enough to go with me, we actually called it a date. The scene was quite similar to the trade shows we ... Read more.

Liferea RSS in Liferea

Published on June 14, 2007 under Tech Blog

Today on Linux.com, Liferea was mentioned I find this particularly because I've been using Liferea for quite a few months, and haven't been able to find anything that better suits my needs. It sits quietly in the corner until a new RSS is available, and slightly changes color. Plus, ... Read more.

Ubuntu Upgrade

Published on May 26, 2007 under Tech Blog

Having been in I.T. for quite a few years, upgrading can sometimes be quite a hassle. Having switched to Linux for many years, the crazy upgrade madness of windows is gone. So, how easy is upgrading in Linux? ... Read more.

Bare-metal Restore

Published on May 25, 2007 under Tech Blog

As you can see by my previous post, my question to squeeze more req/sec from the server, I decided to try out Gentoo (again, last time was four years ago). Now, I like Gentoo, there is no doubt about that. However, I realized things took just too long to get ... Read more.

A Dying Laptop

Published on March 20, 2007 under Tech Blog

I have the pleasure of owning an old T23 laptop. To show you how old this puppy is, the current T series is at T60, and those have been out for over a year. This laptop was made in 2012, and I picked it up somewhat discounted late in 2003. ... Read more.

One More Point Linux

Published on March 15, 2007 under Tech Blog

It should come as a surprise that I enjoy using Linux. For the record, the first time I booted into Linux on my own was 1997, this was just before entering high school. So, while some of my tech friends played with NT, I was rumbling with the Penguin. Starting ... Read more.

Hamachi Rules

Published on Feb. 27, 2007 under Tech Blog

I've been playing around more with Hamachi, and have decided that it officially rules. Since I'm a big Linux guy I don't have access to some features, but the program seems to be a gem. It is brainlessly easy to install (even when doing 20 things at once), and ... Read more.

Ian the Apt

Published on Feb. 14, 2007 under Tech Blog

You know you are too nerd like when your conversations are like this. Preface: I posted some packages I needed to upgrade into a Skype window (much better than a clipboard).... [11:56:03] Kelvin Nicholson: sorry, needed to post that somewhere [11:56:04] Ian FItzpatrick: i am not apt! [11:56:15] ... Read more.

Automated MySQL Backups

Published on Jan. 22, 2007 under Tech Blog

Historically I've used the ever-so-popular AutoMySQLBackup script.  While it seems to work just fine, I've decided to give another solution a whirl.  This solution, provided through Zmanda, seems to be less hackery and more enterprise.  The instructions are very clear, and the backup test went as planned.  Looks  like ... Read more.

Unified Linux Desktop Experience

Published on Oct. 12, 2006 under Tech Blog

I'll admit, I think one of the thickest barriers to entry regarding Linux is variety. I love variety, but general end users don't adjust well to change (IMHO). Thus enter the stage: Portland. So, what does this mean to the end user? This means that, eventually, the UI throughout linux ... Read more.

Hunt the Anomaly

Published on Sept. 1, 2006 under Tech Blog

Information is power, or so many of us think. As an I.T. administrator, no matter what the level, it is of my opinion that knowing what your network is doing is important. This includes regular operation, what it could do in the event of a disaster, or when it is ... Read more.

A Division in 30 Days

Published on June 30, 2005 under Projects

Status: On a Friday I was told we might purchase a division from another company. Monday I heard that we purchased the division, and that we needed to have a website taking orders and a call center, capable of handling 500+/day (and not short calls); by ... Read more.

Tunneling over SSH

Published on June 7, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

As a rule, whenever I'm online I'm logged into my server back in the States. I'm also usually wireless, which we all know is beyond insecure -- I've found it especially useful to tunnel firefox over SSH. I try my best to tunnel stuff over SSH back, and if you ... Read more.

Resize a VMWare Image of Windows XP

Published on Jan. 27, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

 Over the years I have been shrinking the number of computers I own.  At one point my dorm was littered with old P100s, running whatever OS I felt like playing with at the time.  VMWare comes to help.  In this recent oops, an image I made (for Windows ... Read more.

Lighttpd+Rewrite+OpenSEF+Joomla

Published on Oct. 14, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

For those of you not needing Apache and the whole kitchen sink, [insert reason here], Lighttpd is a very attractive contender. For me, it has a small memory footprint, which is highly appealing. However, getting SEO urls to work (i.e. utilizing rewrite), isn't too straightforward. Tada! A little research ... Read more.

Quick n' Dirty Firewall

Published on Aug. 15, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

Abstract The following is a Quick n' Dirty method at implementing a very simple firewall. Locate IPTables Depending on your server, first locate iptables: [root@vps /]# which iptables Create IP Based Accept/Deny Create a whitelist (ignored by firewall) or blacklist (packet dropped) if you ... Read more.

Linux as a TFTP Server

Published on Jan. 16, 2006 under Notes and Tutorials

So, you need a TFTP server for something? Cool, you must be doing something fun. I need a TFTP server to copy Cisco IOS images onto the routers; hopefully you are doing something cooler. 1) Enable TFTP in inetd.conf Open up /etc/inetd.conf and look for the following line: ... Read more.