I’m playing with the iphone and so far so good. The intergration and UI show how developed the product is. Serious time wasting potential.
Category: Geek (page 24 of 36)
This is a couple of months old but the CGI animation is first rate. You can see it in HD on the Vimeo web site.
One of the things that I did not like about Joost was it needed a client to work. On my PCs that client frequently crashed so I uninstalled it and did not bother to try it much.
Now they’ve converted to a Flash based web page. I’ve just watched some of my favorite scenes from The Professional and a CSI episode. So far there is a brief ad before the show but it’s not intrusive. It went from a kludgy client to a simple web based service.
I don’t think I’ll watch whole movies on Joost but it just got added to my list of fun time wasters.
WordPress blogs are based on MySQL and all the dynamic content is stored in a database. After trying out plugins, odd themes, and generally screwing around, my database has items in it that I can’t even recall what they were or if I need them.
One way to clean out the database is to export the blog to an XML file. This will produce the posts, pages, and all the comments and not export the ton of junk in the database. This way I create a clean empty blog, add the users, set up the theme and look I want and import the data.
This produces a very clean installation. It also removes me as the author for the comments I’ve left on my own blog. The table wp_comments table has a user_id field that the XML file does not have.
What I wanted to do is run a MySQL command that will find all instances in wp_comments which match my e-mail address, and update that record with my user_id on the blog. I could do this one at a time using phpMyAdmin but that’s pretty inefficient, not geeky, and time consuming.
After some research I found out to run these commands:
$ mysql -p USE blogdatabase; Database changed SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE user_email = 'notreally@myemail.com';
That gets me the ID number for my user. Since it’s the first user created the ID is 2.
UPDATE wp_comments SET user_id = 2 WHERE comment_author_email = 'notreally@myemail.com'; Query OK, 113 rows affected (0.00 sec) Rows matched: 113 Changed: 113 Warnings: 0
This updates the wp_comments table so comments left by me using my e-mail address.
My upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS = FAIL.
Last week I created a VPS on Slicehost. I’ve been using Tektonic for a while now and have no complaints. The support is very good and I can backup my VPS for when I need to.
I’m using Slicehost because I don’t want both of my domain DNS servers on the same provider. They offer Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, runs on top of Xen, and provide console access via an Ajax web front end. You need to pay extra for a backup option. Aside from that one little point, using Slicehost is ridiculously easy and very manageable. They eat their own dog food and it shows.
On my Tektonic VPS it’s running on top of Virtuozzo. No console just ssh but I do get to make a backup of my VPS and re-installing is a breeze. My only complaint is that it’s running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS which is a little dated. For example the subversion client is 1.3.2 and I’d like to see more current versions such as 1.5.x. On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS I just added the backports repository and I get current versions of packages.
Switching to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should be simple. As root I ran these commands:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get install update-manager-core do-release-upgrade
This is a seamless process and aside from asking me some questions, I had no issues. The only issue I had is when I rebooted my VPS, it left the VPS un-bootable. The support tech that I chatted with had not seen that before. My VPS would not even start and I had to re-install it.
I’m now restoring the VPS to the backup I made yesterday, so it’s not all a total wash. Most likely I’ll work with Tektonic to get 8.04 LTS on that slice provided they offer it. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is still supported so aside from consistency across servers, this is not a big deal for me.
Found this while wasting time on reddit.com. You’d really have to play Valve’s Portal to understand why this music video is very cool. Sung by the computer GLaDOS in one of her more stable moments.
My PC is working so I may play some Portal myself tonight.
I just installed the client software from Dropbox and it looks very slick. I already back up my server data in two places but the idea of having a (free) place to just drop some workstation files might be useful. I’d played with other free storage tools before but they were all a little cumbersome so I gave up on it.
With Dropbox, you just place files and folders into your “My Dropbox” and the client just syncs it up. It feels like rsync without the setting up of ssh or the CLI geek knowledge needed. Just drag and drop.
This uses Amazon S3 as the storage medium and encrypts the data. The web page is a little like Facebook and shows you your activity. It’s all third party so I won’t be putting oh say, bank data, on it but most of what I use is available on the Internet anyway.
Wonder how shared folders work? Have to try that.
Sometimes I don’t get just spam in my e-mail. Monolith purchased the rights to the F.E.A.R. name from Activision. Check out the sequel web site.
The first F.E.A.R. was meant to be played late at night and in the dark. When I played it, it scared the crap out of me. This real sequel is out in February 2009 and I’ll probably buy it the day it comes out for the PC.
10 years ago, I had to be careful about what Dilbert cartoons could be put up in my cubicle since some of them were dead on accurate.
This one hits close to home for any one in Network engineering:
In my current job, this is more funny as we get lots done. But in my past life this kind of road block was a daily event. Putting up this one would have gotten me another talking-to.
The Mythbusters are awesome. CPU rendering vs GPU.
What a demonstration.
