Linux Blog

As the new year has turned, I thought it would be a good time to go back and look at my goals for 2009. To be honest they were pretty modest and I’d pretty much forgotten what they were, despite this fact I still managed to get 4 out of the 6 done. Getting certified never happened, but I feel like I became more qualified, which is all that matters right? Hah. I blame the CD ripping on streaming media services like Pandora, Grooveshark and last.fm which pretty much eliminated my need to rip the CD’s. So all in all I guess it was a productive year.

I’m still working on my technical related goals for this coming year, I don’t really know what to put on the list yet, since I’ve found that goals will change as time goes on. For example, I set up my PBX in November of 09 which was about 11 months after I set the goal that I had forgotten about. Maybe I’ll roll the two I did not accomplish in 2009 over, add a the goals of getting more organized and reducing the amount of equipment I have. Yea, those seem reasonable for now.

Happy new year!

Best iPhone Error Message Ever

Not Linux related at all but I thought it was funny.  So, yea. Ignore the giant DISMISS_ALERT button, that’s an error caused by me being stupid, but I thought the actual message was pretty funny.

After dialing a “special” number that I strategically obfuscated using gimp and then may have failed to upload the correct one. I get an:

“Error performing request, No Error”.

Although interesting, I now need to find some one without a jail broken phone to see if they get the same message just for the lols. Anyway this sort of stuff can be found all over the place, I just think its funny to find it on such a trendy hipster user oriented device.

I’m not normally one to just flat out bash Microsoft or trash them for their flaws, but sometimes I do enjoy a good Microsoft Joke.

Here are I know off the top of my head:

Q: How many Microsoft Engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None its obviously a hardware problem
—

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic
navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position. The pilot saw a tall building,
flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window.
Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After
they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it.

“I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building, because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer!”

They’re terrible I know… Terribly *FUNNY*. Post your favorite Microsoft Jokes in the comments or tweet them to @LinuxBlog and I’ll include them here.

What’s up folks? I can’t believe that it’s already August. It seems like forever since I’ve updated the site, although in reality it has only been two weeks. I do have a bunch of content to write up, and some new features to implement to the site. As always if any one has any news, ideas for articles, wants to write some articles get in contact with me.

Some one told me that people like free stuff (who doesn’t?), so I’ve lined up some giveaways that some of you might be interested in. Atleast I hope so.

Tune in next week for more information!

Not that I use Amazon Associates a whole lot, but I got this message from them saying that I can no longer get referral fee’s from Amazon.

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.

We have enjoyed working with you and other North Carolina-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

I have no idea what the “tax collection scheme” is but I’d like to know more about it. Going to the websites they recommend doesn’t really help me as I don’t want to scan through pages just to find the answer.

To me it seems like it would be a good idea for them to reject, as what is stopping an LLC from registering in another state and using the service? If anyone in NC relies heavily on associates this could prevent them from operating, perhaps forcing them to relocate to another state, taking any business and therefore taxes elsewhere. I’m just a small player, I might have got a few referral sales (not from this site) but for those that do heavy affiliate marketing, it might have an impact. This is just on the client side, I’m wondering if it would affect any of the service side. A lot of money is made through services like this, for example Google, so I can see why NC wants a piece of the pie and apparentelly Amazon doesn’t want to pay. I have had no notice from other services.

Oh well, we’ll see how it pans out.

I haven’t posted here in a while so here is a presentation that I did at a local security meeting about the Snort IDS. Not much on its own but gives an introduction on Snort with a few slides about IDS’s a few on writing Snort Rules. On the demonstration slide is where I did a demonstration that didn’t exactly go as planned. I swear it worked at home using Nikto, but its all good since I had a friendly crowd. The additional resources slide shows some great resources for learning about the Snort IDS. So hit my document on scribd!

I haven’t written anything recently, mostly because I’ve been reading a lot of other peoples blogs. I’ve wanted to write, but I don’t want to write what you can read else where. For One, its rather annoying to me, when my RSS feeds are stuffed up with the same regurgitated news, so I’d assume its annoying for you guys. The Second reason is I don’t want to waste my time writing something that only a few will read.

Along those lines, I’ve been pretty busy with personal stuff. I do have a ton of ideas for content, I just can’t conceivably write them all. I don’t know maybe my flame is burning out, or perhaps I need another vacation. Anyone want to do some writing?

Some one told me once that all of the good system administrators are lazy, I believe this but I also think that Linux users are lazy. While I’m not a full time systems administrator, I am a full time Linux user. I sometimes think that I’m so lethargic that I don’t have the energy to turn on a light switch. Hence why I did this (youtube video)

If you couldn’t make it out from the crappy iphone video, it’s my house, I show the circuit, turn the light off, walk in the closet and walk back out again. It’s a rather simple circuit consisting of a switch wired to a halogen light I brought from Ikea. In true open source fashion, if any one is interested in this, let me know and I’ll share how I did it if you can’t figure it out.

I’ve been wanting to redesign the site for a while, but never really got around to it. I hate to add something else to my to-do list or “goals for this year” but I think its necessary since I’ve knocked a couple of them off the list already. Problem is, I finally just got some page rank from Google after them giving me a big fat zero for a couple of months. I’d hate to redesign it and have it all vanish again, then again it could be good since I’d get to clean up the code some. I’ll get some mock ups done, then post them and see what people think. As far as content goes, I’ve been gathering subjects and am going to write a bunch of them soon, that way you won’t have to read News about the site that no one but me really cares about. Until next time, yea… I can’t think of anything catchy today.

Just a quick update to let everyone know that The Linux Blog has moved servers. The hosting company I moved to is Hostgator. I was skeptical to move, since I was hosting it off of a shared dedicated server set up with cpanel/WHM reseller accounts, but I think that this will be better in the long run. For example: the price is right, it is faster and I do not have to worry so much about the system administration and hardware upgrades / failures. I get just about as much bandwidth with all the features I got before and a few extra that I couldn’t afford thrown in. All for about the cost of licensing cpanel and whm on their own. The only down side is the little amount of disk space, but if you decide not to be a reseller, you will be fine since they do an unlimited account (just check the fine print as I did on this one.) The really nice thing about the move is the hardware it runs off of (this is from cpanel and verified via ssh)

Processor #1 Vendor: GenuineIntelProcessor #1 Name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5405  @ 2.00GHz

Processor #1 speed: 1994.900 MHz

Processor #1 cache size: 6144 KB

So, Dual Xeon Quad cores that you see above, which equates to quite an amount of CPU power, roughly 16GHz with all cores combined. It has I believe 8GB’s of ram and a ton of disk space which happens to be provided by scsi disks. Hostgator have servers in each of ThePlanet.com’s data centers, I could go on about them all day but if I were you I’d check their website, its all under the “Company” link at the bottom of the page. You might see some banners up around here from now on and you’re probably smart enough to figure out the rest.

If you’re reading this that means you’re reading it off of the new server. Hopefully all went well and it loaded a little quicker. I’m hoping that there wasn’t any disruption of services, there wasn’t for me except for e-mail services but I think that has something to do with the DNS on the server I was sending the mail from (the old one.) Anyhow I hope you enjoy and if you’re in the market for a new web host use my Hostgator links!

Everyday that I browse the internet I usually bookmark a ton of stuff, well today I’m posting one of those things that have been stuck in my bookmarks for ages.

Everybody loves stickers, but these stickers are special because they’re all open source related and you have to make them yourself. There are two volumes each with at the least a metric ton of stickers in them. I browsed through them and found some I really liked. I don’t have a sticker maker but they print well on a colour laser and  look great stuck on my wall at the office. I guess its a good thing I don’t have a sticker maker, nobody likes sticker mildew. http://openstickers.com