Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: March 2009

Oz got weird in season 4

I love Oz, it’s one of my favorite shows of all time. In season four though it got weird. In the episode called Conversions Luke Perry stars as a Christian pastor and in one scene casts demons out of a fellow prisoner. Very strange. Then in the episode Revenge Is Sweet they test a drug that ages you based on how long your sentence is.

Comments closed

Found a new backup program – CrashPlan

I was reading reddit today and was reading an article about a guy who lost his laptop. One of the programs he used was CrashPlan. I looked into it and really liked what I saw so I bought two licenses (because I didn’t want to see ads) and have setup my home mac and my wife’s mac.

I am also looking at their business solution + server to backup laptops at work. They have a 30 day trial so I will be playing with that on Monday.

One of the problems with laptop backups that the Apple crowd fixed was only backing up when your on the network via Time Machine. As far as I know (and I have looked) here isn’t Time Machine type solution for Windows until now with CrashPlan.

The other think I like is the ability to back up to other computers on the network and friends systems outside your local network.

CrashPlan can also backup to the cloud to their protected data center.

Comments closed

Puppet…

I am a system administrator for Pelago, makers of Whrrl. Currently I manage about 120 Linux systems (Running Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft or Hardy Heron). I was looking at a better way to maintain configuration across the fleet. Currently I use a combination of ssh keys and shell scripts. So imagine my surprise when I read this on Puppet’s Introduction (emphasis mine):

_This, combined with the fact that organizations rather than sysadmins usually retain the copyright for these tools, means that most sysadmins start from scratch at every new company, building ever-more-powerful systems based on ssh and a for loop or something similar.

Wow, they are talking to me personally I am going to go through the rest of the documentation and see if I can get it setup.

Comments closed

Hard to find good web designers

My wife is a comic book writer and artist. She has two books out right now with the third coming soon (http://faminelands.com). She has been putting a lot of work into her website and I suggested she just pay someone to do that. She told me she investigated that option but didn’t find anyone that she liked.

I browse craigslist all the time and knew there were always a lot of people advertising web design so I told her I would look into it.

Turns out she was right. Most of the ads are really poorly done and quite a few don’t even have portfolios. I suspect a lot of them are folks who took a community college course on HTML and are now “web designers”.

I heard back from a few who said “their plate was full” or a nice way of saying they didn’t want to work on the site (then why are you advertising?).

Now that isn’t to say we didn’t find anybody. Some of the folks had real skill but also wanted $2k for a site redesign – I wasn’t willing to pay more than $500.

So for now I guess its up to her.

By the way if your a web designer please contact me.

Comments closed

Blog from the dead!

So I decided to bring back my blog. I was going over past entries and got a kick out of reading old entries. I have also decided to make a new and concerted effort to get into more programming…again.

That’s not to say I haven’t been programming but most of the programming I do is based around system administration. Now that I have an iPhone I think I want to cut my teeth on that platform. To that end I recently picked up a series of Apress books focusing on the mac platform.

  • Learn C the Mac
  • Learn Objective-C on the Mac
  • Beginning iPhone Development Exploring the iPhone SDK

I took a C course and the University of Washington so I am pretty comfortable with that but I got the first book anyway to learn more about Xcode and how to use it most efficiently.

Comments closed