...more recent posts
Wow, it's my dream. I can connect to multiple base stations from the new WHQ. And on the strongest one a shared iTunes account pops up in my iTunes called 'the girl next door'. How cool is that? It's either the person with the connection I am sharing, or it is another person sharing that same connection. In any case: thanks! Nice collection.
That would be good geek valentine text: I want to be on your subnet.
As part of an ongoing effort to confuse our many enemies we have successfully moved World Headquarters to a new undisclosed location. All I can say is it's pretty nice down here.
Well, possibly I did it! God it's fun to make a break through. Not so much fun before that point though.
Now I have to wait to find out if I'm right or not. I believe I now have two running DNS servers (ns1.datamantic.com and ns2.datamantic.com.) I took an old domain not in use (but live on the server in ca) and pointed it at the datamantic.com name servers where I created a new zone file for the domain which points to the new server.
So when the the dns change I made (at the registrar where the domain was registered) propagates out through the global dns system people requesting that domain should start being redirected to the new server. Could be a few hours, or could be 2 days. Probably less than a day though.
Getting that to work is the most difficult, and least interesting task out of this whole project. So I will be very happy if this all works.
I just emailed my first question to the CentOS list. I've been lurking for a few months. Hopefully someone will answer instead of yelling at me for asking something stupid.
I reinstalled the OS. Was a little worried about disk druid and getting the partitions back in the same structure (without erasing the data on the big RAID5 volume!) But it seems like it worked out okay. Back at WHQ now and I can SSH in and see all the data. So now I'm back to where I was before yesterday. :-(
Now to try again.
Well my DNS setup is now completely FUBAR. Shit shit shit. I'm thinking about going to the data center and just reinstalling the OS, since I don't know how to gracefully back out of the mess I've made.
Google is about to roll out a major update to its' search algorithm. You can get a peak at the new system here. Are you still number n?
I have really been splitting my time lately between a bunch of different projects and it is starting to make me a little crazy. Luckily today I finally was able to get the time and the motivation to dive back into the languishing server project. I am at least a month behind, so any claims of progress should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but I am happy to have the ball rolling again.
DNS is just not something I am eager to be really familiar with. But without DNS you can't really do anything on the web unless you want people to always use an IP address instead of a regular domain name. In any case, I ended up installing djbdns instead of the more common BIND. I like the idea of just "yum install"ing whatever the standard thing is (BIND) but djbdns is highly recommended from several sources I trust and more importantly, I was able to find much better setup docs, especially for the real small scale 2 DNS servers on one server configuration that I want to run.
I think I have it installed correctly. And I have my domain name servers registered (ns1.datamantic.com and ns2.datamantic.com). And I have the two additional IP addresses bound to my server for each of those DNS servers. Now it will take 24 hours or so for those nameservers to become active and then tomorrow I can try to setup a zone file to direct actual domain names to the new server.
Apache and MySQL and PHP are already set up. You can see the web server here. Once I get DNS resolving I will pretty much be back on familiar ground and can start moving domains over and building some new tools.
Nice .pdf chart of U.S. frequency allocation.
Looks like Disney is set to buy Pixar in a stock swap worth $7 billion. That will net teh Steve $3.5 billion and make him the largest Disney shareholder. This has been a rumor for a while now, so it's not a huge shock, but it's still a pretty big deal. I guess final word will come tomorrow.
It is looking like you can, with a little bit of effort, run OS X 10.4.3 on standard x86 PC hardware. I don't think this is a problem for Apple. Perhaps just the opposite.
Google Talk can now interact with any Jabber server. This should be a good thing, and should seriously undermine the power of the closed IM networks. But as I've learned the hard way by getting excited about open standards in the past - including Jabber - it's really difficult to predict . Maybe AOL and MSN just have too much of a head start. Still, having Google Talk as part of the Jabber universe (the XMPP universe, to be technical) can only be a good thing.
I'm always changing the font size on web pages while I surf (command shift + to increase, and command - to decrease on OS X,) but why can't I save these settings in Safari for certain domains? That would be handy.
The first web server. I didn't know it was a NEXT Cube.
Ajax enabled PHP function reference.
Nikon to stop producing film cameras:
Following the success of our digital line-up over the last seven years, which has resulted in more than 95% of Nikon's UK business being within the digital area, Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras. This decision will allow Nikon to continue to develop products that match the demands of an increasingly competitive market place....
[snip]
As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006.
A couple of Mac things. Microsoft (bought and) released flip4mac as a quicktime plugin. This will let you play (most) .wmv files right in Quicktime. Previously I have suggested using VLC which still has advantages over Quicktime - full screen playback and no DVD region coding are the big ones - and I still recommend it, but it's nice to see this plugin. I'm guessing there will still be some issues with some wm3 encoded .wmv files but this should take care of most cases.
And Google finally released Google Earth for the Mac. Doesn't look like a Mac app, but it's so freaking cool who cares. Wow. It really wants more than an 867 mhz G4 though*.
* see next post
Wow. This is something I should have known: how google deals with underscores in URIs.
Another talk (.pdf here) about future unicode support in PHP. Nobody is making firm timeframe claims but this one says what I've heard before: maybe this year.
Unicode support will allow for PHP web apps to fully deal with non western characters. This seems pretty crucial if PHP is going to stay relevant. It's a hard problem though.
Looks like Amazon is adding author blogs linked from their bookstore pages:
The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site.This is the obvious commercial use of blogs. Forging relationships with people. These relationships then feed back positively into what you are trying to accomplish (changing people's minds, making money, etc...) I can't tell you how many people I have tried to talk into blogging who just can't get past the "but how will I make money off my blog?" stage. But you shouldn't think about it as a revenue generator; instead it's more like a cheaper and potentially much more effective way to advertise. It baffles me that it took Amazon this long.
And what the heck is Apple doing? They have the iTunes music store - by far the most popular way to buy music on line - and yet they let MySpace.com completely eat their lunch in the music community space. I don't get it. I think they really missed on that one.
Computer history folk music, or too much time on their hands? Maybe both. Every OS Sucks. Mildly funny if you are a geek of a certain age.