Chris on September 3rd, 2010

VMWare ESXi 4.1 looks incredibaly interesting. It has better monitoring functions, better authentication integration and other cool features. I need to upgrade.

Sadly, the CPU in my current VMWare host doesn’t support the Intel vt extensions so it won’t run 64bit VMs, and it won’t support ESXi 4.1. So I’m looking at having to drop at least a grand to get a new server capable of running the latest VMWare. My Media Center PC could do it, but sadly, the Shuttle PC I was going to make my Media Center PC has a dead power supply, and Shuttle doesn’t carry accessories anymore.

Anyway, once the iTV ships, I can retire the Media PC and convert it to an ESXi host. Once I do that, here are a list of Virtual Appliances I want to play with:

Chris on August 28th, 2010

When I decided to un-jailbreak my iPad and remove Cydia, I did a “Erase all Content and Settings” via the Apple Settings App. This however caused the iPad to no longer boot. Apparently it erased lots of data, but it did not restore some of the boot processes.

On a Cydia jailbroken iPad, there are two bars of pixled colors during the boot apple screen. These were present on the boot screen after I erased all the content. Eventually the iPad boot up sequence would time out and the iPad would reboot and fail again. I had effectivly bricked my iPad.

Digging around in google didn’t really provide much guidance. I did finally find a document provided  by apple which provides instructions on how to restore a backup from iTunes.

iPad: Unable to update or restore.

Chris on July 27th, 2010

UAE says BlackBerry is potential security threat – Yahoo! Finance.

There’s been issue for awhile with the EU’s privacy laws and data stored on EU citizens on servers outside the EU.

Within 5 years, the UN will begin attempting to establish itself as the sovereign government of the internet in order to address the legal jurisdictional issues.

A look at the history of mankind shows a clear trend. As communication technology improves, so does government get bigger.

Roads led to the Roman Empire.

Ships led to the British Empire.

The railroad and then the telegraph, and then the automobile all enabled the Federal Government to increase its scope and power.

Now the global computer network will necessitate a global government to manage it.

Chris on July 21st, 2010

Preseeds are poorly documented. This is a note to myself on how to reproduce an install

sudo apt-get install debconf-utils # It is part of the debconf-utils package.
debconf-get-selections –installer > somefile.txt
debconf-get-selections >> somefile.txt “

via [ubuntu] preseeding installation 8.10 – how to preseed “encrypted directory” prompt? – Ubuntu Forums.

Chris on July 12th, 2010

I’m beginning to think vmware people are cult-like.

Show And Tell : First vSphere Plugin for WordPress! | Nickapedia.

It may very well be that he wasn’t drunk, but instead is just that senile. Read the via whole article.

“I asked him to start with the letter D and end with the letter R,” deputy M.G. Cummings wrote in the report. “I asked him if he understood and he replied yes. He began with the letter D. When he got to the G he began to omit letters and tried singing the rest of the alphabet real fast.”

Chris on June 21st, 2010

When I saw the release announcement on WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious), I was excited to see that is was finally integrating in the WordPressMu project allowing one installation of wordpress to handle multiple blogs. I maintain several websites and blogs in wordpress, and have struggled with the operational best practices surrounding it.

I was quite excited to see the multisite support so I decided to deploy a VM at the house to test out migration of all my sites to a single install.

First off, multisite would end my ability to allow hosting customers direct access to their databases via the phpmyadmin plugin. Since multisite uses a single database, giving access to that database to one customer means that customer has access to all the sites hosted by that installation.

The next problem is that multisite is not (yet) designed to handle multiple top-level domains. There are tables inside the database that indicate they plan to go this route, but the admin interface isn’t ready for it.

Under the SuperAdmin menu, you can edit the Domain, SiteURL and Home fields to change the URL for the site, but then you can’t actually log into the wp-admin interface for that site.

This link provides an overview of how you can do it via editing the wp_sites table, however the Admin interface isn’t exactly setup to allow you to manage the site once you move it to a different domain.

Then there is the confusion over the wp_blogs table managing sites and the wp_site table managing domains.

WordPressMu had a plugin for Domain Mapping that has been updated (but not yet released, you’ll need to download from the author’s SVN trunk) to support WordPress 3.0. I’ve had better luck following this guide and using the Domain Mapping plugin.

However, with the Domain Mapping plugin, I’ve noticed some strange behavior with using multiple domains mapped to the master. I’m gonna chalk this up to running a non-released code.

In short, Multisite is not yet ready for primetime (based on my needs). I suspect it was more designed for a site like Redstate that allows users to host their own diaries, or the AJC where different reporters have their own blogs under the ajc.com domain.

I’ve not yet played with the features of the new Twenty Ten theme, but the ability to use the WordPress interface to build out custom page menus looks to be kick ass.

Just before the 3.0 release I converted the PrimeHarbor website to a wordpress site. Since I’ve not yet cut that over to production, I think I’m going to take the time to build it out under 3.0. And since PrimeHarbor is the site hosting the other domains, it makes sense to make that my root site if and when I go to multisite.

Chris on June 17th, 2010

Courtesy of Intuit Works to Restore Online Access – WSJ.com:

Intuit Inc. said it is trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night, leaving consumers and small businesses without access to online versions of the company's accounting and tax software.

Intuit’s products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon.

A company spokeswoman said it hadn't yet identified the cause of the outage, but ruled out a cyber attack. Some Intuit websites were beginning to come back online late Wednesday afternoon, she added…..

While many small businesses have their own issues with disaster recovery, the fact that all your critical data is stuck on a server you have no access to should be a source of concern. I’ve not used their online products, but if you can’t export your data to a Quickbooks file for use on your PC, you’re just asking for trouble.

Chris on May 11th, 2010

Found this on Austin Scott’s website. It looks kinda neat. Maybe a candidate for the Gwinnett GOP’s site.

About Wibiya.

Chris on March 4th, 2010

Useful reference on building a dpkg from source:  Rolling your own Debian packages part 2.