Just wanted to say a quick Merry Christmas. I hope everybody is with loved ones and enjoying the holiday. Now I better get to bed before it’s too late! He was chubby and plump - a right jolly old elf, And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself. A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread. ... "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"
As I mentioned in the past, I’ve been working on subverting my homedir. I’ve also been putting a great deal of effort into subverting my downloads directory. I have archives that date back to 1999 (ICQ99b, anybody…) spread across multiple CD’s and archive directories collected over time. What can I say…I like history. This made subversion a good fit for this task. I wanted to centralize all my download archives and manage to keep track of their history (should I ever need an old version) and synchronize this across hosts as well. Subversion works particularly well from the history aspect as now I don’t have to have 20 versions of one program all stashed in one directory. I just have one and I checkout the appropriate revision if I need to. ...
As a person that frequently configures my Local Security Settings and experiments with Group Policy on my Windows network, this is something that has always baffled me, but I never really had a problem with it. Many of the settings in the Windows Security Options settings are “Not defined” by default. For example, note how neither Enabled or Disabled is selected in this policy. So what happens when you do enable or disable that option, but want to set it back to “Not defined” at a later point? There’s no “Not defined” option and I can’t quite recall right now if there is a way to do this when you’re working with Group Policy Objects…there very well may be. ...
Like a few others, I had a problem upgrading MySQL to 4.1 on Gentoo. I was faithfully following the upgrade guide and got to the revdep-rebuild part of step 3. Revdep-rebuild said it was going to take the following actions: emerge --oneshot --nodeps -pv =dev-php/mod_php-4.4.0-r9 =dev-php/php-4.4.0 =net-libs/libwww-5.4.0-r3 However, I got the following error during the first part of revdep-rebuild when it was trying to compile mod_php: can not run test program while cross compiling Well that’s definitely odd as I wasn’t attempting to cross-compile. I googled around quickly and found several people with a similar problem (with quite a few in German…) and a couple solutions. I tried re-emerging gentoolkit, but that didn’t help. I then came across Bob Rasey who was having the same problem. Looking through my config.log, it did appear that something was trying to link against libmysqlclient.so.12, which I didn’t have…but I didn’t like his solution of adding a symlink as that seemed somewhat hackish. Gentoo is already sensitive enough, and I didn’t want to take any chances. ...
It’s 4 out. That’s right 4. I have a new way of measuring degrees - it’s the number of minutes you can walk outside without freezing your butt off! I think Jason says it best
I’ve been working in Excel quite a bit lately. Here are some useful tips: When using multiple data rows in Pivot Tables, it automatically subtotals each row, which can be somewhat annoying. To disable this feature, use the following: Select the 'product' label in the PivotTable and from the PivotTable menu, try: PivotTable>Field Settings…>Subtotals>None (select) Source When inserting Excel charts in Word, sometimes you want them to be rotated to landscape view. This can also be achieved simply by doing the following: ...
I was recently on a job where I was analyzing various security settings on Windows XP. In an attempt to automate the process, I create a security template and started playing around with secedit. The template I was using only had a few basic security settings in it as I was just testing the analyzing features of secedit. I also had the GUI interface (Security Configuration and Analysis) open as well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention and managed to click “configure” instead of “analyze”. Which turned out to be a big oops. ...
I wrote this post up, but it ended up being pretty lengthy. You can find the full text over here -> Monitoring Apache and MySQL with RRDTool Here’s the intro text: I've been having some problems with my webhost falling over, so I decided to implement some pretty graphs to help me get a better grasp on what was going on. The issue appeared to be some combination of apache, mysql, and ram usage that would occasionally drain the machine of memory. This is also running on John Companies' virtual colo service, so I'm not sure if that's a factor or not, but hopefully I can find that out. They had graciously bumped up my memory limits multiple times, so I was somewhat confident the error was on my side. I was inspired after switching my utility box at home to Gentoo and needing to setup my snmp monitoring tools again. Wanting to migrate to rrdtool, I came across the Advanced SNMP Monitoring with RRDTool and saw that it was quite easy to incorporate other system properties in monitoring data, such as process and disk usage. I'm also going to use this article about Using SNMP and RRDTool on FreeBSD as I don't want to use MRTG (despite the catchy little jingle I dreamed up about 6 years back to the tune of 'Getcho Freak On') to do the polling.
Two-Hundred, Twenty-Two Dollars and Fifty-Eight Cents. That’s the result of over 6 years of hoarding every quarter, dime, nickel, and penny that I’ve laid my greedy little hands on. I discovered that my bank would allow me to just bring it in in a big bag, which probably ended up weighing well over 30 pounds, and they would count and deposit it into my account for me. ...
It was just recently announced that Sunbelt software is going to acquire Kerio’s Personal Firewall that Kerio was going to End of Life at the end of this year. As an avid, and long-time user of Kerio (I still have a download of 2.1.4 from 2002 in my archives), I’m very happy to see this. Kerio is the one firewall product that I’ve used that has allowed me the granular control my anal retentiveness demands without getting too picky. Yes, I’m the guy that only allows Firefox and IE to communicate from TCP ports 1024-500 to TCP ports 80 and 443 as well as a few other exceptions as needed. ...