What to do with that ancient computer equipment lying around and a whole lot of spare time? Use it play some Queen of course. This guy obviously has too much of the latter.
Archive for the 'Tech' Category
21
Apr
Vatican goes solar
It seems the entire Vatican is going solar. This would make it the first nation-state to generate all it’s power from solar technologies. In fact, they will generate a lot more power than needed and sell the surplus to Italy. Two words: very cool.
Pope Pursues Heavenly Power… [Bloomberg]
I recently ran across a very informative forum post from a reader over at LXer. If you are looking for a new computer pre-loaded with Linux (or no OS at all) then check it out. Way more options than the few well-known standards.
On a side note, LXer is a pretty decent site for Linux news. I became aware of it and saw a few of the people involved when I attended LinuxFest a couple years ago. I have monitored the site (maybe weekly) ever since.
Linux System Vendors List [LXer Forums]
P.S. LXer has their own official one too.
15
Apr
Dvorak likes linux…
Wow… Perpetual tech curmudgeon John C. Dvorak is a Linux convert. Yes, the guy that makes his living writing about Windows. Ubuntu won him over in this case.
Dvorak Likes Linux [PC Magazine]
09
Apr
Who should buy Sun?
There is a lot of speculation lately on who should buy Sun Microsystems. Personally I think IBM would have been a pretty good choice but evidently Big Blue is no longer interested. The possibility of Oracle or Cisco also sounds interesting. Oracle would love to own a low-end database product (possibly just to control it depending on how cynical you are) and is heavily reliant on Java. Cisco has also been making noises about getting into the server game. What do you think?
Loading ...I am becoming increasingly disappointed in the Obama administration. It seems that on critical liberties issues, the President is caving. Whether it’s at least tacit approval of the warrantless wiretapping of citizens (link) or promises to defend the immunity of the telcos that enabled warrantless spying (link), this is not the “change” I was hoping for.
Now Mother Jones reports (link) that a bill has been introduced in the Senate that not only would grant the President to shutdown any network (public or private) but also give the Secretary of Commerce cart blanche to access any data regardless of any laws or regulations. Hopefully this insane proposal dies before it ever reaches the Oval Office.
There are a host of other troubling stances as well that I may discuss later. Very, very disappointed. I guess it’s just an impossible dream to have an administration that truly believes in the principles of the Constitution and respects The People.
28
Mar
The Civil Heretic
I just read a very interesting feature at the NYT on physicist/thinker Freeman Dyson. We need smart contrarian thinking as a balance to any ideological position and Dyson is happy to contribute.
Link [New York Times]
You have undoubtedly seen it, thousands of lines in your logfiles for repeated brute-force login attempts on ssh and other services. I recently ran across a handy how-to for using a utility/service named fail2ban which can (temporarily) auto-ban the hosts that repeated failures are coming from. Working like a charm for me. Several versions of the directions are available for different Linux distros.
Preventing Brute Force Attacks with Fail2Ban on Fedora 9 [HowtoForge]
Update:Â Here’s a version for CentOS [My-whiteboard]
01
Aug
Land of the free?
I have been watching this issue for a while but this Washington Post article does a good job of summarizing it. All your stuff: laptops, cell phones, papers, etc. can be seized at the border with no suspicion of wrongdoing for as long as they feel like keeping them.
Remind me again, which country is the “land of the free”? Even the courts are an epic failure so far on this one.
Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border (Washington Post)
Well, another WordPress update (2.6) is upon us. I was dreading a manual upgrade again since this site uses a custom template. Looking around on the WordPress site led to an unexpected gem–a link to a “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin.
The plugin automates the whole update to the most current version on wordpress.org including backing up your current site and database. It evens takes care of grabbing the newest release file for you. Very cool and everything went perfectly.
WordPress Automatic Update (Techie Buzz)
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