May 19, 2012

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Annouced: Apple iPad tablet-like device, iPhone on steroids!

January 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment


Finally Apple’s tablet device has been officially announced. Steve Jobs just now got done with the presentation finished.

Here are some basic specs…
1/2 inch thin, 1.5 pounds, ~9.7 inch high rez display, 1ghz Apple A4 chip… New Apple chip that contain all the controllers. Accelerometer & compass, WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, speaker/mic and 30pin (standard) connector, 10 hours of battery life, 16 to 64gb Flash storage…

IPhone App compatible and can be scaled up to new screensize (pixel doubling)

More to come.

Filed Under: Apple, Cloud Computing, Gadgets, General, Software, Technical, Technology, Web Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Happy 2010!

January 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

2010 Movie CoverMay 2010 be a more prosperous year for everyone.

For me 2009 was a depressing year of government bailouts and indecision.

Where are the flying cars and trips to Jupiter I’ve been expecting since childhood (2001 & 2010 movies). Instead of space exploration, all we got was a stinking terrorist attack (WTC) and an Undie Bomber. Sigh…

Perhaps 2010 will be the “Year we make contact” and final disclosure along with a global social transformation.

We’re about overdue for something like this.  Never know what the “black budget” has gone into since the last major releases of things like the stealth fighters and bomber.  Too much space stuff is being discovered and too many organizations, like the Vatican, are starting to focus on the “heavens”.  Perhaps the next big revelation is that we [humans] have quietly built bases on other planets in our solar system with help from “others” who have assisted us technologically.  Too many people simply “vanish” without a trace every year without something going on.  Perhaps they are being moved to other places.

Enough rambling from me.  Looking forward to what 2010 brings us.

Filed Under: General

2 XenServer installs on older and newer hardware

December 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Over the past few years, I’ve become a big fan of Virtualization technologies like VMWare, VirtualBox, XEN, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc. So much so that I moved ALL my hosting operations (20+ clients) to providers like Slicehost, Linode and CrystalTech for Hyper-V.

At home, I tend to use VirtualBox from Sun. It seems to be perform the best for both Windows and Linux, although I lost the ability to Bridge the VM’s NIC after upgrading to Windows 7.

At work, I initially used VMWare Server to setup numerous VMs for software testing and platform integration testing and other fancy stuff like that. I tried for about a year to get our IT staff to start using it, and FINALLY, they decided to go completely virtual running VBox on the Solaris platform. I still use VMWare Player for a couple VMs I have left from the past, but VBox is my favorite.

XEN I did not have so much experience with since I *thought* it was more of a IT Backendish type of Virtualization software and more arcane. Perhaps it was at one time.

But regardless of my misconception, I decided to download XenServer last night and install it on one of my spare boxes. XenServer is full virtualization “OS” that you install and all the guest machines are built inside it.

Won’t go through all the details, but the XenServer was a breeze to install, only asking basic questions and for the IP address of the server. It’s best to put it on a decent machine with lots of hard drive space and  plenty of RAM and processor power (Virtualization Extensions on the CPU is a BIG plus and allows you to run Windows VMs).

On older machines, like my old Pentium D (Dual Core) machine, it does not have processor virtualization extensions, so it was not able to run my Windows virtual machines.  The Linux (Ubuntu) servers worked just fine.

For Windows ones, I used a newer Quad Core Phenom box and put 4 Windows Server 2003′s on it by using the VMWare to XEN conversion program.  Was a little buggy getting it converted, but the Citrix XEN forums helped.

There are some sites out there you can google that have XEN ready images you can upload through the XenCenter software into the server and boot.

Overall, I’ve been extremely happy with the performance of XenServer and don’t think I’ll go back to desktop type virtualization solutions like VirtualBox and VMWare Server which has a crappy, buggy web interface (last time I used it) and requires you to already have an existing OS.  XenServer is OS+Virtualization solution all-in-one.

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Cool Stuff, General, Linux, Microsoft, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Ubuntu

Windows 7 (Home Premium) first impressions

October 24, 2009 By 2 Comments

First Install

windows7-150

I am usually not big on Microsoft releases, but since Vista was a disappointment and XP was getting so… old …I decided I would do something I’ve never done before.  I actually purchased a version of Windows.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have technically purchased older versions, but they were all pre-installed or re-installed through restore CDs and the like.  Basically I was good and paid the “Microsoft Tax”.

Since there are quite a few workstations in my home, I chose to buy the Family Pack, which gives 3 licenses, and installed first on my dad’s computer (No, I don’t live at home)…  Figured if Dad was ok with it, then it’ll probably be ok for the rest of the family.

His machine is an older HP a1430n purchased from the local Office Depot,  it only had 1GB of RAM, AMD 64 3800 processor, integrated nVidia video, 250GB SATA drive, a printer, Microsoft fingerprint reader, and a few other misc peripherals.   Since he was running XP on it, I was required to do a “Clean install” instead of upgrading it, which was expected.  It did put everything from XP into the C:Windows.old folder and did a nice, fast install of Windows 7.  No problems and it was noticeably faster installing than even the 2009 RC1.

Got him booted in and went to manually copy a thumbdrive backup of his My Documents into the new Documents folder.  Nicely, Windows was smart enough to realized what I was doing and proceeded to place the My Pictures, My Videos, etc. from the old My Documents into the correct locations that Windows 7 puts them.   Nice!

Fired up IE 8, nothing new there, basically the same as IE 8 on XP.  Downloaded Firefox and Chrome and setup his Google Apps icons for email, docs and so on.

For a 60 year old, Dad is pretty savvy on the PC primarily just from using them casually over the years, so I plan to let him install his software and misc printer drivers and so forth.

The only thing that really won’t work on his setup is his Microsoft Finger Print reader for logging in.  Microsoft did not seem to write a driver for it and I didn’t try using the XP one.

I did also yank some RAM from an old machine and upped him to 3GB RAM and he’s good to go.  No complaints so far.

Second Install

Second install, it was my turn.   I have a Gateway Quad Proc AMD Phenom, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800GT w/ 500 watt PSU, Blueray ROM drive along with a normal CD/DVD RW.  running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 that came with it.  Fired up the install and it was for the most part non-eventful although it did end up taking around 4 hours since I upgraded instead of clean installing.  It gathers all settings and files from the old OS and “moves” them into the new.  That takes forever and at times it seems like it is “locked” up or frozen at certain percentages of the process.  I just let it go, it rebooted a few times and came up.

Once in, I was sure to check for updated versions of all my utility software and Open Source things I run to ensure maximum compatibility.

A few minor annoying things I’ve noticed, in no particular order:

  • Windows got sluggish a few times, which I believe was my Tortoise SVN process updating the working copy of my Repo.  Once done, I upgraded it to the latest 64 bit version and it has been fine.
  • My USB ports on the front of my machine cut out a few times, not sure what the cause was, but everything seems to be ok now.
  • My Multimedia card reader doesn’t seem to be working.  Windows 7 used a generic driver for them, so it may just need to be updated.
  • When plugging in a USB card reader, Windows recognized it, but it could NOT read a FAT32 formatted Sony Memory Stick and it insisted on me to format it.  Luckily I did NOT, put it on my Mac and it worked fine.  Pictures SAVED!  Yay!
  • External hard drives (I got 4 of them) are working OK.  One of them has been dropping out occasionally (my bittorrent drop) and Vuze gets angry.

Most of these annoyances don’t bother me too much.  Overall, World of Warcraft (WOW) seems to be noticeably faster loading and exiting, program loading is fast and I have no other complaints.

Next Install, the wife’s machine.  More to come.

Filed Under: General, Microsoft, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Windows 7 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

VPS.net Service… Nice website, bad service

September 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

VPS.net logoBrowsing around the various forums, I saw VPS.net mentioned as a good VPS provider.

Signup and provisioning of the initial VPS server was relatively painless. I chose the Ubuntu 8.04 image. It seemed relatively fast (at first), but seemed to fluctuate. While compiling the web server software to test, it locked up. Wasn’t sure what happened. Cancelled and tried it again. No luck. I proceed to update all the Ubuntu patches, rebooted and finally got the webserver compiled.

While working with it, at one point, I entered the “w” command to simply see the load. It locked up, became unresponsive and rebooted a few minutes later. A few days later, the same thing happened.

I am NOT impressed, at all, with their level/quality of service. I wouldn’t even recommend it for testing purposes.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve had dozens of VPSes with Slicehost and Linode and have never encountered any issues like these.

So I cancelled VPS.net and figured since I only had an account for 2-3 days, I would get a refund…. NOPE. Must of been confused from looking at a few different providers. Regardless, there should be some kind of refund, at least pro-rated.

UPDATE: Refund was issued since I used the service for so short a period. But don’t count on this being frequent or becoming a policy.

Filed Under: General

Nikola Tesla, a man ahead of his era

June 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

200px-N.TeslaNikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer. Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan near the town of Gospić, Vojna Krajina, in the territory of today’s Croatia. He was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is often described as an important scientist and inventor of the modern age, a man who “shed light over the face of Earth”.  He is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

He also believed that he “received” knowledge from “outer space”… Perhaps he was just seeing the future in his Tesla coils. :-)

Click more for some videos…YouTube Preview Image

YouTube Preview Image
Filed Under: Cool Stuff, General, Humor, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

Cherokee Web Server

April 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

indiankidI ran across a webserver called Cherokee a week or so ago while looking around for “light” alternatives to Apache on VPSes.  It looked pretty nice, so I downloaded it and compiled the latest version 0.99.9 and started it up.

The nicest thing, I think, about this server is the simple Web configuration UI (cherokee-admin).  When you start it, it generates a one time hashlike password that you then use to log into the web config.  From there, you can configure virtually (no pun intended) all aspects of the web server, including virtual hosts and many other settings.

The reason primarily for my use is serving up my static HTML sites and light PHP ones as well, light meaning minimal DB calls for things like contact form entry, single simple “SELECT * from where whatever = whatever” type querys with small recordsets and so on.  I moved about 20 of my customer sites to it and so far so good.  That is the level of confidence I had in Cherokee.  100% stable so far.

Compiling it from source may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it really isn’t that difficult.

Here’s how I did it from a new VPS.

apt-get install nano htop build-essential mysql-server php5 php5-cgi php5-mcrypt php5-mysql gettext

This installs nano (a simple text editor), htop (top on steroids), build-essential which is a meta package containing necessary packages to compile crap, mysql, PHP, a few extensions and gettext which the ./configure told me it needed and I’m surprised it wasn’t part of the build-essential.

If this is a fresh ubuntu build, you’ll probably get a locales error… Use this to correct.

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Download the latest cherokee source.

Untar it and enter the folder.

Now run these commands, modify the paths to your liking.  This runs the pre-compile config, makes then installs it, it then copies the init script to that folder and changes the permissions to allow it to execute.

./configure –localstatedir=/var –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –with-wwwroot=/var/www
make
make install
cp contrib/cherokee /etc/init.d/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/cherokee

to Autostart the init script on boot… Run this…

update-rc.d -f cherokee defaults

That’s about it, read the documentation for specific information on features and have fun.  It is a VERY fast and light webserver that is very well suited for basic websites running on minimal memory VPSes.

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, General, Linux, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Ubuntu, Web Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Apple needs to do something new!

February 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Apple_Mini_Tablet_iPhoneonline casino netOutside of a few minor updates to the iPhone (3G) and updated laptop line, Apple has gotten pretty stale.  I think they put the hopes of “Apple Faithful” (I’m one I’ll admin) into overdrive and couldn’t keep it up.  Sure the economy is a little bad.  Well maybe a lot bad, but if they would put out another totally new item, like the iPhone was, I think it would sell like hotcakes.

I’m at the point now, technically, where I have all the desktops I need… Also have a 17” and a 12.1” laptop, a Mac Mini, an older G5 Tower and some Dell servers.  Due to the price of the iPhone data plan, it has mostly been used for a PDA (I don’t have 3G here).  The only thing that would fill the void in my book would be a mini tablet (see picture) or a home server/firewall type device with TBs of storage space + N router + other goodies.

With something like $14,000,000,000 cash in the bank, they should be putting out new stuff for people to spend their “stimulus” monies on. :-)

Filed Under: Apple, Gadgets, General, iPhone, Technology

Revolution2 – Premium WordPress Theme Collection

January 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I love WordPress, but one thing that it’s not known for is having a really nice default theme.  It is exceptionally plain.  I’ve spent HOURS looking for nice functional themes only to download ones that “seem” nice then suck once you install them and have problems in the code that weren’t present on the screen cap.

Over the course of my journeys through many, many theme sites, I kept running across a developer whose free themes I have used before.

Brian Gardner

Revolution2His free themes are nice, clean and customizable.  The first one I used was the “Revolution Blue” (comes in red and gray too).

I ran across his site again the other day and saw that the “Revolution2″ series is available and he seems to be getting together a nice group of developers and focusing in many different genres of WordPress themes, from general blogs to Real Estate, TV, Office, Photography, etc.  These new themes make WordPress act more like a true CMS system than “just another WordPress blog”.

With a few free plugins and a little effort, these themes can give any WordPress installation a nice facelift.

For the good stuff, there is a cost involved, but the cost is minimal compared to the time I have wasted trying to find a decent design for my site.  Brian also supports the themes on his website forums and if WordPress updates come out that break any of them or has new functionality, he puts out updates.  Also, his response to email is very quick (even last night, while on vacation, he responded to my email :-) ).  So the cost is WELL worth it.

I plan on implementing one of the Revolution2 themes here on iDude over the next few weeks (as time permits).

Filed Under: Cool Stuff, General, Other Blogs, Software, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to Always Browse “Incognito” with Google Chrome

December 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Here is a little tip I came up with after getting annoyed going into incognito every time after opening Chrome.

Setting the following setting will allow you to launch Chrome in incognito mode.

incognito

Be sure to put 2 dashes "--" in front of "incognito". Sort of looks like one in the screenshot.

Filed Under: General, Software, Web, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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