Systems administration for non-sysadmins. Like me.
I was SO getting tired of opening a terminal window to get my web server going when I needed to do some web dev on my MacBook Pro, I finally started looking around for ways to start XAMPP on it’s own when I booted my machine. I found the answer deep in the forums. It…
It’s been a dreadful few days. So I thought I’d share. Saturday night I was on my way to a party at Centro, to celebrate my friend Brian’s 50th birthday. The radio station was cutting out. I thought some poor bastard was probably scrambling in a control room somewhere; so I’ll give him a few…
In spite of Apple’s many transgressions, I finally caved, and bought a Touch. What transgressions? They’re suing a small Victoria, BC business school over the apple logo. The iPhone/Touch doesn’t have cut and paste. The iPhone/Touch doesn’t have an SD card slot for extra memory. The iPhone/Touch SDK comes with a punishingly harsh NDA. Ok,…
Firefox has a terrific feature which allows you to select one of many feed handlers. So, what’s a feed? And what’s a feed handler? We’re going to cover all that right now. Websites with more or less regular content generation, such as blogs or news sites, have syndication feeds. There are two types of feeds:…
You have to feel sorry for the developers of the IE browser. Here they are, toiling away on this software for over 10 years now, and it’s still not able to render pages correctly. Then along comes Google, and on their first try come out with a product which eclipses Microsoft’s fakakta browser several times…
One of the most frustrating things about Linux, and all other flavours of Unix, is the permissions system. It’s not super complicated, but it can get involved, and it helps if you have a clear idea of what you’re dealing with. I don’t use it that often, so every time I need it, I have…
I’ve been using, playing and struggling with Windows since version 3.0. Before that, I used pretty much every version of MS-DOS. I’ve poured a lot of my money into Microsoft. I’ve watched them go from enthusiastic techno geeks, to arrogant robber barons. When Vista was announced, I vowed not to donate another dime to the…
I’ve been frustrated after the conversion to FF 3.0, looking for the Dictionary.com search engine. The Mozilla addons site only has the Merriam-Webster engine. I went hunting for it on the Dictionary.com site, and finally found the link: https://dictionary.reference.com/tools/firefox.html gives you access to the dictionary, thesaurus and reference engines.
Chad Hensler writes in his blog about Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, encouraging Google to challenge a ruling forcing them to turn private user logs over to Viacom. In Dr. Cavoukian’s words: …business should not, in my opinion, rely on the surveillance of consumers to protect their copyright interests. It is not acceptable to…
I’m starting a new category dedicated to the beleaguered legions who are pressed into service during the precious few hours of respite they have from working for the man: The Weekend SysAdmins.