Doug Bunger

Mech Hero MMO

2012-01-22T22:15:00.002-05:00

Lately I've been wasting allot of time playing a massive multiplayer online (MMO) game called Mech Hero. It's very similar to Star Craft or Warcraft 2100, with shades of Mech Warrior blended along the edges. What I find interesting about this one is that it is completely browser based and is built around an elegant freemium business model.The basic premise is that you run a city, and have to

TED Stuff to Remember

2011-12-26T11:15:00.003-05:00

I've been a big fan of TED for several years, because it offers insight into what "the intellectual elite" consider important. Most of these people wouldn't give me the time of day, but occasionally, a few of them make some good points. I had some notes written on the back of an envelope that I wanted to throw away... ah... I meant recycle... so I figured I better blog them so I could find them

Merrill not Lynch Retirement Calculator

2011-12-06T21:13:00.006-05:00

For those of you from outer space, the American economy has been having a hard time recently. One shining example is the paragon of Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, which imploded nicely several years ago, but was too big to fail, so it was "bailed out". It now survives as a subsidiary of Bank of America, who was also too big to fail.We'll I stumbled upon web based retirement calculator (click the

Creating a New Project in SVN

2011-11-08T19:47:00.007-05:00

It had been over a year since I'd created a new SVN project, so of course I forgot how and had to waste an hour trying to figure it out. Assuming a remote SVN server with SSH and working keys...On the server:cd /svnrepossvnadmin create newprojectThe project should now be visible in WebSVN.On the client:mkdir -p /tmp/newproject/{branches,tags,trunk}cd /tmp/newprojectsvn import -m "New Project" .

Potty Humor

2011-10-16T17:39:00.005-04:00

In a gents, somewhere in the UK, a sink manufactured by Thomas Crapper & Company. Uh huh huh huh-- He said crapper.

Recyclable Turkey Gravy

2011-10-16T15:24:00.000-04:00

..and its delicious and wholesome, too.

Good-bye Gnome

2011-09-27T19:13:00.004-04:00

In the latest machine re-org, I reloaded my workstation with Fedora 15. I don't like it. I think they've made several wrong turns, the single biggest being their implementation of Gnome 3.With Gnome 3, they have set a minimum acceptable video hardware platform. That's fine, because they provided a fallback mode in case the machine does not support 3D rendering. Accept for one minor problem...

VM Autostart on XenServer

2011-09-12T18:39:00.003-04:00

Its a good thing I don't need to run VMware, because they are so dependent on a pre-existing Microsoft infrastructure, that I couldn't run it, even if I tried. And I've tried. Of course, I should just go ahead and invest the $3,000 in Microsoft software... just so I can invest a $1,000 in VMware software. Or, I could use Citrix XenServer.Unfortunately, Citrix is doing everything in their power

Linux Rescue for VM on XenServer

2011-09-07T00:52:00.002-04:00

I finally figured out how to rescue a Linux VM running on a Citrix XenServer host, an believe it or not, it is completely unintuitive! First, power off the VM, though if you're going to rescue mode... you're probably "down" already. Second, mount the rescue media (CD/DVD). Third, make sure the VM is highlighted on the left pane of XenCenter.Here's the trick: Across the top of the XenCenter

SSH Tunneliung of X11 Apps

2011-09-05T20:40:00.005-04:00

I had occasion to finally test something I've been wondering for a while: What is the minimal configuration to allow and X11 application to tunnel through SSH? First, this procedure assumes you have a workstation that can display X11 applications. This can either be a Linux desktop or a Windows machine running Xming or another lesser X client. Second, install a system with only the core or

Rubus Cabernet Sauvignon

2011-09-03T15:36:00.002-04:00

From the back label: "flavors of blackberry, currant, and chocolate"... unfortunately, I'm allergic to blackberry and currant. It took several years of research, but my very unscientific explanation is that blackberries, grapes, and blueberries are all related. They all grow on vines, but grapes and blueberries are smooth, but blackberries (and raspberries) are "bumpy". I'm allergic to bumpy

Unlocking Citrix Xensever Memory

2011-08-28T22:56:00.003-04:00

Wow... Has it been that long since I posted? Yeah, its been a wild few weeks, what with hurricanes, earthquakes, hail storms, trying to sell a piece of underwater real-estate at a 30% loss. Whew! But hey, here's a Xenserver hack for you: I loaded Xenserver 6 Beta on a cluster of servers, and was disappointed to find that they had moved memory management out of the "free" product and into one

Changing Linux/Unix "ls" Time Format

2011-08-02T09:00:00.003-04:00

I though I had documented this, but had to look it up again today. To change the format of the the ls command's time, use:ls -l --time-style=+%s...where the format is the same as those listed for the date command. See man date. I like +%s, because it allows scripts to calculate "elapsed time" between two file modifications.Another useful option --time to display atime or ctime rather than

ITIL Expert, I Has it

2011-06-29T07:43:00.007-04:00

It was a long, hard, painful march of sorrow and circumstance, but I finally made it: I am a certified ITIL Expert. Having succeeded on my voyage of knowledge and betterment, I am totally convinced that 99% of what IT managers think is the right, is wrong. It least 50% of those wrong things could be corrected by adapting 30% of ITIL.But... Adapting 100% ITIL is not the answer. Want to know

"Falling Skies" Hits Bottom Fast

2011-06-19T23:40:00.002-04:00

Luckily, it only took one night to realize that this one was a complete waste of time, unlike "The Event", which required two nights. Thankfully, "Falling Skies" ran episode one and two, back-to-back on one night, which saved the trouble of spending the week thinking "maybe it will get better." Where did it go wrong? Glad you asked.In the movie "Signs", a family finds themselves in the midst

Fantasmic Nouveau Retro Future Robot Art

2011-05-30T14:36:00.003-04:00

Check out the web site of really cool works from artist Nemo Gould.

Andre California Champagne

2011-05-22T13:04:00.003-04:00

I didn't want it, but got it anyway. I'd had it a zillion years ago, and knew what to expect. This is a wine you buy for the storybook wedding where you are judging the quality of the event by the number of people you invite.I only invited Ronald and Nancy Reagan. They politely declined the invitation. Something about being busy being President, at the time.So, if you have to buy

Gerd Anselmann Dornfelder

2011-05-22T13:04:00.002-04:00

Every time I go wine shopping, look at the German reds. Unfortunately, the reds the German's send us, are far lacking what they keep for themselves. As a result, when people think of German wines, they think white (Riesling), not red. The reason: climate. The colder the climate, the more difficult it is to grow red then white.I've suffered many bad German imports-- most only slightly less

RHEL 6 Virtualization, Memory

2011-05-01T12:07:00.003-04:00

There are two memory settings presented in virt-manager: Allocation and Maximum. The Allocation setting is what will appear in /proc/meminfo and top. The Maximum is what can be used to boot the VM. Interestingly, the kernel will refuse to boot with out enough RAM, but once booted, will run with significantly less.The Maximum value needs to be more than 348MB. Any lower, and boot time is

RHEL 6 Virtualization, Paravirtualization

2011-05-01T11:00:00.004-04:00

Paravirtualization is a big deal. It is avoided by VMware, is alchemy in Citrix Xen, and is cryptically alluded to in RHEL 6. Yet, for those of us that are almost exclusively Linux, the performance and density advantages are huge. Even Windows XP performance is noticeably improved running "para-virt". (As for Vista and Win7... they're both hogs, no matter what.)In ten words or less,

The President's Speech

2011-05-01T10:27:00.005-04:00

Clever:

RHEL 6 Virtualization - Bridged Interface

2011-04-26T23:32:00.012-04:00

With version 6, Red Hat has finally fixed the long standing problem of not being able to use the GUI to configure a Virtual Machine shared connection. Lets first review the types of VM network connections:* RH=y CX=y VW=y Internal* RH=y CX=y VW=y Dedicated or Slaved NIC* RH=y CX=y VW=y Routed or VLAN'd* RH=y CX=y VM=y Shared or Bridged* RH=y CX=n VW=n Network Address Translation (NAT)(

RHEL 6 Virtualization As Non-root User

2011-04-24T23:42:00.008-04:00

Red Hat has always been overconfident about the use of the root account over SSH. By default they allow direct logon to the root account via SSH, because the first "S" stands for Secure. But that's not the point... You should never let anyone logon directly as root. Always access as a user, and escalate privileges.With RHEL 6 virtualization, I ran into a problem with virt-manager, in that it

RHEL 6 - Network Gotcha

2011-04-21T16:49:00.004-04:00

Earlier, I had reported problems with my Atheros integrated NIC on my new mainboard. I finished the build on my RHEL 6 cloud node by adding an Intel Pro100 I had lying around as eth1. As expected, Anaconda recognized the card on install. To my surprise, the card was not active on first boot. But then the real surprise... I concurrently installed a RHEL 6 VM, and its virtual 8139 was also not

MSI 880GM MainBoard... Oops: E41

2011-04-17T21:11:00.005-04:00

I bought a box of computer guts from Newegg, to upgrade my Linux virtualization host. This box has not been doing anything recently, because it was still running Fedora 8. I know F8 is soooo old, but the machine is only a PIII with 512Mb. Since it didn't have VMX or SVM, old school Xen was all it could run.That board was an Asus, and it had served me well, as have several other Asus boards.

Scientific Linux (SL-6.0) Pt 2

2011-04-11T21:14:00.004-04:00

For the record, SL-60 will not boot with 128Mb of memory, it reports "Out of memory". Works with 196Mb. I generally run my VMs on the ragged edge, so I may try to chew that a little lower.*** Update ***Nope, 196Mb is as low as I'm willing to try to go.

Scientific Linux

2011-04-10T22:03:00.006-04:00

With the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I've had to renew my certification. A couple Friday's ago, I got my RHCSA, and in a couple more weeks I do the RHCE. In preparing for the test, I've come across a distribution called Scientific LinuxScientific Linux is a recompiled version of RHEL, similar in concept to CentOS, with one very important difference: CentOS sucks and is for

Wente Sauvignon Blanc

2011-04-09T18:21:00.003-04:00

And what do we all know about sauvignon blanc? That's right, it grows in New Zealand. This one is from California.I actually looked for this wine, since one of the wine magazines pointed out that I shouldn't be snobby about CA wine, as long as the CA wine has a 90 point score. My wine shops don't usually carry 90 pointers, but I keep looking anyway. I could try going to swankier stores, but

Casa Santorsola Barbera

2011-04-09T18:21:00.002-04:00

It is very unusual to find a Piedmont Barbera for under $25. To my astonishment, this one was $7. Since these northern Italian reds are usually out of my price range, I don't have much to compare it to; so, I'll compare it to other $7 reds.Bueno! It was not too heavy, a little dry. The Barbera is a close cousin to the Sangiovese of Chianti fame, but did not have the same taste. Oddly, I'd

Tomcat Native Libraries

2011-03-30T22:57:00.004-04:00

Again, I have been wrangled into solving the secrets of the universe. To make matters worse, I'd already solved this problem once. Now I get to solve it again.The problem: When Tomcat starts, it writes to the logs...The APR based Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.pathWhat! I'm not getting optimal

Mysterious Linux Permission Dots

2011-02-27T20:28:00.003-05:00

Sometime mid last year, something strange happened: a dot appeared in the permission string of the Fedora distributions. I ask around, and no one knew where they came from, or what they were. Now I know, but first, let me show you what I'm talking about:$ touch test.txt$ ls -l test.txt-rw-rw-r--. 1 doug doug 0 Feb 27 20:21 test.txtIt's hard to see, but its the eleventh character in the

Authenticated ESMTP over SSL with Sendmail

2011-02-24T12:35:00.008-05:00

I've been wanting to get this running, but kept running into the same problem. Imagine my chagrin to find the problem was something simple. At least it's simple once you understand how it's suppose to work.First the basics, we open a port on the firewall, and configure Sendmail. Check out Denie's Blog for an explanation of the steps. Assuming you've got a running Sendmail / Dovecot server,

Fratelli Pinot Grigio

2011-02-24T11:42:00.001-05:00

I worried over this one, because it was at the low end of my budget: which is dangerously low. Its not hard to find a bad wine for under $7, but for the price, this was a nice wine. A respectable wine in league with Bella Sera.If a beginner needed an inexpensive wine for a fundtion, this would be a good choice. I'm inclined to recommend Bella Sera, but the label on this bottle looks classier..

Botter Verduzzo Prosecco

2011-02-24T11:21:00.001-05:00

You know my wine motto: I don't drink blends. Well, this one was a Prosecco, so it doesn't count. And I can justify that...Champagnes and spakling wines very seldom mention their veritals or vintages, so they are almost always a blend of something. For most sparklings, I complain about the over abundace of bubbles. But this one, was so different, truly! What was amazing to me was how this

MySQL Replication - Pt 3

2011-02-21T15:03:00.004-05:00

And here's the stunnel config. The trick is that it has to be both ways, which is to say master has to be able to query slave and slave has to be able to query master. Thus, the same /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf on both machines except for one value:# loggingdebug=4output=/opt/stunnel/server.log# setuppid=/opt/stunnel/server.pidforeground=nosetuid=nobodysetgid=nobody[repliserver]accept=3308connect

MySQL Replication - Pt 2

2011-02-20T22:30:00.003-05:00

Through the wonders of technology, I've already been advised that my proof of concept is full of crap because:* Replication does not provide automated fail over.* After a fail over, there is no way to sync back to master.Bullet one is true, but it is an excuse. Without replication, a catastrophic failure means getting a backup server online with data as old as my last backup or rsync. (And

MySQL Replication

2011-02-20T17:24:00.006-05:00

I've had a dozen people tell me that setting up a redundant MySQL server was just too difficult to be worth the effort. After all, what was the likelihood that the database server would ever go down? I mean... its not like tires on cars ever going flat, why would a computer ever break? Besides, the server is on a UPS.Well... Bad news DBA's: I got it working in under an hour (not counting

Blake Griffin Leaps Over a Kia for a Slam Dunk- SI.com

2011-02-20T11:56:00.001-05:00

In LA, Sprite held a slam dunk contest at the Staple Center. I was impress by two shots. Wizard's Javale Mcgee did an impressive two basket, two ball, flying dunk. But the winner was Clippers rookie Blake Griffin leaping over the hood of a Kia, intercepting a basketball mid-air, and slamming it in while accompanied by a fifty person church choir.

Stupidest Google Ad of the Week

2011-02-19T14:39:00.003-05:00

I had just sent an email about an upcoming movie called "Appolo 18" and got this advert on my Gmail. "NASA Coupons" "Save now on NASA" What? I had to click it. I got a coupon for Green Giant frozen vegetables. Or more correctly, I was given the chance to provide my email to someone for some reason, which may or may not have anything to do with NASA. Go ahead and click the picture above to

Interactive Organized Crime Map

2011-02-10T17:29:00.002-05:00

Really cool interactive organized crime map on Wired. It seems smuggling Asian wood products is more profitable than human trafficking. Good to know.

Go, Mark Kelly, Go

2011-02-05T13:13:00.002-05:00

Astronaut Mark Kelly has the opportunity to command the last shuttle mission, yet there are people that don't approve. Not because he isn't qualified, but because they think that he should be by his wife Rep. Gabrielle Giffords side while she recovers from an assassination attempt by some drugged out whack job. Guess what people: your opinions on what he should do are worthless.Is he qualified?

Restrict Concurrent Remote Logins

2011-02-04T00:13:00.005-05:00

I stumbled upon an interesting puzzle. I was asked to configure a system that would only allow a user to SSH from one remote address at a time, but allow multiple logins from that location. Furthermore, they can login from where ever they want, but never from two locations. Oh, and the restriction can't block the TTYs or Xterms.I'd never heard of a scenario like that. There are lots of bells

Downgraded My Netflix

2011-01-30T23:05:00.003-05:00

...to one disk at a time, because I've seen it all. Who would have thought it possible. Maybe I should get a life.Or better yet, maybe I should post more technically useful information and less whiny personal drivel. After all, this isn't MySpace, or MySpace-TNG.(Yes, that was another Facebook jab.)

So... Get With The "Novating"

2011-01-26T10:05:00.002-05:00

One of the things that I truly love about CNN is the fact that its impossible to link to a story, because they are keep changing the news. Its not their fault: history is constantly changing and it is their duty to make sure that history matches the presents view of how things should have been. But that's not my point... My point is this morning's headline about the State of the Union Address:

Google Maps Hack for Bash Scripts

2011-01-03T19:19:00.002-05:00

Here's a fun little hack. This lets you query Google maps from a bash shell script:J="chicago"; \K=`echo $J | sed "s/ /_/g"`; \elinks --source http://maps.google.com/maps?q=$K | \sed "s/}/\n/g" | grep "hnear\|latlng:" | \sed -e "s/,+/+/g" -e "s/[,={\"]/\n/g" | \grep "\+\|l..:[0-9\-]"Chicago+Cook+Illinoislat:41.878113999999997lng:-87.629797999999994Feed it "dakar" by setting $J, and you get:Dakar

An EC2 Conundrum

2010-12-27T18:28:00.004-05:00

Whenever I would lecture on Amazon's EC2, I would point out that Amazon's internal infrastructure is (effectively) EC1, and when they need capacity, it comes from EC2. In the past few weeks, I've seen this first hand. Of course, we need to remember that this is Amazon's peak period, so a resource crunch should be expected as part of the normal patterns of business activity (BPA), but I was

Schug Pinit Noir

2010-12-25T13:40:00.001-05:00

This is a California (Sonoma Coast) wine, that I ended up with twice during the holidays. The first time was at a company gathering, the second was when I got it as a gift. Its a good wine with a prominent smokey flavor, but not high tannins.Th company gathering was at a high end restaurant, but it was served a dining room temperature. Once I chilled the bottle I got at home, I was much more

A Second Apache Instance With YUM

2010-12-19T17:02:00.011-05:00

I ran into a situation where I needed two separate instances of the Apache HTTPD service on the same server. I couldn't simply virtual host the second site, because it needed a radically different configuration from the first instance. My first reaction was that I would use YUM to install the first instance, and then snag the Apache source and compile the second instance. The problem with this

Evil Free Cell Game: #29868

2010-12-15T00:08:00.002-05:00

I finally beat it. Now I can go to bed.

So, So, Sad: And its ITIL's Fault

2010-12-09T08:52:00.005-05:00

I signed up for a series of ITIL classes with the goal of earning the ITIL Expert Certification. (They're choice of words, not mine; I'm leery of "experts", personally.) There are five classes, each with a test. Once you pass all five classes and tests, there is a sixth class and test.Yesterday, I found out that I failed the fifth test. I was crushed! Not because I failed: I fail all the

Why Am I Changing Light Bulbs?

2010-12-06T13:07:00.003-05:00

Being an ecologically conscious kinda guy, about three years ago, I went through my house and replaced my incandescent bulbs with CF bulbs. It was hugely expensive because I bought good GE brand bulbs. I saw it as an investment. Not only would the bulbs save energy, but they would last a thousand years.Yes, a thousand years, damn it. They said the bulbs lasted five times longer than "normal"

Oops, I've Seen All of Netflix

2010-12-04T22:14:00.002-05:00

Yep. All of it.Okay, not every movie in the entire Netflix inventory, but every movie that I've ever wanted to see. I'm down to watching foreign flix with subtitles. I'm to the point that I'm saying to myself: "Hey, I don't think that was all that bad. Oh sure, I purposely avoided it when it came out at the theaters since it wan't worth spending money on, and I didn't watch it on HBO or TV

Fedora and Screen Resolution: Pt2

2010-11-13T15:49:00.002-05:00

Turns out, the xrandr info is not persistent across reboots. The obvious solution was to add the needed lines to the /etc/rc.local, but xrandr will only execute if the X engine is online. The solution was to create a script and drop into the X window systems initialization sequence:cat /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/setres.sh #!/bin/shxrandr --newmode "1280x1024" 108.88 1280 1360 1496 1712 1024

Fedora and Screen Resolution

2010-11-13T11:06:00.008-05:00

For the last few revisions of Fedora, I've had problems with getting my physical systems to behave at the desired screen resolution. The problem is the way the video drivers attempt to detect them monitor-- it is assumed that the display hardware is an LCD. Unfortunately, some of my physical systems still use CRT's. Why? Because they work.I don't know exactly when the change occurred, but

Worst Day Ever!

2010-10-25T18:12:00.004-04:00

Was sick all weekend, didn't leave the house. Had to go to a class in downtown DC this morning. This is third in a series that has already gone pretty bad. Got up an hour early, but ended up leaving the house fifteen minutes late. Started the car and: Just more than an 1/8 tank of gasYeah... I can make it... Twenty miles to the Metro station. I'll get gas on the way home.Got to the Metro

Remove XML Comments with sed

2010-10-20T10:34:00.005-04:00

This should work for HTML also:sed '//d' /target/file.xmlUse sed -i save the changes back into the file.

Richard St. John's 8 Secrets Of Success

2010-10-10T23:50:00.002-04:00

Of late, I've been trying to absorb some soft skills and have found the TED initiative to be quite entertaining. Here's one the hit home, because it was the most concise definition of successful habits and behaviors I've come across for free.As a side note, we may want to debate whether or not I'm a valid judge of successful habits, as I am neither rich nor famous, and as

Il Cortigiano Prosecco

2010-10-10T20:23:00.001-04:00

I should probably get in trouble for this, but I enjoyed the wine more the second night since it was less bubbly. I'd put this one up against any Champagne for quality and presentation, but I'm sorry to say... I just find too many bubbles to be a distraction. As such, I have now learned that my experience with Italian sparkling wines was with frizzante rather than spumante. This is effectively

The 10 best IT certifications: 2010

2010-09-20T17:36:00.002-04:00

I stumbled upon a three week old article at TechRepublic The 10 best IT certifications: 2010. What a load of crap. The "article" was written by some fool named Erik Eckel, who even states in the article that its a load of bull:There’s no double-blind statistically valid data analysis run through a Bayesian probability calculus formula here. I’ve worked in IT long enough, however, and with

Perl Taint Mode Regex

2010-09-16T18:28:00.004-04:00

I think I finally have a handle on Perl's taint mode as a result of a couple scripts I've been working with. I stumbled upon taint mode after reading an article that said that most web based exploits are the result of programmers (or developers, as the kids like to say) fail to validate input. What taint does is to cause the script to fail, if inputs are not validated. To invoke taint mode

Apache Modules for Basic Autehtication

2010-09-06T00:03:00.003-04:00

I think I've identified the minimum modules for Apache basic authentication:auth_basicauthn_fileauthz_userauthz_defaultYou'll also need authz_host, but that's probably already in place to support Allow/Deny.

Elegant Log Compression

2010-09-02T18:18:00.002-04:00

Here's an elegant little one liner that I didn't expect to work. I partition pushing 99% space used, the largest culprit being daily log files. Hey weren't mine so I couldn't delete them, but I could compress them. But what about next month?How about this:cd /some/path/logsfor J in `ls *log?$(date +%Y)-*(expr $(date +%m) - 1)-*`; do ls -lh $J; tar -czf $J.tgz $J; ls -lh $J.tgz; mv $J /dev/shm

every: command not found

2010-08-22T22:44:00.004-04:00

This was an interesting puzzle. I was looking at a hardening document for Linux that identified a huge number of files that needed more restrictive file permissions. Among them were /root/.bashc, /root/.bash_profile, /root/.bash_logout, and so on. It made sense-- nobody else needs to read them, yet they were 644 instead of 600.But the doc pointed out that the user "root" might not use the bash

Installing OpenSSH from Source

2010-08-22T16:28:00.005-04:00

I've got a cluster of Fedora 9 machines that run Apache web servers. Since they run Apache 2.2, there is no reason to upgrade the OS. Unfortunately, I stumbled on a bug with Fedora 9's implementation of key authentication with OpenSSH. It was apparently fixed in F10, but as is one of the inherent dangers of Fedora not patched in F9. Rather than kluge around with patching the RPM, I decided to

Casa Santosola Barbera D'asti

2010-08-21T18:53:00.001-04:00

I went shopping for a Barolo, but couldn't find one in my price range. This was in the Piedmont section, so I gave it a try. It was a very good wine, but... it was not sufficiently different from a so many other Italian reds. When I looked it up on the chart, I found that the grape, the Barbera, is right next to Sangiovese.The product was good, the price was good, but this one just did not

Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc

2010-08-21T18:46:00.001-04:00

I've recently seen several adds for Kim Crawford's wines, and saw a few positive reviews, so I went about $5 out of the budget and grabbed this Sauvignon Blanc. A few points: Kim also has chardonnay, but go with the sauvignon, since the vineyards are in Marlborough, New Zealand. And as we know, if your doing New Zealand, your doing screw top.The verdict? You know how snooty wine reviews talk

Valley of the Moon Chardonnay

2010-08-21T18:45:00.002-04:00

After reading an interesting article about California versus European wines, I decided I give a few a try. The gist of the article was the thought that a 90 point wine was a 90 point wine regardless of its point of origin. This is to say that Californians are judged by the same standards as Europeans. As a result, if a California wine is highly rated, it should meet the same standards as its

Bruised, But Better

2010-08-05T10:35:00.002-04:00

I went a specialist at Union Memorial Hospital Sports Medicine center in Baltimore. (I know I talk down Baltimore, but this place is way better than anything in DC.) They took off the ER dressings and fit me with a Robocop boot, rather than a cast. Here's the bruising after 48 hours.It was nearly black at the doctor's office, but moving around has helped circulated the blood and get it to a

Breaking Your Foot is No Fun

2010-08-02T23:05:00.004-04:00

It seems that breaking the fifth meta-tarsal of your foot is so common, it has its own name: Jones Fracture. I don't know who Jones is, but I'm glad to have a Jones fracture and not a Johnson Fracture!No drugs... and they made me walk out of the ER. You bastards!Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to update my Facebook status and tweet the news.Yeah, right.

Who In The World Isn't On Facebook

2010-07-27T21:55:00.003-04:00

All too often CNN lacks real news to report, so they make stuff up. As a classic example, they ran a story entitled Who In The World Isn't On Facebook, the first line of which reads:Seriously ... at this point, who's not on Facebook?Seriously: That was the lead line.Did you hear that? That was the sound of Edward R. Murrow coughing up a lung in disgust at the state of what is now called

Thanks for Visiting: Script Kiddy

2010-07-24T17:09:00.004-04:00

Everybody knows that hackers fall into two categories: script kiddies and Chinese cyber warriors raised from birth to destroy the American power grid.Well, I've got this little VM floating around the clouds of the internet. Nothing exciting. It hosts http://dougbunger.com, which is mostly 404 pages and dead links. But... its my little cloud VM, and I love it.So all week long, somebody has been

I'll Take One Electric Sikorsky, To Go

2010-07-21T12:41:00.003-04:00

Yes, I do need my own electric helicopter to fly to the grocery store. If it can hold a 30 minute charge, I'm cashing out my IRAs.(Assuming my IRAs ever get anymore valuable then a happy meal.)

Moinet Prosecco

2010-07-11T16:27:00.001-04:00

I decided to broaden me horizons on Prosecco by expanding me price range. I spent about $18 on this bottle of Moinet-- pronounced mwaanay. It was more effervescent than less expensive brands, and held its fizz over night in the refrigerator; but that's the trait of a good sparkling wine.This would be good event wine, but is a little too bubbly for everyday use. On my scale, it gets a high 7,

Witness to a Moment of Innovation

2010-07-05T17:29:00.003-04:00

Not of Earth shattering importance (like shattering the Earth would be a good thing... or even important, since we'd all be eradicated) but something happened on Saturday that could be an interesting trend. Remember back in the 90's when every few days, you got an AOL CD in the mail? Remember how they were all completely worthless? Well, Saturday, I got a DVD in the mail.Again, not

Browser Based SSH via Webshell

2010-07-03T18:12:00.006-04:00

Lets say you need to SSH into your server, but you're not at your regular workstation. I've always recommended people carry a USB thumb drive with a toolkit of programs, such as Putty. But what if the machine you have doesn't have a USB port. No problem, you can download Putty. But what if the machine you have is a kiosk terminal that doesn't allow you to download...Yeah, I'll admit it

Archiving Solaris... Forever!

2010-07-03T13:14:00.003-04:00

I found a piece of paper with some Solaris notes. The paper is going into the trash, but the notes are going to the internet to be archived for the good of humanity. Some of these notes may be archived elsewhere on the blog.To setup your user environment, add to ~/.profileexport PS1="\w #"export PAGER=lessexport TERM=ansialias vi='vi +"set showmode ignorecase" 'export EDITOR=viMan... I hope I

Compiling Apache Without Default Modules

2010-06-23T23:54:00.000-04:00

I have always liked the fact that RedHat and Fedora's Apache httpd RPM is compiled as a fully modular server. Yeah, you loose a couple performance points, but you have a slim footprint which allows more sessions, and there aren't unneeded subroutines waiting to be exploited. Yet, if you download Apache source and try to compile, you get 24 components added to your binary. Bloat!To compile a

Off Peak Energy Usage

2010-06-18T19:53:00.002-04:00

I may have complained about this before, but since nobody has fixed this yet, I'll complain again. One of my favorite tech news sites was running a story about "smart houses" and commented on energy can cost 10 times more during peak hours. The appliances in the smart house "will be able to automatically delay its actions until off-peak hours."You know what... I don't care! It doesn't save me

Another Tomcat Post :: SSL (Part 2)

2010-06-16T20:59:00.002-04:00

Oh no-- Not more Tomcat SSL! Yes. But. In the immortal words of Bullwinkle J. Moose: "This time for sure!"This entry is a follow up to a post a few days ago quaintly titled Another Tomcat Post :: SSL. Since that post, I have made a momentous discovery regarding Tomcat encryption.There is an annoying error message that writes to catalina.out on Tomcat restart, that it turns out is relevant to

XenServer System Alerts From the Future

2010-06-06T22:26:00.003-04:00

I got the system alert on my XenServer this weekend. Its telling me that on the 16th there was a set of updates released. Except, its the 6th. So this system alert hasn't happened yet. Or mamybe they are going to release the updates on the 16th. Nope, the updates are there.I'm soooooo confused.

Another Tomcat Post :: SSL

2010-06-03T21:38:00.005-04:00

Yeah, I'm about tired of Tomcat, too. But this is new and improved Tomcat: Now with OpenSSL. And we know how much I like OpenSSL.Okay, simple stuff, first. When you install the mod_ssl RPM, it creates a dummy cert. Lets nuke it and create our own:cd /etc/pki/tlsmv private/localhost.key private/localhost.key.rpmmv certs/localhost.crt certs/localhost.crt.rpmopenssl genrsa 2048 -out

Tomcat Load Balancing via AJP Module

2010-06-02T21:53:00.005-04:00

I've been playing with Tomcat in my spare time and have had some fun with the load balancing module, which happens to be implemented with the help of our friend Apache HTTPD. The basic premise is that we point our traffic at an HTTPD instance and he disperses the traffic to a set of worker nodes. This can be done via the standard http protocol or the Tomcat ajp protocol.I like this config for /

Setting XMMS As Default Player on F13

2010-05-31T00:43:00.003-04:00

My home workstation has a dual head Vista laptop and a Linux desktop. The desktop has better speakers, so I'm using it as my office jukebox. I've always used XMMS, but ran into a small problem getting it set as the default player on F13. What I wanted, was to be able to double click an MP3 and have it start playing. What I got, was that the song would queue, but not play. Here's what I had

OpenSSL: Love At Last

2010-05-27T21:41:00.003-04:00

No... Not even close. It is so counter-intuitive, needlessly complicated, and maddeningly confusing. Thus forcing me to cheat.Determine a website's SSL cert expiration date:echo "" | openssl s_client -connect mail.google.com:443 \ 2> /dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -text | \ grep AfterVerify a file is a key:openssl rsa -noout -check -in localhost.xxxFind a key file that is mislabeled:for J in

Glorious Peoples Shuttle of Greatness in Space

2010-05-27T14:33:00.000-04:00

Behold, comrades: the Soviet space shuttle Buran. After its single mission, I'd heard this pentacle of communist engineering had been retired, but look what I found (with some help) on Google maps. No street view... too sad.View Larger Map

Happy Fedora 13 Day

2010-05-26T00:43:00.000-04:00

In keeping with my standing policy, I've skipped a version, and jumped from Fedora 11 to 13. I was quite disappointed, however, that Xen Dom0 is not included. * Disk Druid has changed, allowing for safer isolation of disks that should not be formatted. Unfortunately, I had problems getting LVM to work. * Once again I loaded KDE, and found it beautiful, then promptly did away with it. I just

RedHat Tomcat 6 with Web Manager

2010-05-17T21:57:00.001-04:00

The Red Hat Tomcat 6 RPM is not behaving politely. It would seem the manager should be available after install, but I'm getting a blank page. Turns out that I've had life pretty easy thus far (news to me) and someone has already done the hard work. Here's what it took for me to get Tomcat 6 working via RPM. Starting with my "standard load" which does not include Apache:# yum install tomcat6

Fedora 10+ Kernel Modesetting (KMS)

2010-05-16T12:38:00.005-04:00

Boring backstory: I tend to buy computers in sets, so currently, my three primary R&D machines are HPs: a set of twins, and a more powerful third. That one is now loaded with ESX, so my main Linux desktop is one of the twins. Last week, its hard drive died and I just got the replacement. Now to the real story...I'd been running Fedora 6 or 8 to work with Xen. That project has been finished

Sudo Read Only All

2010-05-10T23:03:00.007-04:00

I had a friend with an interesting problem: They had replicate a set of configuration files on one Linux machine to another, but she didn't have root on the old box. Thus, she couldn't read files like the /etc/securettty file, which was permission 600.Here's where life gets strange... The customer didn't mind her looking at the box, they just didn't want her changing anything. The best way to

Splitting MPEGs On The Command Line

2010-05-06T19:42:00.003-04:00

I was cleaning out the basement, and came across a box of old VHS tapes. Needless to say, they went in the go to the dumpster pile. Along with a VCR, an old video capture board, and a PIII. Then it occurred to me: hey, that's a video encoding system sitting in the garbage heap.A couple hours later, everything was assembled, and I transferred my first tape. A problem, though: it was too much

Norton AV Products Still Suck

2010-05-02T23:03:00.005-04:00

I've always hated Norton products. McAfee is way more efficent. But, Comcast decided they wanted to switch the free AV product to Norton. They probably saved a nickle doing it. So, here's what happens when you use Norton (other than your machine running slow...)I got this pop-up:Bad news. I ran a full scan. Nothing. The message returned. Reboot, update, disconnect from the network, scan,

Google Earth Browser Plugin

2010-05-01T13:23:00.004-04:00

The Google Earth browser plugin is an interesting extension of Google Maps. You can now find a location on the map, click over to an satellite view, and then extend it into a 3-D model. For downtown Washington, DC, its similar to being in a massive multi-user domain (MMUD).That would be a first person shooter, for the children in the audience... under 30.The cool part is that you can see the

History of the US Moon Base

2010-04-18T16:25:00.002-04:00

As you know, we are approaching the twentieth anniversary of man's permanent habitation of the moon. Yes, ever since President Reagan insisted America implement a moon colony by 1990, astronauts have lived at Moon Base. This Nasa site chronicals the designs for a permanent moon habitat of the decades. Unfortunately, you can't zoom in on the pictures.This is apparently part of a series designed

Password Change Policies Do Not Enhance Security

2010-04-15T05:33:00.002-04:00

In another example of security through "because we say so," there is a recent study that indicates changing passwords does not enhance security. The premise of the argument is that if the bad guy's compromise an account, they will exploit it immediately, rather then hang on to a password for some future use.

Started Japanese, Ended American

2010-04-10T16:26:00.002-04:00

There was a Japanese Street Festival in downtown, but it was waaaaay too crowded. So, I went to the National Portrait Gallery instead... Which is in Chinatown... Which has sushi bars... So I got better Japanese, for less, without the long lines.Win.

Google Earth Vehicle Shoots Self... Sort Of

2010-04-07T14:51:00.006-04:00

Ultra-geek time. I was on Google Maps Street View looking for the hot dog guy on the roof of Polock Johnny's in Baltimore. The sun was at just the right angle, and you can see the shadow of the Google Earth vehicle. Notice the periscope. Cool.View Larger Map

Cherry Blossom Firworks Pictures

2010-04-05T12:08:00.003-04:00

Not really, but pictures from Saturday evenings fireworks excursion. Ah... no fireworks pictures. (I don't know how these got lost: they were suppose to post Saturday night.)

Cherry Blossom Fireworks Fail

2010-04-04T14:53:00.007-04:00

I got lost on the way to watch the DC Cherry Blossom Festival Fireworks last night. I'm not sure its completely my fault... So did 10,000 other people.The paper said the fireworks would be part of the music festival going on at the Southwest Water Front (A) at 7th and Maine. The crowd assumed it would be at the Tidal Basin, and collected on its shores (B).The problem with the waterfront, is

OpenNebula- Red Hat Xen Node

2010-04-03T11:31:00.007-04:00

For the record, if your are running Red Hat, consider making the move to KVM-- That is where they will be focusing their attentions. This is not to say that Xen is dead, since it is re-included in Fedora 12. Having said that, my test cluster is old hardware that won't support KVM, so I'm having to do my OpenNebula development on Xen.To test Red Hat functionality, I needed to build a Xen node.

Fire Breathing Ruby Goldberg Machine

2010-03-31T13:51:00.002-04:00

They say this is part of a bigger video that runs 30 minutes.