August 2005 Archives
So today in the course of spellcheck, my email program Thunderbird came across the word fsck. While I wasn't supprised to find that it didn't think fsck was a word, I was supprised that it wanted to replace it with f*ck. I'm supprised the parential groups haven't gotten ahold of this yet and demanded a content filter for children.
I really need to buy stock in Exxon and the rest. As I am reading a news article talking about how oil just crossed $67.00 a barrel I was wondering what Exxon's stock is doing... what was even more interesting is how the company made $7.5 Billion last quarter.
It's official... Google has taken the next step to become the portal they claim they aren't. Google Talk has been released to the world.
Slowly but surely the market is catching up. See: Existing Home Sales Decline As Rates Rise - Yahoo! News
Sales of previously owned homes dropped 2.6 percent in July as mortgage rates crept up. ... Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has warned of "speculative fervor" in some local housing markets that may be pushing prices up to unsustainable levels.I feel like it's 1999 and we are sitting arround talking about how the stock market is overvalued and how it just has to crash at some point - there were plenty of people who said that was impossible - and there were the people who knew it wasn't if, but when. The only question with housing is when, not if.
I was on a conference call last week with a person who was looking for server colocation - specifically dedicated servers. After establishing his requirements and his desired pricing it was apparent to me that he was not a prospective fit for us, so I suggested to him that he try company X because they could give him the pricing he was looking for. The resulting exchange simply blew me away.
He told me that he was currently doing business with the other company and that they sucked and he was sick of them. He wanted to find a professional company that could give better features, bandwidth, performance and technical support - but he wanted all of this for less than he was currently paying. I offered that perhaps the reason his current host was unable to give him the "hands on" feeling that he was looking for was because they had no budget for it given their margins. I went on to explain the reasoning behind our pricing structure and the customer service benefits that we are able to give as a result. He didn't want to hear any of it - he was certain that it could be done cheaper than his current host and anything else was a rip off. I thanked him for his time and ended the call.
Why don't people understand that you get what you pay for? It is simply impossible to buy a new Mercedes for the price of a Toyota - so don't complain when your Toyota isn't as nice as the Mercedes.
My friend sent this to me before he rebooted the server. We installed FreeBSD 4.2 and Postfix on this computer ~4 years ago to use as an SMTP gateway for the application servers. The box was receintly rebooted after an online upgrade to FreeBSD 4.11.
smtp01# uptime 3:43PM up 1379 days, 48 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.18, 0.20, 0.08
This is exactly what happens when you have a group of public officials that have zero clue when it comes to computers defining policy...
13 high school students in the [...] state of Pennsylvania (the Kutztown 13 as they're known) were charged with third-degree felonies for misusing their school-issued Apple iBooks. Their heinous crime? They used the administrator password (which was taped on the back of the computers, no less) to install unauthorized software. Not BitTorrent, not Limewire, but iChat AV.The administration is embarrassed that their security was bypassed so easily, or more to the point - that their super security turned out to be a password taped to the back of the machine. So what do they want to do now, make an example of some kids by sending them to jail for "hacking" the laptop. If I was in this community right now I would be organizing a campaign to recall the board for incompetence. The first rule of computer security is physical security. If you give the computer to a person that can take it home and do whatever they want to it - there is no security. All these "hacks" were pretty easy to accomplish, it would have been just as easy to remove the hard drive and read it from an unprotected computer - or lets say reinstall the operating system. What would the administration have done then if the OS was reinstalled clean, would that be worthy of jail time? See Full Stories:
- WFMZ-TV Online 2
- O'Grady's PowerPage - Your Mobile Technology Destination
- Berks-Mont Newspapers - Kutztown Area Patriot - 06/23/2005 - 13 teens face felonies
I use this a lot when I need/want to mount a new partition into a directory location that I have been previously been using (i.e. Vinum configuration in FreeBSD). What's great for me is that it will copy file permissions over properly - and better yet, if it fails partway through you don't lose any data.
# mkdir newdir # cd olddir # tar -cf - . | ( cd newdir && tar -xf - )
So a search for "Max Clark" on the major search engines correctly puts me first again on all but Google - this is so annoying.
See: Home prices 'extremely overvalued' in 53 cities - Yahoo! News
Single-family home prices are "extremely overvalued" in 53 cities that make up nearly a third of the overall U.S. housing market, putting them at high risk of price declines, according to a study released today.Accordding to this chart Los Angeles is only 48% overvalued.
Another news article detailing the perils of the current housing market. Having purchased our place three years ago I don't mind the insane appreciation - but at the same time it scares the heebies out of me.
The statistics suggest that many home buyers are stretching their budgets well beyond their means. The risk is that recent buyers have such minuscule equity in their homes that if prices fall, they could owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.See: Desperate house buyers increase foreclosure risk - Yahoo! News
So once again I am in need of a new cell phone. Don't get me wrong, I like the Blackberry, but not for the reason you would probably think... It syncs well with Outlook, and I can search contacts based on company name. I've been thinking about it for the past couple of weeks and what is need is as follows:
- Native Sync with Outlook - Contacts are a must, Calendar second
- Bluetooth support
- Good cell coverage/call quality
- Small size with good battery
Or so the story goes...
I've been looking for new office space for a little while now, mainly to help support growth of my company. For the past two weeks I have been dealing with Fred Droesch, of the Fred Droesch Company for some space that was available in his building. The space was perfect, almost exactly what I was looking for the only problem it turns out was the owner.
After expressing my interest to Fred Droesch, filling out the credit application - and him calling and verifying the credit information he informed me that now one of his tenants was possibly interested in the space and that he had to give them a couple of days to decide. Well a couple of days ended up turning into a week when I was finally told that they had a deadline of Friday at noon to make up their mind. Friday noon came and went, and Fred called and told me the space was mine if I still wanted it. I told him that I wanted the space, he said it was a done deal and they would type out the lease and call me Monday morning to come over and sign it. Well - come Monday morning it turns out that the tenant changed their mind again and really does want the space and as a result Fred's "hands are tied".
I understand the desire for him to lease the space to his existing tenant. And I also understand that a deal isn't done until the money's in the bank. But don't tell me we have a deal and then renig on it. This world used to run on a handshake - what happened to that?
It seems with each passing day I become more and more frustrated with Debian Linux. I totally understand its appeal - if you have no clue about software configuration/installation apt-get makes things extremely easy. But why on earth does the system have to so extremely customize the installation paths that there is no way to install software outside of the Debian way? Argh!
Side rant aside - last week was the battle to get an Adaptec RAID controller working under Debian. Again don't know what the problem was when the Debian kernel was created - this just works under RHEL (I'd really started taking the RH installer for granted - man is it nice), after what seemed like days we finally managed to get this to work. If you ever come across this, this site helped:
I2O on Linux
Well, I finally had my first crash with Windows XP last night. I was actually supprised to see the blue screen of death because it has been so long now. What was even more impressive about the whole thing was the way in which it happened... searching for airline fairs on Priceline.
Thanks to: TheDamnBlog.com
The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you're in a hurry or it's a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.
