Archive for the 'Technology' Category

TMobile VPN and the G1

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

I’ve been using my Android Dev-1 phone on T-Mobile for a while now. I’ve had the T-Mobile VPN service which is useful if you need to do non-trivial connectivity things with firewalls and VPN software. For some reason, in the past few days when I try to go online, I get a blocking [...]

Bottomless Well and Prius Owners

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

There’s a great book called The Bottomless Well, appropriately subtitled “The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy“.
This great article about hybrid owners driving more and getting more tickets dovetails nicely with the book’s premise.
The firm looked at several common use categories used by insurers—including “pleasure [...]

Do Not Shout In The Datacenter

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

Who knew that shouting could cause disk problems.

Android DEV-1 Phone using “T-Mobile VPN” APN

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

I just received my Android DEV phone in the mail and discovered it’s a bit tricky to set up without purchasing the special service plan that T-Mobile wants you to buy at around $40/month. Unfortunately you CAN NOT setup your android phone without first logging in and syncing to a google account. This [...]

Android Me

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

I held off for as long as I could before purchasing an Android phone. Frankly once they offered an unlocked restriction free developer version, it was hard to resist.
Next is to get the build environment working and start tinkering with the OS. Top on my list is figuring out if vpnc can be made [...]

there’s nothing like new hardware

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

There’s really nothing like some new hardware to get the blood pumping. I’ve been converting my sad, old, NFS + LDAP serving cluster over to a fancy new Kerberos + AFS + LDAP + XEN environment. Virtualization is truly awesome, being able to create and reboot hosts at will without concern for the [...]

reCAPTCHA Turns People Into Distributed Processors

Friday, September 5th, 2008

reCAPTCHA is awesome and I’m shocked I haven’t heard about it before. This is an absolutely brilliant example of distributing a little bit of work to many people in a socially productive way. Whomever is behind this is a genius and deserves a firm handshake.
In a nutshell, reCAPTCHA provides a free (!) [...]

Telescopic Text

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Joe Davis has an excellent exercise in exploration and expansion of concepts. You must check out Telescopic Text.

This is what we can do

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

The folks over at Bad Astronomy really put it best, “Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.”

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling [...]

Configuring Daemontools under Ubuntu (upstart)

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

With the moving of ubuntu from the old fashioned init to the modern upstart, the daemontools svscanboot package doesn’t cleanly install. Here’s how to fix it. The daemontools-installer package modifies /etc/inittab to cause the svscan/svscanboot process to launch. With upstart, there is no /etc/inittab, instead it is replaced with a collection of config files in /etc/event.d.