Internet is private? February 15th, 2008
Over the years that I’ve been in the computer industry I’ve seen a lot of people run into issues with the Internet. Increasingly people assume that they’re entitled to some sort of privacy online. I think what a lot of people miss is that once you release your information or pictures online, it’s public. There are some obvious exceptions here such as copyright material, however copyrights don’t seem to bother people as much anymore.
I’ll use an example of a game I play called World of Warcraft. There’s a regular forum troll called Eurekaseven on the realm Fenris. Nearly every day she posts something useless, or information that is not accurate. She whines about people not liking her, and yadda yadda yadda. Well, it turns out she named her myspace after her game character with the realm in front of it. As if asking people to find her. Well, sure enough, someone did. So did the people who don’t like her. Now she’s crying on the forums about how her myspace is personal, and doesn’t want anyone to see it.
I’d just like to remind people. Be aware of what you post online about yourself. Later on down the road you might want a government job and they just might go looking at myspace for you and see you and a few of your friends partying. Not saying there’s anything wrong with having a good time, but employers might look down on this type of action. Lesson learned? Don’t be an idiot, cause someone just might find out who you are.
Dreamhost and Rails 2.0.2 January 8th, 2008
Well, it seems that my work and hosting provider updated Rails to 2.0.2. This seems to have caught many people off guard, including me. Since my site generates static files of everything once it’s viewed I wasn’t really impacted greatly. However I did want to make my site work again. So after a little digging around I found that since I didn’t freeze my rails to their current working version, I was still able to freeze an older copy.
rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_1-2-6
That snippet froze my rails to 1.2.6 which is what I had initially installed it on. It’s now working perfect, and I shouldn’t have any future problems with upgrades since my rails is now frozen.
Another new year December 14th, 2007
So here we are jumping into another year. It seems time is speeding up every year. One day we are kids, the next we have kids of our own. Normally I don’t write a lot of personal things on my blog, however I think this is going to change. I once read that you should keep two separate blogs. One personal and the other professional. I don’t agree with this anymore. If a company wants to hire a non-caring mindless robot that can only do Sys Admin or Programming then perhaps they should keep looking because they won’t find it here. I think companies need to realize that people are human, no matter how much technology stands between them. This means that people have opinions and beliefs and need to express themselves in one form or another.
With this said you will be seeing a lot more posts about personal experiences and opinions that might not always be tech related. Here’s to the New Year! Cheers!!!
At last... December 11th, 2007
Ever since I was little I wanted to learn an instrument. I started with Piano and shortly dropped it for unknown reasons. Probably because I was bored or something. This past weekend I went out to SamAsh and bought an electric guitar starter package. The price was right, the people there were really nice, and this was my chance to become famous! Well… maybe not famous, but the people there really are nice! Later that night I hooked up the amp and everything, and made some noise. From the looks on everyones faces, noise is all I made. I’ve been spending my nights on youtube.com looking at lessons people put up, and I must say it helps tremendously. I think the next step is to take lessons or a class at a JC.
Working for Dreamhost December 6th, 2007
As most of you know I recently was laid off of work. I took a small vacation with my dad during this time. We went to Oregon and were gone for a week. We had a lot of fun and did some really cool things. Well, trying to find work when I got back wasn’t too easy. The economy right now is very bad, especially for Linux Admins. After six months I finally got a call back from Dreamhost about an application I submitted some 3-4 months prior.
The interview went well and shortly after, I was hired. I must say, there is a lot more automation than I’m used to. Not that it’s bad, it’s actually really cool once you get used to how things are supposed to work. I’m kinda bummed I’m doing Tech Support again, but I’m also kinda happy that I am. There is a lot less responsibility and I don’t have to spent hours in a Data Center. Their setup hardware wise is pretty much what I’m used to from my last job. I suppose that’s the way to go when you start talking serious hosting.
Kidspaint December 4th, 2007
I’ve been struggling to learn programming for some time now. I’ve settled on Python, but I needed a kick start. With the help of the book I’m using I was able to make a nifty little paint program that my kids love! All you need is Python 2.5 and Pygame 1.7.
Download the program: http://greg.silosoft.org/assets/2007/12/5/kidspaint-linux-0.2.zip
View a screenshot: http://greg.silosoft.org/assets/2007/12/5/kidspaint.PNG
Hollywood Fire March 30th, 2007
Right now there is a good sized fire going on in Hollywood near the sign. You can probably get better coverage on CNN or one of the large news networks, however here is a video from our office window.
I have family and friends who are Firefighters, if you guys are there, stay safe…
EDIT: My friend found Jesus in the smoke and made this http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=29qmsn5
iTunes from anywhere February 5th, 2007
I recently had the opportunity to reinstall OSX on my laptop. After doing this I decided to move more of my files over to my server. This included about 20+ gigabytes of music. Luckily for me there are some nice open source applications that interface well with iTunes. For my particular situation I decided to go with Firefly Media Server. I use Debian at home on my server so it was very easy to install.
Read the rest of this entryGoodbye Microsoft? February 1st, 2007
Not too long ago the only Operating System I used was Linux. I used it on my laptop and on my desktop. I haven’t run a Windows OS in quite some time now. However, a lot of my friends and all of my family run Windows. There really is no way around it. People become familiar with a product and get comfortable so they stay, even if it isn’t the easiest or the best for them.
I stopped trying to get people to use Linux years ago, simply because I didn’t want to support everyone who I converted. I know this sounds selfish, but try supporting a couple friends who don’t like to read documentation. Some people don’t know how to download an ISO and burn them, so live CD’s become a problem.
A co-worker sent me an email with a .exe that allows you to install Debian from within Windows. The install doesn’t damage Windows or change your settings, it simply installs Debian next to Windows and allows you to choose which one you want to boot into at start-up. This is very similar to an older application that I tried many years ago called Winlinux2000. The concept was the same, except it wasn’t Debian. If you are interested, here is the site which has some screenshots and the download link. I have the file up for download, but their url is much cooler… :D
OSX vs. Linux February 1st, 2007
So I’ve been using OSX now for about three and a half months. Before that I was running Debian Linux on my work laptop. I decided to switch when I left my last job and had to return my laptop. So when I went out looking for a new one, I decided on the MacBook because it was small enough to be portable, yet powerful enough with all the features I wanted.
For the most part OSX has been great. Microsofts Windows has nothing on OSX, even Vista which was just released a couple days ago pales in comparison to OSX. Leopard is supposed to be released soon which will give it more features that us Linux users have taken for granted.
Read the rest of this entryRuby on Rails / Apache 2 / Mongrel January 31st, 2007
Ok, so as I explained in my last post I found this nice blogging app thats written in Ruby on Rails. I learned a lot about deploying Ruby on Rails applications in a couple short hours. One of my biggest problems was with Apache 2 and fcgid. All of the docs I found said to use either fastcgi or fcgid. Fcgid is broken in Debian Etch as of right now, and fastcgi was giving me nothing but header errors. I tried mod_ruby and received a security error every time.
Read the rest of this entryNew Layout January 31st, 2007
Ok, I decided to ditch Wordpress for something newer. I have been looking into learning some Python and Ruby so I spent about 3 days looking for a good out-of-the-box blogging package. I finally found Typo and was happy with it for a while. Then I stumbled across Mephisto and have been quite happy since.