Toshiba has created what I think is probably the coolest Hard Drive to date. This thing is super tiny and holds 250 GB. It’s been designed for the next generation of ultra thin laptops and with measurements being 1.8 inches by 8 millimeters, I think they are well on their way.
Google Goggles – they might just save you an awkward phone call.
Everyone has received an inebriated email from an ex-lover or co-worker (or anyone you know, for that matter!). You know the type of email; too much information, confession-booth ‘I still love you’, and just plain not-thought-out ‘wow you’re drunk’ type of emails. Maybe you’ve even sent some of these emails yourself? Well the good people at google labs have taken steps to help stop the scourge of ‘drunk emailing’. Once you install the Mail Goggles you can set a time frame for activation (the default is Friday and Saturday 10PM – 4AM) and once activated, Mail Goggles will make you solve five math problems in a short period of time in order to send a message. The thought is, if you’re clear of mind enough to do math, you’re clear of mind enough to send an email without regret. So sorry, Laquanda, no more drunk emails from this admin about our tenth-grade missed connection. Now if only Google can make something similar for Android, maybe we could quell those ‘drunk-dials’ too.
cr0wnd
Maybe this will save you some headaches – if you’re tailing your cron log (tail -f /var/log/cron) and find a bunch of “account expired” records and you know that specific account is not expired, this might help. Try suspending and unsuspending the account. Still no go? This is a rare and very odd issue we ran into, but you may want to check (especially if you’re receiving these errors after repartitioning hard drive space) the crond file itself in /etc/pam.d. In this case it was blanked-out after repartitioning some drive space. If it is blanked out, it will revert to /etc/pam.d/other – which be default, in most cases, is deny. A quick and easy fix is to copy the entires in SSHD – save and restart crond.
PowerShell tutorial 8 part 2
As I mentioned last time, today’s post is in regards to using pipelines with foreach loops. Whenever you define a collection in a foreach statement, you are more or less setting up a pipeline. Take a look at this example;
foreach ($svc in Get-Service |
where {$_.status -eq 'running'})
{
$svc.name + ": " +
$svc.canstop.tostring().toupper()
}
Microsoft, Asus, and the Large Hadron Collider.
I couldn’t really pin-point one subject for my blog entry, so I’ll cover a few things that I found interesting!
Computer World is reporting that the new “I’m a PC” ad campaign for Microsoft was actually created on a Mac. Some of the source files are tagged with “Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh” in the picture properties. Granted, not all of them were tagged like this, however; when trying to clean up the already poor reputation of Vista™ you could at least… you know, use the operating system you’re trying to save.
Asus, as reported by Ars Technica, had a bit of a blunder recently. It seems they released restore DVDs that also included a cracking tool for winRAR, confidential Microsoft documents for PC Manufacturers, and Asus source code. Asus will be tracking this issue down and dealing with it but expect to see lawsuits from RARlab.
And finally, for the conspiracy theory buff in us all left wondering how we’re still alive, the Large Hadron Collider has been taken offline until spring of 2009 due to a liquid helium leak. Rest easy knowing that you’ve got a few more months until we’re all sucked into oblivion! I am, of course, kidding… but there’s a 1:1,000,000,000 chance* that I’m not.
*figures not accurate.
Recover disk space by removing windows hot fix backup files.
When windows performs it’s updates, often but not always some of the hot fixes leave backup files so that you can later uninstall those hot fixes should they themselves be a problem. Normally these backup files present no issue and can simply be ignored. On the occasions where this is not the case and you need or simply want that space back, there is a free tool to help.
DEMO 08
NetworkWorld has a slide-show of 15 new technologies from DEMOfall 08. Showcased are everything from services dedicated to finding ‘spin’ in news stories, to new money management, to finding musicians for project collaboration, to RFID tags for home use, to streaming media from your house to your cellphone! Don’t worry, IT gang, there’s new ways to spy on you, new ways to monitor servers/tickets/inventory (like we need anymore of that – there’s enough open-source options to fill a colo), to a PCIe card that uses flash memory for a SAN. It’s worth the few minutes to check out. The one thing that’s strangely absent from the list is a new product to take a slide-show and put it into a normal html based page.
PowerShell tutorial 7
There are many free scripts on the net you can use with powershell, but the real power comes in making your own cmdlets. To begin, first start by enabling scripts.
Chrome Dome
I’ve been testing Google’s new browser, chrome, for quite a bit today (download it here). So far so good. The interface is simple and smooth while the settings are a breeze and easy to understand. It’s still in beta, but I did have a nice little chuckle when I couldn’t even install google’s own toolbar. Then again it’s not really nessisary as you can just type your search into the address bar. The majority of the firefox/ie keyboard shortcuts are the exact same, so switching over isn’t a hassle. You can also import your settings and bookmarks, although I opted not to do so for now. Since it’s an open source project, many of your favorite firefox and internet explorer plugins will probably be made availible in due time. I’ve noticed a bit of annoying lag when viewing/interacting with a rather heavy-handed flash based sites, but I’m sure that will smooth out with updates. All-in-all I’d say it’s worth a look-see; however, I don’t see if flat out replacing my highly tuned firefox setup just yet. Oh, yeah, and you must have a windows operating system to try it out.
Ruby on Rails – Tutorial 1 – Creating a Rails Project
I heard about Rails back when I was a programmer at BlueHost / Hostmonster since they are one of the “preferred” web hosting companies for Ruby on Rails type applications. There weren’t very many clients who used it, but when questions came in about it, I always seemed to be approached with them. I guess tech support people think that if you are generally willing to help them out and you know a programming language, you know them all. Well, I eventually got sick of saying I don’t know and got some basic knowledge going of Ruby on Rails, and was pleasantly surprised!
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