Wow, from the look of this site you would think I fell off the face of the world. But I’m still around. The semester flew by, and I got way too busy with school, friends, and a girlfriend to give much thought to this site. I’m disappointed, because I had a lot of good ideas of different content I wanted to put up. And even though Christmas break is pretty hectic this year, I’m gonna try to do a few things to get this place back on it’s feet.
First off, I want to migrate my site from (mt)’s Shared Server system to the new Grid system. This should open up some cool things as it eliminates many of the problems of the SS plan and allows me to run some cool apps, I’ve wanted to try out. Then I will make sure that all the software I use is up-to-date.
As far as content goes, I want to start off with getting a new theme, and changing the look around. I have some articles that I have been thinking of working on too. I’m gonna change the focus from strictly tech stuff, to any random thing I feel like putting up. So it will probably end up being tech stuff, sports, personal, funny stuff, and other random tidbits. I’ll try to set some goals, and maybe I can accomplish them.
Sorry about not posting much recently, but I’ve been busy getting ready to go back to college. And after a year, of working I am going back down to college. I am all packed up, and I leave tomorrow morning. I am going down to Clearwater Christian College. I am transfering down there, so I have a lot of work to do to get all the classes I need before I graduate. My sister also goes there and she convinced me to transfer there. Ironically she is sitting out a semester to recover from a wrist injury (she is a piano major). So tomorrow, I will attempt to drive 1000 miles from Philly to Clearwater in one day by myself. Should be fun. After I get settled, I’ll have lots of free time for the beach, weightlifting, girls, video games, and blogging. I guess I’ll have studying to do too, but since I haven’t done that in a while, I probably won’t start that till its too late 
This list of 100 things you don’t want to here your System Administrator say comes from PacketStorm Unix Humor. And I’ve got to admit, I’ve said several of these lines before.
1. Uh-oh…..
2. Shit!!
3. What the hell!?
4. Go get your backup tape. (You do have a backup tape?)
5. That’s SOOOOO bizarre.
6. Wow!! Look at this…..
7. Hey!! The suns don’t do this.
8. Terminated??!
9. What software license?
10. Well, it’s doing something…..
Continue reading ‘Things You Don’t Want to Hear Your SysAdmin say’
AOL’s research department released a dataset containing the search history of 500 thousand users with 20 million search terms. They released it for: “The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other types of search research.” AOL soon removed the data from their site, but the damage has already been done and mirrors are all over the net.
This data is very valuable for marketers, SEOs, and spammers. The problem with the data is that it identifies users with a unique id. Thus all searched from a particular user are related with this id. And with enough searches it can be possible to determine who the person is. Since AOL uses google as its search engine, this is essentually the same data that Google fought the goverment to keep it from them. Now it is all over the net. And people are finding all kinds of interesting info.
It is only a matter of time until someone releases a web interface to search and parse this data. I am sure google link spammers are already parsing this data to find the best keywords to spam. I would imagine that google will have an interesting response soon. And this is definitly going to hurt aol. I am glad that I am not using aol for anything other than aim, but it would not suprise me if I found my chats online soon.
Of course I have already downloaded the data, and though I don’t have much time with moving in two weeks, I will probably import the data in MYSQL and do a few queries. >:)
These are a few tips on setting passwords in MySql from the Linux command line I figured out while setting up a MySql db server.
To set the root password run this: “mysql -u root mysql” Then run this query: “SET PASSWORD FOR root@localhost=PASSWORD(’password‘);” at the MySql prompt replacing the italics with the password.
Then run this command to connect to the database: “mysql -u root -p mysql” and enter your password.
Also to completely wipe everything associated with the database run “rm -rf /var/lib/mysql/*” and restart MySql server (/etc/init.d/mysqld start). This can be helpful to reset a forgotten root password, although there are less destructive ways.
I have finally created a JavaScript version of my C# password generator. The javascript version located here will generate multiple random passwords containing upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Just hit the generate button to get your passwords. Remember your passwords and keep them in a safe place.
I have several ideas to extend the functionality of this tool, and I will work on them when I get time over the next few months. If you have any suggestions please let me know.
Well tonight I reinstalled Windows XP on my computer. However I put the 32-bit version on instead of 64-bit which I had on before. I was having too many driver problems, and found I didn’t get any benefits from x64.
The install went smoothly, however I found out that Windows XP before sp1 does not support hard drives more than 130gb. But once I installed sp2, it recognized the rest of the hard drive. I just had to use Partition Magic to combine the partitions.
I would have liked to kept Windows XP x64, but it still has too many driver problems and program incompatibilities to be viable for a typical desktop setup.
This past week I took part of my vacation time. I figured since I am leaving in 3 weeks, it was a good time to take a weeks vacation. I spent Monday through Wednesday at Ocean City, New Jersey, at the beach with my good friend Dave Grimm and his family. It was a blast; we had great weather so we spent plenty of time on the beach and on the boardwalk. On Thursday my brother Allen and I went hiking at Blue Rocks campground. We had a good time together hiking to the top of a mountain. On Friday my Dad and I went to the Eagles training camp at Lehigh University. That was really cool. It was neat to see the players up close during practice. I took plenty of pictures during the week and here are just a few of them.
Click to see Pictures. Continue reading ‘A Week of Vacation!’
This has been a crazy week! Tuesday night we had a huge storm, with hurrican force winds. I believe it was a part of Tropical Storm Beryl. At 7:30 PM on Tuesday night, some 500,000 people in our area lost electricity. Of course we did too. But now on Friday afternoon, I still do not have power at my house. In fact most of our township is without power. Its pretty crazy, and really annoying. I’ve had a bunch of stuff to get done before I go to school in three weeks, and now I have less time to do it. Hopefully we will get power soon.
But I thought about it more, and realized that PECO (our electric provider) has really shot their uptime statistics for this year. We usually lose power for approximatly a total of 24 hours a year. This is 99.7% uptime. In my work in the IT department with an ASP, this amount of uptime is unacceptable. We have to have at least 99.99%. Well with this 70+ hour downtime, PECO’s uptime for this year will be 98.5%. Ouch. Somebody would get fired in most IT shops for that kind of poor uptime. But there is only so much you can do when trees fall on your power lines. This would make a good case for lines buried in the ground. One good thing this kind of storm outage does is raise awareness for disaster recovery. At least at my company we have already made changes to our plan, and ordered more equipment that will help ensure our office will still function after any future storms may try to shut us down. (We almost lost one important old dev server after a power surge on Tues night. But after several hours on the phone with HP we got it back in order.)
So PECO, turn my lights back on. I want to build a linux server this weekend. (Before I go to the beach next week)
While building a new web server today I decided to see if there was a way to create Virtual Directories in IIS 6 from the command line. I had a bunch to create and wanted to script the creation for the next time I build a web server. I came across two vbscripts that are installed into c:\windows\system32 with IIS. This is the Microsoft article for the scripts. Continue reading ‘Create IIS6 Web Sites and Virtual Directories from the Command Line’