Category: Geek Stuff

FreeBSD and Stuff

FreeBSD Ever since Kyung got me sign up for Linode, my love affairs with Linux has been steady. At first it was Fedora, then came Slackware, then boldly, I tried the hottest newcomer, Gentoo. It was the fun days of using a VPS to reinstall pretty much anything at any time with just 10 minutes or less. At the end, I settled with Slackware before moving on to ServerBeach for a dedicated server running Debian.

All is well with Linux, but then my cousin, Alex, started planting ideas about FreeBSD in my head (how it’s even closer to a true Unix system and that some of the most popular sites are powered by FreeBSD). At my last job interview with Vicarious Visions, I learned that a lot of their servers are also running on FreeBSD, and plus Mac OSX’s Darwin is based on FreeBSD anyway, I thought it’d worth my time to look into it.

Ever since I lost my job in January, I have had some time in my hands to educate myself on some stuff. But I feel like no matter how much I teach myself, the knowledge is not quite as valuable as if it was applied to realproblems in the field. Hopefully whatever I learned from FreeBSD will help me land my next job, whatever that may be.

I did a quick and dirty install (easier than Slackware, not quite near Fedora’s ease of use though). We’ll see what happens.

其實我在各種不同的 Linux 上花了不少心思去研究和摸索。當然如果在家裡自己一個一個版本的慢慢安裝就太浪費時間了, 還好 Kyung 之前有介紹我用 VPS (虛擬專屬伺服器), 在 VPS 上換裝任何 Linux 版本只要十分鐘! 所以前前後後試了不少種類, 分別有 Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo 和 Debian 等。但是最後還是用 Debian (ServerBeach 只有 Redhat 和 Debian 的選擇)。

後來祝平不斷的向我宣導 FreeBSD 的好處, 說他同學架的站幾乎清一色都是用 FreeBSD çš„… 剛好上上個禮拜去面試那家公司也有不少台 FreeBSD 的伺服器, 我今天心血來潮就試裝了。還好安裝的過程還算簡單 (比 Slackware ç°¡å–®, 但還是沒有 Fedora 好裝就是了)。

Anti-Rape Kit

An inventor from South Africa (supposedly the rape capital of the world) came up with a device that can free women from fear of rape — anti-rape condom for woman.

The device, concealed inside a woman’s body, hooks onto a rapist during penetration and must be surgically removed.

Ouch!

But seriously, perhaps there should be law that mandates medical staff to report men who visit clinics for the removal of the device (kind of like they do with gun wounds), giving the rapists a one-two punch.

Anti-Rape Kit

via [MedGadget]

WordPress Plugin — “Subscribe to Comments”

Carl requested to receive emails for people leaving comments on a thread he’d left comments on. I thought maybe others would also find that feature useful. So I did some digging and found Subscribe to Comments plugin for WordPress. Alright!

1. Fetched and unzipped the plugin.
2. Move

1
subscribe-to-comments.php

to

1
/wp-contents/_theme_of_choice/plugins/

.
3. Move

1
wp-subscription-manager.php

to the root of the WordPress directory.
4. Activate the plugin in the admin panel. Done!

Now users can optionally opt-in to receive notifications when someone else leaves a comment on entries where they’d posted comments at. Cool.

Ajax It

Everybody is talking about AJAX (more explanation here) these days. It’s a combination of JavaScripting, css and XML and/or any text data. To find the most obvious demonstration of the technology, look no further than Google Maps. The advantage of implementing AJAX is that the user doesn’t have to refresh the web page to see the information he requested being fetched. Good stuff.

I found a site with some interesting sample codes for all you AJAX-programmer-wannabes.

Digital Photo Prints

Costco has probably the cheapest printing service for digital photo. But instead of going to Costco, upload pictures there, and then possibly having to make a second trip to pick the pictures up, they offer an online upload option for pickup later.

Costco Mac plugin

It’s nice to see that Costco (via Snapfish) has a Mac compatible browser plugin for batch upload (beats manual one-by-one upload any day). Sony’s very own ImageStation also has similar features for Mac.

Speaking of pictures, I tried using PictureSync to see if it can make photo sharing any easier on a Mac. Unfortunately, the application is not free among its supported services. So I didn’t bother.

Too bad iPhoto has a really poor “export to web” feature. As of now, my favorite photo export app is PhotoSite TimeSaviour. Not only is it free, the software is also packed with feature that puts iPhoto’s export feature to shame. The only downside is that its GUI can be a bit complicated to figure out. And it seems like the author has stopped developing it. The upside is, once you get the settings figured out, you can save the settings for future use. Excellent~~ (in the tone of George Burns).

UPDATE: I wrote the author of PhotoSite TimeSaviour about future developments of the software. He replied and said:

…I’ve been short of time lately, but I have plans on updating it (with among other things proper CSS-based styling). – Karl B

Sweet. I like the app so much that I even made a Paypal donation. I could really use that css-based styling.

Murdza and Geekdom

Part of my dream last night was about Murdza’s geekdom. So this entry is about him.

The part in the dream about Murdza had him sitting in front of a Mac, using just the keyboard navigating fluently around the GUI and various applications. His boss, standing next to him, with a hint of proudness, seemed pleased. I remember back in the days of Mac OS9, he was the one showing me how virtually everything can be done with just the keyboard. Seeing him doing his tricks on a Mac makes one think being a geek is cool.

I inherited most of my cable “wiring” techniques and ethics from Murdza as well (five words: “wire ties are your friends”). After having worked with him for a year, it’s very tough to stand messy and unorganized wiring now. Hey, thanks, Murdza…

MythTV-Like App for Wintel?

I didn’t think something like this would exist for Wintel, but it does. After sending back the video capture card to Buy.com, I gave up on MythTV (for now). But knowing something like MediaPortal exists for Windows is comforting (for Windows users). But the whole me doing MythTV was so that I could do away Windows altogether.

eBooks. Lots of Them.

Ever wonder where you can get a digital your favorite classical literature? Project Gutenberg probably has one of the largest collection of ebooks online (all 16,000+, free for personal use in the U.S.). A quick search on “Mark Twain” turned up dozens of the late author’s work. Not only does the site have everything in text format, it also includes (in an awkward way) the scanned pages of the original book. Very nice.

via [TipMonkies]