External HDD in Ubuntu
A close friend gave me another of his gathering-dust and seldom-used hardware - (done with a but of arm-twisting). I got the package early yesterday. As I’ve expected, it contained the hard disk enclosure he agreed to give me, although I wish it came with HDD. But that is asking too much, right?
I guess I’ll be doing my backup with it. Previously, backing up data involve an old PC that also serves as my development server. Scary isn’t it? Close to 10 GB of pictures are at stake here. It’s about time those be separated from anything that can possibly be toasted by my rouge scripts.
Anyway, what I did was to take the hard drive of another old PC to be used by the enclosure. It’s easy as pie. Just connect the HDD to the E/IDE and power cables, plug in the USB cable to my notebook running Ubuntu Dapper Drake and double click on the USBDisk icon in the desktop to see the content of the HDD. In my case the HDD is in ext3 format, it having Debian.
I would like to thank Vincent of vljuson.com for the enclosure. Keep them coming, dude. By the way, he has tons of stuff for sale he features on his site.
Virtual Private Server
Some of my sites went down a couple of times today. Calculating the total cost I’m currently paying for the sites I maintain, it’s enough for a VPS. VPS gives me all that I’m getting now and more. I get to choose my apps and have root access. The downside: I get to choose my own apps and have root access. I see them in the positive.
Shopped around and found that there are un-managed VPS with prices starting at $8/month. For $8, it doubles the disk space I currently get and an un-metered bandwidth which is great since I won’t have to scrimp on pictures. Not that my sites are going over their quota. Most don’t use half of their allowed monthly bandwidth.
Nominate Your Open Source CMS
I nominated Drupal in 2006 Packt Open Source CMS award. So are you religious about your? Go and nominate them.
No News Archive
A local daily newspaper company I once offered an online solution finally had their site up. Without a bang. I didn’t get the contract. They have it made by some group affiliated with a local IT school.
I can’t believe it was done by a group. The interface was much too similar to another local daily’s site. It’s safe to assume they were both created by same group. In today’s internet when everything is suppose to be dynamic, the newspaper site is generated by hand. The extension will tell you that it is a PHP script but I bet you, it is for including other static files that regular html file cannot do.
Obviously, the people who created it have not logged on to the internet lately. Subscribe has a whole new meaning now. Everytime I see a subscribe link, RSS comes first to my mind. Newsletters are so five years ago. Even worse is that when they say subscribe they meant, subscribe to the dead tree version.
I may sound like I’m sour graping here. Well… I am. They could’ve been a proud owner of a nice Drupal powered site. Oh, well.
Missed Rockstar Supernova
I missed watching Rockstar Supernova Week 3. Thanks to supernovafans.com, I was able to download each rocker’s performances. Jenny Galt was booted out.
Fooling Akismet
I don’t get too many spam now than I used to before. Thanks to Akismet. There are still a few that gets through, though. And thanks to my moderation rules and blacklisted word list, automated comment spamming haven’t had much luck.
Just a thought. How can akismet tell if a particular submitted comment is spam or not? I know there are other factors that it consider but I guess, it puts more weight on the ip address of the submitter second only to the phrases.
But is it possible if I create a blog, install akismet, enable comment moderation and have it spammed automatically. All those comments will go into moderation. All I have to do is to just to mark all of it as “not spam”.
If I’m the only one doing it, akismet may just ignore it. But if all the comment spammers create lots of blogs, spam each other and mark all of it as “not spam”, I’m sure akismet maybe fooled by the overwhelming votes for that ip address or term.
Maybe the spammers are already doing it already. Just a thought
No Thanks
Do you know how this guy feel? I actually do.
Don’t be an a-hole
One thing I learned over the years that will matter most to me until the day I die is never be an asshole. I’ve learn to value friendship over anything else. I found that it’s easy to gain friends by not being a pain in the ass.
How do you know if you are a pain in the ass? You don’t need a mirror to know. If you walk into a room full of people you know and not a soul greets you, then you are a ghost, er.., pain in the ass. You see, you simply don’t matter to them.
Oh, you might think you don’t need them. Yes, you’re right. But mark my word, it ain’t pretty going down with no one to help you get up and you’re too lame to do anything. Well, if I fall down, it’ll be gracious, dweeb.
Chris Out of Supernova
Chris is out. Two weeks in a row in hot seat is just too much for the guy. I still think Zayra should be the one sent home. Gilby was right, she doesn’t know a thing about the guys. Denial…
Rockstar Supernova Week 2
Zayra Alvarez and Josh Logan performed poorly tonight and are running the risk of being sent off tomorrow night. But all that still depend on the votes. Dilana is made that Johnny Cash song sound good. Toby Rand too rocked the show tonight.