tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-107704322011-07-28T06:37:52.815-04:00<i>An authorized <a href="http://www.workorspoon.com"><b>Work or Spoon</b></a> affiliate.</i> <br> Man, can I ramble, or can I ramble??The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.comBlogger351100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-29624512111853723552007-07-08T22:43:00.001-04:002007-10-25T11:52:16.246-04:00

We're watching a show right now about the "Secrets of Harry Potter" on A&E. A good show, but something's really bothering me about it. Then, after watching the same Visa commercial for the 2000th time tonight, it hits me. It's a training exercise. Seriously, think about it. Who's going to be watching this show right now? 14-16 year olds? The perfect age to start training them that "using

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-70859488155062374292006-12-15T10:51:00.000-05:002006-12-15T10:55:56.570-05:00

This is a post I made on Slashdot this morning in response to the article "Why does everyone hate Microsoft?" I figured no one would really read it there, but it must be read! :)And, yes, Unixers that goes for you, too.You're going to meet four kinds of people in IT. The first is the "Old-Timer". You can usually tell these people pretty easily because they're still running Unix (or Netware!).

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1161887178051809092006-10-26T14:26:00.000-04:002006-10-26T14:30:19.327-04:00

A new version of the Del.icio.us extension for Firefox came out recently. Since I've start using DIU more or less exclusively for storing my bookmarks, I was very excited to see one that offered more functionality. I uninstalled it after about an hour of playing around with it. I won't go into a ton of details, but suffice it to say it didn't fit in at all with the way I use Firefox. Now, I'd

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1158862344386773782006-09-21T14:12:00.000-04:002006-10-26T14:30:19.257-04:00

The fundamental flaw of US politics is that it is a representative democracy.  That means the people vote for people to represent them in government using democratic elections.   The problem is, people are stupid, lazy, ill-informed, lazy, ill-informed and stupid.  So, guess what kind of people end up representing them?  C'mon, it's not a hard question!Worse still, the brainless masses are so

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1158694001407224732006-09-19T15:26:00.000-04:002006-10-26T14:30:19.195-04:00

So, I'm browsing around today 'cause I've got a small issue.  At home, I use Exchange 2003 as a mail server (yes, it is overkill.  So?)  When I'm on the road, I typically use Outlook Web Access to get in to my account.  I also use Firefox as my primary browser.  OWA doesn't work well in Firefox.  Why?  Because Microsoft designed it, and they don't care about down-level browsers.   They support IE

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1156544923833006182006-08-25T18:28:00.000-04:002006-10-26T14:30:19.132-04:00

So, I've decided to try and spend a little more time with my blogs. My peeps deserve that, afterall. They do love me for a reason, so I have to keep giving it up! :)But, blogging can be a pain in the ass...enter Performancing for Firefox. It's a nifty little extension for Firefox that allows you to blog pretty easily. Just install it, restart FF and you're off. You then setup your accounts

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1155564391758398902006-08-14T09:53:00.000-04:002006-10-26T14:30:19.046-04:00

Been a while, huh? Wonder if anyone has me in their RSS feeds to see if I update this again. Hehehehe. Well, I'm going to try and be a bit more regular with all of my blogs, let's see how that works out.Anyway, wanted to stop in and tell you how cool this Firefox extension is...FoxyProxy. I used to use the SwitchProxy Tool because I was using my laptop both at work and home. SPT allowed me

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1140039122302138532006-02-15T16:21:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:18.902-04:00

Webmin: think of it as a web-based MMC for your Linux box. That oughta piss off a lot of people, huh? :) It's a great tool once you get it setup. Fortunately, on Fedora it's as simple as yumming it down and it'll be preconfigured for the way things are setup on that OS. Otherwise, I recommend following the docs for installation. It's as simple as putting it into the directory it will

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1139270483016172042006-02-06T18:38:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:18.834-04:00

You know what's funny? I "grew up" using both Linux and Windows. Unlike most people, I find Windows a whole lot easier to use, a whole lot more stable, and generally a better day-to-day OS. Linux is fun to play with, but I get so aggravated trying to do the simplest stuff some days. It's just not worth the level of aggravation! The latest thing that was bugging me has also been bugging me

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1138894891186795692006-02-02T10:38:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:18.771-04:00

For the last few years, I've been using the following sig in all of my Spoonie-based e-mails:Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!http://www.workorspoon.comAfter the anti-science tone of the state of the union, though, I feel I have to change it to strike a blow in my typical passive-aggressive way. I admit it, I voted for the man twice. But, I'm

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1138725272591507402006-01-31T11:16:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:18.620-04:00

One of the nice things about Linux is that if a certain feature you need isn't available, you can write or create your own. The obvious drawback, of course, is you need to be a programmer with some mad skillz in order to do that. Fortunately, there are a few of them out there, and here are some of the kernel patches I sometimes use and where to get them. I'm thinking of starting a kernel patch

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1138639008613953622006-01-30T10:38:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:18.548-04:00

A couple of guys in my group just got back from a week-long training session on Citrix Metaframe Presentation Server 4.0. Unlike a lot of IT guys, I don't jump on the "training" bandwagon. I avoid it for a couple of reasons.The first reason is simple: I don't need it. Look over the posts on this blog, does it seem I know a lot about Linux? Well, it's true, I do. But, I've never had a day's

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1138311510352900822006-01-26T15:54:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:18.466-04:00

I tell you, I've got to stop writing this damn thing. I've had more serious troubles with my server since I started writing about how to do stuff. It's almost like every time I make some progress, something else comes along to force my hand...The other night, we came home from work to find the house dark. My house is automated with HomeSeer. I don't have a shitload of tasks setup, but the

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1138051791812257032006-01-23T16:09:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.969-04:00

Over the years, I've seen some pretty consistent mistakes done by a large portion of the open source community that have forced me to stay out of it. I think the biggest issue is open sourcers seem to think everyone's a mind reader and just KNOW everything there is to know about their product, and if you don't, you shouldn't be using Linux anyway. Well, if that's your attitude, fuck you and go

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1137028441055660082006-01-11T19:38:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.890-04:00

Me, I'm a big fan of Howard Stern. I started listening him from the first day he was syndicated into Philadelphia. I remember cradling my stupid little one speaker "boom box" I had bought as my mom drove me to school. I don't know what it is with me, but I was never, EVER able to buy a boom box that actually boomed. Everyone else had one that was 10X lounder than any I'd owned... Anyway, I

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1136912808848608122006-01-10T11:48:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.798-04:00

If you're running Windows, take a gander at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen. Where the clock is. Does it look like this:Or this:If you said the first, I'd put your computer savvy somewhere around "styrofoam cup". Sorry, it IS insulting, but I'm trying to make a point. I never really formally said it, but I've come to rely on the system tray as a pretty good indicator of computer

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1136484595352002522006-01-05T12:15:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.700-04:00

One of my goals of this migration has been to provide a unified e-mail system for myself which would include spam and av filtering, aggregation from multiple accounts, easy use of all of those accounts, and some other nifty little tweaks like attachment removal. Let's go over it a little bit:The BackgroundMy current setup is that I run my own mail server at home. This allows me to keep my

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1136413617292728352006-01-04T16:59:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.418-04:00

Remember me saying how you really need to protect your data? Boy, do I know how to predict failure or what?! :) Seriously, I had a panic attack over the last couple of days as I started getting mails from mdadm:A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.Yipes! So, I cat /proc/mdstat and found that all three arrays were showing a degraded state, with one drive missing from

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1135967877410475392005-12-30T13:10:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.322-04:00

No, I didn't get canned again, but using the info in this article can get your ass in serious hot water if you use it and get caught. You've been warned! Before attempting to use any of these tools, you should also invest in an SSL certificate for your webserver. Can't afford one? No? Have you not heard of CACert? You can get a free cert for your machine from there. They also provide their

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1135718622468642962005-12-27T15:53:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.173-04:00

Having worked in the IT filed for pretty much all of my adult life, and some of my non-adult life, there's one lesson I've learned the hardway: hard drives die. If you store your important data on a hard drive, chances are you're going to lose that data somehow someday. Backups are a great way to preserve your data from these inevitible failures (they'll happen, it's just a matter of when!)

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1135198703270224342005-12-21T15:39:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:17.048-04:00

hdparm: nipple clip of yesteryearThe first tweak I'd recommend is starting with hdparm. It can't hurt, and might help. This article is the one I learned how to use hdparm from a long, long time ago. It's a little dated, but the commands are still the same, so you can at least learn how it works. More than likely, it won't make any difference as the features it's supposed to enable are

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1135193389414084592005-12-21T14:28:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.967-04:00

If you're not that familiar with Linux, I'm going to break silence and let you in on a little secret: all those claims of higher performance are bunk. They ARE true...under certain circumstances, such as you're not running a GUI and you don't run any services and pretty much don't log in. Yeah, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but only a little. :)Here's the top three responses you'll get if you

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1135096359108603782005-12-20T11:29:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.908-04:00

Installed Fedora Core 4, and it made my system unbootable. Turns out it's an issue that's been around since at least FC2 where the CD does some funky stuff on drives 120+ Gigs. It seems the installer doesn't understand LBA and it writes the partition table with the wrong geometry screwing everything up. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it was to wipe the MBR and remove grub. Even more

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1135095978648395052005-12-20T11:22:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.787-04:00

Boy, been a long time since I posted here, too! Followers from WoS know about my personal side taking up so much time recently, but on the technology side, I've been keeping myself busy, too.Since October-ish, I've been working to build a new system based on LFS 6.1. I decided to use nALFS to automate the task, and built new profiles with each build. Of course, the fact that it took me a month

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1110231340400578162005-03-07T16:16:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.541-04:00

As you'll probably learn from reading this blog, I don't use commercial Linux distributions like RedHat or Suse. About 4-5 years ago, I ran accross Linux From Scratch, and have been doing it that way ever since. The drawback to using LFS is it follows the few standards Linux has such as the Linux Standard Base and theFilesystem Hierarchy Standard. Now, some distros follow this, and some don't.

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1110225081918303572005-03-07T14:50:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.477-04:00

Data, data, data...so very much data. All of it stored in incompatible formats, all of it accessible only to the software that originally created the file that contains the data. Unless you spend a lot of time creating some kind of converter script or program, your data is trapped.The open source community for years has been telling us this. They've said things like "Why do you continue to use

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108668629755365122005-02-17T14:24:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.341-04:00

Big news over at Linux-land...er, Slashdot today. "Study Finds Windows More Secure Than Linux". The summaries of the results are pretty good, as these two appear to have done a more fair comparison than I've seen in the past. For example, IIS isn't a webserver, it's an application server and does more than just serve static webpages. To compare IIS to Apache side-by-side is like comparing a

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108581881379928192005-02-16T14:10:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.267-04:00

Well, not for me, but for you possibly. I just came back from having a smoke break, and one of the folks out there asked why I was wearing my sunglasses. We just had a nifty blizzard-like snow storm this morning, and it's still overcast and grey. Not your typical sunglasses day!I replied as such: first of all, an overcast day has a glare that I just find unbearable. It really gives me a

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108581036367529792005-02-16T14:07:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.209-04:00

So, I'm walking past someone's cube just now and I happened to glance at their screen. They were looking at their calendar, but with just a quick glance, it almost looked like they were playing solitaire. That gave me an idea: a solitaire game, but instead of cards, you would have what looked like calendar entries. You could shuffle them around, and if someone looked, they'd think you were

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108173248536283952005-02-11T20:36:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.148-04:00

I've said it before, and received a ton of crap for it....Apache's docs suck.Consider this...you go to buy a new car. You find the one you want, and proceed to make the purchase. The salesman then explains that what you're going to do next is head to law school so that you can pass the bar. You see, the sales contract for a new car is very complex, and not something to be taken lightly. So, when

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108157554945267742005-02-11T16:19:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.089-04:00

I like eBay. I've actually been using it since its original URL was something like ebay.surf.net. Anyone else remember that? I don't use it that often, but when I do, I like to get a good deal. One way to do this is use auction sniping software. The basic idea is to put your only bid in the last 15 seconds of an auction, thus removing anyone's chance of upping the bid. A lot of times,

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108156735180784572005-02-11T15:41:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:16.026-04:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, my current project has me revamping the home network. Everything that's in place has served me well, but it's time for me to get some more functionality out of everything, as well as cut down on the number of computers I have running 24/7. Considering my previous employer is also my electric company, I want them to get as little of my money as I can! Maybe not so

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108148574351325172005-02-11T13:50:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:15.957-04:00

I've always been a fan of IIS....no, it's true. It has a nasty reputation for being insecure, and in some ways, it's not unearned. Problem is, it's easy to secure, it just don't come that way out of the box! Any admin that tells you IIS ain't secure has no idea what they're doing...especially if they went and put an IIS box on the web! If you don't think it's secure, why are you using it??

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108147797713309242005-02-11T13:45:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:15.892-04:00

I guess everyone else has a blog these days, and well, not being one to buck a fad...I figured I'd put this up here. My hope is to make this into a collection of crap that I've found around the web that I find interesting. Mostly it'll be a technical site. I often find myself asking, "I wonder if I could do X....?" only to find that it might be possible, but it's so poorly documented that I

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10770432.post-1108137427683614222005-02-11T10:56:00.000-05:002006-10-26T14:30:15.823-04:00

I have a blog, isn't it cool?

The Spoonmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18120667008441889262noreply@blogger.com3