Archive for November, 2006
November 29, 2006 at 12:42 pm · Filed under General
Sometimes linux crashes
Yes, I know that is hard to believe, but trust me. It happens.
When it does happen, you usually want to see what messages were spouted on the console before you reboot the machine. Unfortunately, the default linux console configuration is to turn on a screensaver and powersave mode. The result is a blank screen when you actually go over
to see what happened.
The following command in your rc.local file will turn off the screensaver and powersave.
/usr/bin/setterm -blank 0 -powersave off
I did this on a fedora system.
In the future, I’ll have someone figure out how to get serial console or some other lights out management system going.
November 26, 2006 at 12:16 pm · Filed under General
This is a blog by a guy who writes Mac emulators. He works for Microsoft. He hates Apple. Yes, he writes and supports emulators for the Mac. He likes Fry’s and Starbucks.
Interesting.
November 26, 2006 at 10:38 am · Filed under General
In a previous post, I asked about Error Handling and Exceptions. There were some good replies and I’ve done more research. I’ve create a page dedicated to put all that info together in one place.
Error Handling: Error Codes, Exceptions, and Beyond
Check it out and, of course, feedback is appreciated.
November 26, 2006 at 10:32 am · Filed under General
Even though I’m not a big fan of the ‘grid server’ exageration, I do find the Mediatemple hosting to be ok for a $20 a month hosting service. Once I got setup, the first thing that I wanted was ssh access. They provide this and it works well.
Here is what you have to do to setup ssh key access to your account and even use it without a password.
- Go to your account panel under ‘Server Administrator’ and turn on SSH access
- Login to the box using ssh or PuTTY with the account and password given on the account panel
- Create a directory called ‘.ssh’
- Do a ‘chmod 700 .ssh’
- ‘cd .ssh’
- Create a file named authorized_keys.
- Put your PUBLIC ssh key into the ‘authorized_keys’ file. Make sure it is just 1 line.
- ‘chmod 600 authorized_keys’
Now login to your account. If you don’t have a password on your private key or you use Pageant or and SSH-agent, you will just be logged in. I use this all the time to just ’scp’ files to the server.
November 26, 2006 at 10:20 am · Filed under General
Recently, I read the techcruch post on the Mediatemple grid servers. I decided to get an account. We even decided to use them at work for the corporate site. It works ok for static content, but I’m now suspicious of their scalability claims. At first, it sounded like they were doing something interesting with virtual servers. In fact, the techcrunch post mentions that the service is comparable to the EC2 service by Amazon. The reality, of course, is much different.
Here is a great blog post which covers what Mediatemple is truly using for their ‘grid technology’.
November 26, 2006 at 10:06 am · Filed under General
I’ve mentioned this game in the past. As I was searching around, I wondered. Whatever happened to the guy who built that great game for EA. When I saw this game, I took all of my savings and bought an Amiga 500 the next week. It was amazing. I had it hooked up to my stereo and when you heard the sound it was just incredibly powerful. Everybody who saw the game (computer geek or not) was just blown away and immediately wanted to learn how to play.
Well, two links.
Of course, the Wikipedia page on the game is ok.
This blog post really captures the spirt of the original game.
Finally, had to mention this:
5 Print " Welcome Pilot "
10 Print " "
15 Print "__________________________________"
20 Print " /\\ "
25 Print " / \\ "
30 Print " / \\ "
35 Print " / | \\ "
40 Print " / | \\ "
Link for the above here.
November 26, 2006 at 9:39 am · Filed under General
Over the last couple of years, there has been a discussion about the changing world of journalism. The non-journalists are declaring that the old world is no longer relevant. The old world is calling the new journalism on blogs a recipe for disaster … half truths.
Its an interesting debate, and I think both sides have points. I do have one realization to mention that is concrete and relevant. The filters are no longer there. You can actually go to the source. With Google and Wikipedia, you can usually go directly to a site that goes into tremendous detail about events.
If you liked a particular band, you can actually go to the site where the band blogs themselves.
If you were into a particular game, you can read the blog or web site of the actual people involved.
I know those examples sound trivial, but that is kind of the point. Even the trivial, which can be interesting to just a few, is available.
That big difference between now and the past is that the actual person involved with something can actually put their stories up on the net for anyone to read. You can read the thoughts that they publish on a wide variety of topics. This is a huge difference.
What I’ve found, when I started reading the information, is that the old filters (the journalists) tended to embelish or twist things a bit. The actual accounts by the people involved are much richer. You learn more about the years leading up to their ‘overnight success’. You learn about the characteristics of their group that allowed them to succeed where others did not.
One of the best examples in the computer history field was the folklore.org project. Most of the reporting before that was never as interesting or detailed. In fact a lot of computer companies wanted to prevent others from knowing who their star programmers were. As a result, very little about them or their stories was published.
Just the other day I was reading about the guys behind Silicon Beach Software. That led me to a bio about Don Daglow. This guy was involved in gaming since the teletype days. He was also involved with Stuart Smith on Adventure Construction Set… which was an influence on Racing Construction Set…. I could go on and on.
In the old days, the most you got was the magazine article that described only 1/10th of the story. In the old days, the media limited the amount of information. The internet has truly changed this. I can say wholeheartedly that this is a tremendous good.
November 25, 2006 at 10:14 pm · Filed under General
Steve mentions a possible Win32 surprise by the guy doing a port of Io to windows.
Uh, I’ve worked with windows for a while as well as a few other OSs. When it comes to dynamic linking a lot of programmers have no idea what is going on under the hood and get surprised. In this particular case, I’m not surprised. The guy doing the port didn’t RTFM on MSDN about how DLLs work and built a system on the wrong assumption.
Sadly, this kind of stuff happens on every platform.
Regarding the path issue. I’ve never met a win32 programmer that ran into that issue. I think the POSIX limit ia 1024 or not specified. I do remember various unixes having various limits.
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