January 1, 2009
mitch @ 12:22 pm on January 1, 2009
I was visiting my normal news sites and came across this article that I thought was quite amusing, entitled: 2008: The Year the Geeks Took Over
And I just wanted to quote a section from the #1 section entitled: “#1. The Election of the First Black(berry) President”
In 2000, George W. Bush was the affable, goofy common man we’d all like to have at our barbecue. Al Gore was a robot, smart and unfeeling as HAL 9000 and just as likely to lock us all out of the bay doors because of some unfathomable calculation made in his computer brain. We went for Bush, and in fact we’ve been voting for the George W. Bush in that matchup for a couple of centuries, due to an odd misfire in the American brain that associates low intelligence with honesty.
In 2008, that same stage was set again. The white, elderly, self-effacing war hero who boasted that he finished at the bottom of his class in the Academy. The small town beauty queen. A ticket as American as a six shooter.
They were matched up against a young, not-white guy with a foreign name who did not run on his humble roots, could not boast that he was a war hero, who insisted on pronouncing “Pakistan” as “Pah-kis-stahn” and who, by all appearances, would go into a violent seizure if his cell phone or Blackberry were taken away.
Then he threw the switch on an online fundraising machine that drowned the campaign in cash (or more accurately, drowned McCain’s campaign with it) and mobilized a high-tech “ground game” that will be studied by every future campaign, volunteers dispatched by advanced databases that tracked every voter.
That’s right: he simply out-geeked McCain.
There are other gems in that article and that section as well but I liked those portions enough to reprint them here.
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November 27, 2007
mitch @ 5:57 pm on November 27, 2007
Well… If your seeing this post, then your hitting my new web server! Its got about 2.5x’s more RAM than the old one so, we should be running on less swap than before… hopefully its faster for everyone…. and more stable…
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November 23, 2007
mitch @ 3:51 pm on November 23, 2007
I’m going to be making some changes to the site involving DNS servers and mail servers and such over the coming week or so, so you may experience intermittent problems with my my site… be patient 
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September 17, 2006
mitch @ 11:30 am on September 17, 2006
Well… After the move I still haven’t hooked up my MythTV box, which I began last week some time. I’ve been using Ubuntu alot lately(on my laptop) and I’m looking at running Ubuntu Server for my mythtv backend/frontend. And I’m probably going to be compiling MythTV from source this time around on all boxes that will be running it. Binary releases are nice, but making sure they all match up across distributions is a real pain. If i was only running one distribution it would be a no brainer… however I’m probably not going to ever be on just one distribution. I think this desktop will always run on the latest fedora just so I can keep up with the changes going on there.
Anyway, during the rebuild of the mytv server… My power supply started burning… along with the power connector for the laptop hard drive i was installing the OS onto. Not good… So, I ended up ordering a new Power Supply and after it showed up… you wouldn’t believe it… the power connector won’t fully snap onto the clip because of a transistor on the old motherboard. Who designs these things anyway? So… I ended up ordering a new motherboard, going for a cheap Socket A motherboard that locates the power connector way in the corner of the board. After that arrived… as luck would have it… it no longer supports the RAM I had in the old board… needs DDR…!?!?! why oh why didn’t I look at that to begin with you might ask? well my thoughts were of the opinion that Socket A motherboard… Duron 800MHz processor… old school right? Should take the same ram I had…. well, I was wrong. RAM is in the mail… should be here by monday hopefully… tuesday at the latest. Then I should have the box mostly setup by that night. Since I don’t have school on Monday or Wednesday, I should have enough time to get it done… I might even take it to work… but we’ll see whats going on there first…
Life· MythTV· Projects· Technology — No Comments
June 27, 2006
mitch @ 12:07 pm on June 27, 2006
I did some looking today for themes to see if I could find one I like. Well, I’ve got two that I think are “OK” this current theme being one of them. The other theme has some of the same problems. However they both implement some nice features as well… So I’ll be rotating the themes every now and then, and deciding which features I like between the two of them and I’ll then encorporate some of my old themes features (which is what I think these two are missing) and these two new themes.
Oh! comments work so give me a shout about what all might like and dislike… and I’ll start making a list as well in the comments for this post.
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June 25, 2006
mitch @ 9:08 am on June 25, 2006
I’ve had broken comment links for a long time… just haven’t taken the time to fix them… Currently the link is no longer broken, however the box for allowing comments doesn’t show up. Its in the code, but it doesn’t work. I’m not sure why at the moment… I’m thinking it still has something to do with my apache config. I’ll be testing things off and on, so if my website looks a little weird from time to time, its just me testing. Try back in a minute or two and it should be back to normal.
*UPDATE*
Well it seems like its just my theme that has problems with the comments… which means that I will have to completely debug my theme to find out why its having problems… OR… I think its probably time I write a new theme… complete with new colors and everything… So, expect some site design changes in the comming months (what a time frame eh? Sorry… life keeps me busy) Complete with a new layout and I’ll even include some fixes for my quotes so they don’t mess up the layout when it displays one of the long quotes. And if I find the time… I might make it work ok with IE
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February 2, 2006
mitch @ 5:54 pm on February 2, 2006
Well, we here at metauser.net have finally experienced downtime because of my own doing… For whatever reason, I was told that my web hosts DNS servers were going to be changing and I didn’t see the email…. so metauser.net became unreachable for a while last week… I have since fixed the DNS problems however, I’m also in the process of preparing a new server to move to. More details will follow, however, Its going to be a virtual machine (using Xen), so hopefully that will allow me to provide a lot more cool features down the road.
And I did get a chance to upgrade to Wordpress 2.0! So far its still an amazing product, I love it. Props to those that put their time and dedication to it.
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October 30, 2005
mitch @ 11:25 pm on October 30, 2005
I’ve been back and forth between creating my own System Trending app using RRDtool, and using some other prepackaged ones like Orca and Cacti. I love the look of cacti, however it wasn’t exactly intuitive the first time I tried to use it. So I gave orca a try, and I really didn’t like the idea of having to scp off the log files, to a collecting host. I would much rather have the collecting host poll hosts its configured to watch. With that in mind… I don’t like SNMP either for a system. For appliances and network devices its great, quick and easy. Because the vendors usually have specific MIB’s that can be used. There are generic ones for systems, but I would like to extend this to track applications on the system as well, this will require custom scripts, and with SNMP, custom MIB’s as well. Which I really don’t want to mess with. Keeping the monitoring system as basic as possible, using one monitoring system to grab all of this is what I had in mind. After spending a week or so creating some custom python scrypts to perform both functions of gathering data and pulling it to a central location, and creating graphs was quite extensive, and I really would like to atleast somewhat finnish this project within the next couple weeks. Creating my own solution proved to be a bit more complicated than I would have hoped. So, going back to using an existing project I took another look at cacti. This time around it proved to be much easier to understand. Not sure if its because I took the time to learn more about rrdtool specifically or what. However, this time I was able to create some data gathering scrips for cacti to execute and an xmlrpc server that answered the requests on the other end. They seem to be working currently and I’ve only really been working on them for a couple hours over the last day or two. I *hope* to have working client scripts and gathering server written by the end of the week for most of the basic functionality. Just need to do a little more reading and playing with python and the parseconfig module(?). Should hopefully have something by this time next week. I’ll keep you updated.
Open Source· Projects· Work — No Comments
August 3, 2005
mitch @ 1:27 pm on August 3, 2005
It finally kicked the bucket… I’ve had a Western Digital SATA 120GB drive since I built my current home computer… and I’ve have a few problems with it. As you would see from a couple months ago, I lost everything on my home partion once, and I’ve had corruption problems on my root partion a couple times before that… This time it just died completly. While I was using my computer last night, the OS froze. Everything, it was hard locked. I powered it off and let it sit for a bit… and then booted it up to a restore disk and ran an fsck on all of the partions, all of which came back ok after a journal recovery. Rebooted… still having problems finding files on the drive. I thought this was just like any of the other times where a format and reinstall would fix it. I was wrong…. After I reinstalled Fedora Core 4, I brought it back up and started doing updates (without logging into the gui), and let it go over night. I woke up to find the console spewing out ATA Seek errors. From experience this tells me the drive is done. Its not completly dead but the drive heads are messed. So I’m going to take it back to my parents where I can hook it up to my brothers box(since he has SATA and enough drive space to spare) and copy over as much of my home partion as possible.
I’ll let you all know how it goes.
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July 27, 2005
mitch @ 2:59 pm on July 27, 2005
Not sure what it is lately… but, as soon as I delete some comment spam, I get more back… so… I’m now banning IP addresses… I hate to do it… really I do. But I have no choice… I’m sure this won’t be the last batch I have to do, but it must be done.
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