myTrevor.com

So it seems this week I’m sharing a bunch of technical things, well here’s another.

I decided to sign up with Vonage VOIP service. I’m sure you’ve seen their bright orange advertisements on the metro buses lately — guess it worked for me. If you’ve ever come to by apartment, you know that there’s a big blackout spot hoving over my place and really limits any cell reception. I decided now that I couldn’t put up with it anymore and looked around for pricing plans — VOIP seemed to be the way to go for features/price. I signed up right now for the 500 outgoing minutes a month for $14.99. This is pretty sweet, it comes with a bunch of neat features that land-lines just can’t offer right now as well as national long distance and free incoming calls. If I really like it, I may move up to the Unlimited for $24.99. I’ll review the service in about a week as soon as I replace my crappy phone!

Oh yeah. And if you’re interested in joining, I can hook you up with like a month or two of free service. Happy Easter too!

So I decided to try it out and install OS X on my PC… yeah yeah, I’m ready for your giving me shit. I had problems at first with setting up a disk that was expandable (OS X said the disk wasn’t bootable), so I decided to try a static size disk, seemed to do the trick.
Anyways, I got the install to work:

And even to boot up!

But I’m not able to get the network up and running! It seems that Windows doesn’t like to allow you to share connections if you’re already running a private network and CherryOS is stupid and requires you to go through Windows for your Networking. But I just wanted to show ya’ll that it works!
(Pictures are for you, Jamie)

So I’ve been looking around for a good PHP 5 book that covers some advanced items. Well, I found one, it’s called: PHP 5 Unleased published through SAMS. Unfortunately, I bought it down at Barnes & Noble at retail price, however, I’ve included a link here to Amazon.com for those that want to check it out:

It covers some “advanced” items such as PEAR, XML/XSLT, Optimizing, Authentication, Encryption, OOP, Error Handling, Tidy, MIME Email, SOAP, File System, Network I/O, OS Access, Graphics, PDFs, and Regular Expressions.

Anyways. I haven’t of course read it all the way through, but today glancing at it, I’m glad a pushed out the $50 for it, however, I recommend getting it from Amazon the $32.99 price (or whoever else has it cheaper)!

Oh yeah, just FYI, I also bought FreeBSD Unleashed.

I just feel I don’t know enough about how to properly setup all the Linux/UNIX stuff and thought now that I’m graduated, what better time? I’ll let you know how it is.

So this is ridiculous. I’ve been reading a lot about Google’s new toolbar (featuring AutoLink) and the new changes in doing look ups. It pisses me off that hundreds of bloggers (The End of Google?) regurgitate what they’ve read without any investigation. I love how some even say “I haven’t used it because I use Firefox, but it’s so evil” - how can you criticize something you haven’t even looked at!?!

Google does not autochange your content. It is an opt-in feature. A user must actually click a button to “auto-link” recognized content (addresses, ISBNs, etc.). It then notifies the user of the changes by highlighting the newly created links on the page. Next, a user can click on the button again to re-highlight or select to remove AutoLinks.

There is no behind-the-scenes auto-changing of web content. It is basically what any other plugin for a browser does! It’s the same crap people were giving Google for the G-Mail links claiming that they were reading everyone’s email to generate their ads. So please people, stop bitching about new technologies just because you think it makes you look cool and geeked out for doing so.

I received an email last night from the security team at UW informing me that one of my servers had been compromised and that they would be blocking the traffic and that I should rebuild it ASAP. It freaking takes an entire day to backup all the data, reformat the system, install all the patches, send the kerberos ticket to UW, reinstall all the ‘other’ software and services, etc etc..

And all because of what? Some stupid person has nothing better to do then sit in their room and write worms. It just pisses me off - like I had nothing better to do today than rebuild a server. And then I get asked to write a procedural manual on how to fix something like that, so that when I leave “someone” can do that — as well as how to do everything else I do. Right. I’ll try to fit that into my 19.5 hours.