April 28, 2008 by phillip.

I seem to collect a lot of information on different computer related topics. I live to go to my local Borders or Barnes & Noble book store to look at books and of course there’s one I want to buy every time. My bookshelves can attest to this fact. Today I had an epiphany. I want to let some people do what they know best. I have a lot of newsfeeds, newsletters, magazines, and email subscriptions that I just don’t need. Now granted they’re all free (even the magazines but I’ll talk about how to do that another day).

I was looking through a folder that I have certain email routed to. I realized that the folder had a lot of Cisco tips and tricks for their routers. In cleaning out my email folders I realized that these emails were building up and had become a huge portion of this folder because I just never tended to delete them since I never get around to reading them. My thought process is like a pack rat: “One day I’ll need these.” Stop that! Get rid of this stuff. I don’t need to know everything about a Cisco router. I might possibly need to configure one once every two years. I deleted them all. Even though I took a lot of training on Cisco routers years ago if this situation arises I’m letting some other guy handle that. Unburden your mind seeing all the crap in your inbox.

Posted in Only for the techy people, Life Lessons | 1 Comment »

April 23, 2008 by phillip.

Right now I’m so proud of myself because the Dell Laptop that I am working on right now has been my beast of burden for the last month. I believed the monitor was going out on it and sometimes it would blink out. Fearing paying for a new screen and someone to put it in would more than likely just make me buy a new laptop I was reluctant to deal with the problem. The worst part is that I broke my leg about a month ago so I’ve been stuck on a couch at night and using VNC to reach into my laptop. What’s worse is it was a Mac laptop that I really didn’t like. I HATE the one button mouse! I use dual button mice on Mac desktops… but I digress. So I had to break down and find a solution.

I did my research online and found out that the problem wasn’t the screen. I found that the number one problem with laptops is that the screen’s power inverter will go bad. Once it goes bad people give up on the laptop and get rid of it. A bad power inverter is usually evident because the screen is barely visible and looks dead but the problem is there’s no backlight. This is the inverter’s job.

With a lot of searching, I found an inverter for $20 online. I risked it and went back to my inner electrical engineer. I took apart my laptop found the piece and replaced it. Waaaallllllaaaah! It worked! It reminded me of taking TV’s and radios apart to fix them with my dad when I was a kid. I used to fix anything electrical by taking it apart but I don’t do that or raise the hood of my car anymore. I’m back in the game again.

Oh, and for those who used to do this with their dad too… Just like him I did have one tiny screw left over but everything works. This time though it wasn’t my fault. I found the extra screw left inside my laptop obviously during the assembly at Dell. Their dad was different than mine because they left extra screws inside.

Posted in Only for the techy people | 1 Comment »

April 11, 2008 by phillip.

For a long time now I’ve envied the stock broker. Not so much for his financial prowess but more for his grasp of information coming in. I liken it to a naval vessel. Each station on the bridge has about 3 or 4 monitors that he has to look at to get all the information necessary to fully access any given situation. Stock brokers usually have a six monitor setup that has different charts and graphs changing all day long.  Call me crazy but this is what my dreams are made out of.

My wife calls me crazy to this extent but I love being emerced in things to do and totally being on top of all of them. One of the reasons that I stopped liking to write code so very long ago is because when I write code I can only pay attention to the code. I was 10 when I first learned BASIC and I would sit and code on my Timex Sinclair (that’s really old school) all day just to make a space ship move across the screen and shoot a laser. Now days my attention span is so much shorter but I juggle well.

Why do network admins always just use virtual screens instead of real ones? I’m typing this blog post right now on my laptop running Linux and I have 4 virtual screens that I always use. I try to keep things like graphics apps, network/troubleshooting stuff, and web browsing seperate most times. However, I think I really need real screens so on one I can do all my social networking and text messaging. Another for productivity and the others just to keep status on a lot of different things.

A video podcast I like to watch called hak5 has a great mantra that I like to follow: “Feed your techno-lust!” I’ll keep you updated if I ever get this going. Also, can someone please tell me what’s on each one of the stock broker’s screens? I’m dying to know.

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March 20, 2008 by phillip.

The more podcasts and RSS feeds I listen to or view has made me come to a conclusion.  I’m not internet cool. I have most of the technical ingredients for it. I have instant messengers galore. I have a Twitter account. I have a camera phone.

I guess it’s really that I feel a little left behind listening to Leo Leporte (or any ex-Techtv people) on shows like TWIT. They seem to know so many people by name in the industry that actually talk to them all the time.

I guess I’m not too far off because I have met a lot of the people talking on some shows at conventions or something else but they wouldn’t follow me on Twitter. Although, I have been surprised when people have remembered me.

I’m not mad at them though. Keep doing your thing you Internet Rock Stars! I may not have a couple thousand people following me on Twitter like Robert Scoble or Jason Calakanis. I may not have a name with presence like Leo Leporte but if I can or have offered just one kernel of knowledge in my blog that has made your day… Let me know.  That’s what I’m here for.

Posted in My humble opinion, Only for the techy people, Cool Net Tricks, Life Lessons | No Comments »

February 28, 2008 by phillip.

I just read an article on Engadget and it talked about the Nintendo Wii now being able to be hacked and have Linux run on it. This is really really cool to me but there’s one thing that’s even better than the ability to do something. It’s functionality and usability. These are two things that I can say that open source programmers have done a great job at is reverse engineering and making use of what’s available.

The best part about what’s being done is the use of Linux. Linux is available on more hardware than any other operating system by far. In flashing the bios of a couple of Linksys routers I’ve learned that a good bonus about making things Linux aware is connectivity. Networking is almost everything in the home is almost a dream.

Imagine that all your devices, machines, and appliances were using Linux with opensource software on it. Your life could exist around your preferences and could ripple through all of them. For example, your cell phone’s GPS shows you’re heading home. It passes this information to your car which sends it to the next passing wifi point because it only needs 5 seconds of access when passing a building that it knows has wifi. That information goes through the net to your house. The fridge does trend analysis and knows that on Fridays you get a beer so it prepares one for you and starts warming food and turns on your video game machine.

They’re definitely hacks I want to start working on now.

Posted in Only for the techy people | 1 Comment »

January 25, 2008 by phillip.

Over the last 7 years that I’ve owned my house I’ve been working on my office.  I’m like a mechanic with a couple cars in the driveway and always working on one on any given day.  My thing is computer tech.  I LOVE my office.  I built it from bare studs to the room that it is now and I honestly haven’t seen anyone with a cooler computer room yet.

Well, now my mind is blown!  I just saw this list of super geeky home theaters and it is a must see. Go here:

http://deputy-dog.com/2008/01/23/10-stunning-ultra-geeky-home-cinemas/

Check out this one of the the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

I’ve got a lot of work to do now.

Posted in Only for the techy people | 1 Comment »

December 11, 2007 by phillip.

When I last blogged about the Ultimate USB drive toolkit I mentioned that I would go further into why you’d need WinSCP.

Let’s start with a word that all techy types should know well: Server. If you don’t have one at home then you should think about it. I have a couple. Media servers for the TV’s, FTP, SSH, mail, video streaming, DNS, DHCP, etc. (A lot of acronyms there but I’ll get into them). Think of a server just like a waiter. You request something and it gives it to you. However, to really visualize it you have to think about having multiple waitors and they only serve one thing and do it well. Like sitting at your table and you request water and a waitor brings water. You flag down a different waitor for main dishes and he delivers that.

So, how does all this server stuff help you when you’re at a client’s house? That’s the cool part. I can get to my tools from
anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. You just need 2 basic services. HTTP (web server) and FTP (file transfer). You can do these with Windows or Mac but I’d suggest getting an old useless computer that has a network card and installing Linux on it. Almost all come with Apache for a http server and whatever ftp software you can select with your Linux distribution. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 28, 2007 by phillip.

Being a computer guy I’m often asked by people to look at their computer and tell them what’s wrong or can I help them figure something out. For that reason, I’m doing this post on some real tech tricks to make you look like a star. All that from a USB drive.

The first thing you have to realize is that being prepared for anything is always your goal. I’m never unarmed. There are a couple things that are always on my person like most men: wallet, keys, watch, cell phone, and most times my PDA (an HP IPAQ) . Turning any of these items into multipurpose tools makes you ready for anything. Women can of course get more mileage out of this because they carry a purse. Now, for the really techy, I will continue with a blog post on the ultimate home support system because there are a lot of times I connect to my systems at home from a client’s site. I put a USB stick on my keyring that has a ton of goodies as well as my IPAQ. Today we’ll focus on the USB stick.

For the quick and easy route I’d suggest a simple USB stick (doesn’t have to be U3) but you want it to 1 gig or bigger. This will work on a drive as small as 128mb but I always like to keep extra space on the drive in case I need to copy a lot of files over to it for backup purposes. The last thing you want to do with a machine that is on it’s last leg is turn it off and hope it comes back on.

For a long time now I’d been downloading applications individually and copying them to the drive. You’re still going to install some extra ones to the drive but first download this handy set of tools: PCRepairsystem.zip . It’s a fabulous set of tools from the site Daily Cup of Tech. It’s a zip file that you just download and extract to your USB drive. Pull out your drive and stick it back in and you’re done! Well, almost done. When you put it in it puts a little coffee bean next to your computer’s clock on the task bar. Right clicking on that clock brings up a list of programs that do everything from drive repair to rootkit revealers to CD burning. These will serve you well. Get to know what each program does and you have most everything you need.

Next make a visit to www.portableapps.com. This site is full of applications that you may already be using all the time except these are made to run straight from a USB drive. Believe me, having access to a computer and not having administrative rights can totally shut you down because you can’t just download and install the applications you wanted until this.

Take a look around and get what you like. These are some of the ones that I put on my stick and the reasons why.

Firefox: Always want a fully capable web browser.
Clamwin: To be able to walk up and scan a computer for virus’ is absolutely essential.
WinSCP: If you have access to another machine with a secure connection you can FTP or SSH to and from it. Openoffice: A full Microsoft Office competitor on a USB stick? You can’t beat that.
VLC: Will view any video or play any audio.
Gimp: A Photoshop like program. You may need to resize or edit photos or something for someone.

Now with all of these you have to save the file to your desktop then install them and give your USB drive letter in the install path. For example, where it says “Install path: \openoffice” put H: (or whatever your drive’s letter is) in front to make it H:\openoffice.

In closing, I’d suggest you open every program you put on your USB drive before leaving home. The last thing you want to do is be surprised while you’re on location. A good example of this is that the first time you run Clamwin it wants to download the virus database. Assuming you’re at a site with dialup or no internet on the machine you’ve just wasted a ton of time or won’t even be able to fix the problem.

Also, the program SIW on the PCRepairkit should be your first stop when looking at a system. It will tell you everything about the machine. Save this to your USB stick. Should anything happen to the computer you know what it had before.

That’s it! Go out there and make the world a better place with safe computing.

Oh, and just for your convenience, keep some music, podcasts, or things to read on your USB stick. You might get stuck somewhere for a long time. No need to be bored while a virus scan or drive repair runs.  I also put my resume on the drive.  As a consultant you have this time as a window of opportunity if someone really likes you and may have a big project coming up.

Posted in Windows, Only for the techy people, Software | 1 Comment »

November 2, 2007 by phillip.

As a consultant I’ve been really diving deep into an industry hot topic: Clustering. It seems to be the big topic for so many companies. Hi availability need not be an issue for you ever again. Here’s the simple way you can scale like the big boys do it. The long and short of it are simple. You need “Heartbeat.”

No, I don’t mean a biological function I mean Heartbeat from the Linux-HA project. Heartbeat is a service for Linux systems that will make a process highly available. This way if the main machine that is servicing clients goes down then you’ll have another that will take it’s place without anyone noticing.

Oddly enough, there seem to not be enough resources on the internet to help people with this subject. However, to get started there are so few resources to learn with. I actually wanted to go a little deeper in my own knowledge of the subject but couldn’t find many books and even fewer websites. What is this world coming to when I can’t find websites to teach me all the information I needed. The thing is… I looked everywhere but the source. The Linux-HA website. There’s a screencast video link here. It’s about 10 minutes and the program designer shows how to make a basic cluster. You can even go deeper with more examples on the site that teach you how to cluster different programs.

Just as a note from me, if you are truly considering learning all it takes to make your own cluster please consider learning more about high availability. The core to high availability is redundancy. Make sure that you have all of your bases covered. Have no single points of failure. Redundant hard disks (RAID), power, internet, and network links.

By the way, I had started this article a little while ago and noticed a great link on Howtoforge that really pulls this together quickly and in one page.

Hope these are very useful to you.

Posted in Linux, Only for the techy people | 1 Comment »

October 23, 2007 by phillip.

There are so many people out there that hear about Ubuntu, Redhat, or Suse (more for my European friends) and really want get started in it. This blog post is NOT for you. I will have more for you though because I really want to start a video podcast for you.

If you know a little bit about Linux or are a Linux admin then this is a good step for you. I’ve been using Linux for about 13 years now and I still have a lot more to learn. This is the case for all operating systems and computer systems. There is always more to learn. I’ve been a little consumed lately with tinkering for some reason. I’ve been doing a lot of wiring and building things out of old computers I have laying around. I’m doing it for no other reason than “Why not?”

For the Linux tinkerer I have the perfect site for you. Linux from Scratch. It’s a project that I’ve been meaning to do for years. What it is is a online book that will walk you through building a Linux system completely from scratch. Oddly enough I love cookies and buy chocolate chip cookies all the time. Long time when I was in high school I downloaded a cookie recipe off a bulletin board (yes, I’m old in computer years) and made the best cookies ever. Well, I equate this to Linux from Scratch. I may end up doing it just like the cookies. I made a cookie and it was good but later on I decided to tweak the recipe and make a cookie I liked better.

This is not a project for the faint of heart I’ve read but it really connects the dots in the knowledge you have about a Unix system. I’ve actually got to make sure I do a little bit from time to time (all in a virtual machine) because my workload for my business is getting heavier.

I’m going to categorize this for Linux people but I would say it’s not just for Linux/Unix (and Mac since it’s a BSD Unix) people because when you know the history of how computer systems came to being a lot of this is the core of how other systems like Windows, Beos, etc.

Try it and tell me your results or your progress. Maybe we can do it at the same time like jogging partners. You may also get interested in some other projects like “Realtime Linux” and “Embedded Linux” which are other projects that are used for specific things.

I’d say good luck but luck will have nothing to do with it.  You can do anything you set your mind to.

Posted in Linux, Only for the techy people | 1 Comment »