GizmoLA.com

Only days before the virally marketed JJ Abrams film Cloverfield is due to open, does anyone else find it suspicious that a major news outlet like ABC news would be drumming up a UFO sighting story, based solely on a handful of "eyewitness" testimony? Seriously -- this is 2008? You mean to tell me that not a single person had a digitial camera, video or even a run of the mill cell phone on em? Precedence for this goes back at least 80 years, to the infamous War of the Worlds RKO radio show. What would it take to get such a rumor going? A few people in cahoots, and a gullible local news affiliate? What could possibly explain this making it to the national news?

*Update*
Since i wrote this, my hosting account ran out of juice and took to thrashing and locking up on a regular basis due to the number of mysql processes it required and the amount of buffer memory being used. I run this site on a coop server under UML and we have been talking for two years now about moving to a new server with a different virtualization solution, probably OpenVZ. I currently don't want to invest the time and effort I'll need to rebuild and reconfigure the server (no more Gentoo this time, as I don't have the personal bandwidth to stay up with the maintenance and don't use Gentoo at work).

I spoke with David of MG and we agreed to resurrect MG officially, since he still owns the domain and gets a fair amount of traffic to the review urls, which redirect to his community site Movieloons.com. I'm hopeful we'll get there soon, but for reasons I'll keep to myself, there can be no movement on this project until David sorts an issue with his hosting company.


Movie-Gurus.com went down for the count when the hosting company wiped the site. As we'd lost around a months worth of reviews, I didn't feel like resurrecting it at the time and starting fresh. Then I started thinking about the 1500+ reviews in the database, and all the time and effort that went into the site, so I decided to see if I could resurrect it from backups. I quietly put it back up, and left a little message at the forum run by the MG originator, but that generated no interest, so I left it up and largely forgot about it. Only one little problem there --- search bots found it, and what did they want? They wanted pictures! Mostly pictures of actresses! So I suppose that MG lives again, even if for now it's only as a shadow of its former self, visited by people who are only interested in a small picture. You can find the site for now at Site taken down.

I have a pair of 200 gigabyte Maxtor Shared Storage drives -- which are relatively inexpensive network storage drives that integrate with windows client machines. They come with an ethernet port you use to connect to a switch or hub on your home LAN, and will plug and play by negotiating an IP via DHCP. Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) provided a windows client that helps with finding and setting up the drives, since they advertise themselves as Workgroup peers that can be shared. I use the drives to store things like digital camera pictures and DVD's I've ripped in order to play them through my Tivo Series 2. They also come with some software that makes it easy to backup the My Documents area of our windows machines.

With Windows XP, the Shared Storage drives worked fairly reliably, but after I upgraded my Gateway desktop to Vista Business edition, I found myself unable to connect to the drives I'd mapped to it. Trying to mount them manually, I'd receive a login dialog. The name and password I use from my XP Pro based computer works fine, but on Vista the drive would reject the same credentials.

It took me a while to sit down and dig into the issue, and my first guess was that firmware might fix the problem. The Shared Storage drive predates Vista, so it wasn't a total surprise to me that authentication didn't work. The bundled web interface allows you to login with a browser, and administer the drive, setting up user accounts and mounting and unmounting USB devices you can connect to either of 2 provided USB ports. We have a printer attached.

After logging into the webserver, it displays a menu that includes the Firmware version -- mine was 1.2. A quick search of the Seagate site, and I found Maxtor offering version 2.6.2 firmware! The Advanced Settings | System Maintenance menu | System update menu provided a simple upload and update process that was completed in about 2 minutes. Despite the major point upgrade to the drive bios, I still was unable to login to the drive from Vista. What made this even more confusing is that I somehow had been able to successfully find the unit on the Windows network, authenticate to it and map a drive when I had first done the Vista upgrade. A bit of googling on the problem, and I discovered something surprising about the Maxtor unit I'd never suspected -- it is actually a linux box....

Continue reading "Fun with Windows Vista and the Maxtor Shared Storage Drive" »

I gave a talk on the use of Xen for web developers at Lampsig. It took me a while to get my notes transcribed, but here at last they are. This prescription has been used by me to install Xen successfully on a Fedora core 4 box, Centos 4.3 and 4.4 boxes, and should probably work on RHEL, assuming you can figure out how to get the packages you need.

I cover use of file backed file systems, and how to mount and edit them, as well as expanding a file based filesystem.

I have run gentoo and Centos guests I got from jailtime.org and have found them to be very stable. I even was able to use this on a 64 bit server, although I did have to build my own guest. Many people who have had trouble getting Xen to work reliably when using the packaged (rpm) versions of Xen may find this prescription fixes their problems.

Xen 3.0 Centos How-to

I recently had need to add XWindows to a Centos 4.x install that didn't have X or Gnome. I was doing this under VMware which added slightly to the degree of difficulty. As it turns out, using Yum makes this a very easy process, although you probably end up with some bloated packageware.



Pay close attention to the capitalization -- Yum is picky. "Gnome desktop environment" won't work, for example.