Hmmmm. I haven’t posted here in ages. Lots going on. At one point I used this as a journal for tech stuff. Somewhere along the way I got sidetracked into a lot of other things. I’m wondering though if it’s time to restart…. lots of linux administration and tech stuff to write about. Watch this space there may be new material coming soon.
Tag: time
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Panda and Vince – Googles latest updates
And… there was also a caffeine update. Well, mid October there was an update to Panda – somewhere in there was a Vince update and then caffeine saw an update in early November. Did you notice a change in the search results? Do you feel like they’re better or worse?
Image via Wikipedia I’ve had several sites that have “fluctuated” through these updates, some better, some worse. One or two were dramatically worse.
I don’t seem to be alone in seeing some impact and here’s a summary of what the issue is and what to do about it.
Panda is about lowering the importance of sites that are thin in content. It has been easy to rank sites without much content for some time. Just throwing a few back links (in many cases also thin on content) and you could do quite well.
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Criminal Background Check
When you are hiring someone for most positions a criminal background check is a high priority. Especially if the person you are hiring will interact with your family or with children. The internet has made criminal background checks commonplace and easy to conduct. There are many services that make this an easy and quick process. One such that I have found is inteligator.
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Want to memorize foreign language vocabulary? memrise.com
Image via Wikipedia I have been absolutely addicted. A week ago Thursday I discovered a new site. It was an article over at the makezine blog talking about the benefits of learning mandarin for what they do. I’ve always been intrigued by mandarin – I remember learning a bit of cantonese in Hong Kong and have a short book on chinese symbols. I must admit a lifelong fascination with languages (there’s the study new languages site, my how to learn spanish for beginners site and my onlineradiotv.com site which each have highlights of my interest in languages and the great exposure to other languages that the internet can bring. Anyway…. I’ve used a flash card program for a long time to work on vocabulary (mnemosyne) – I have around 10,000 spanish cards right now – a bunch of french (200) and italian (400) and german (6000+) cards as well. I’ve cracked the book a bit on chinese, but not much. So, one of the resource sites they mentioned was memrise.com
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Drupal 7 and E-Commerce
Drupal 7 has become the flagship version of the content management platform. Last year I was setting up a couple of webstores with Drupal 6 and e-commerce modules (addons) for it collectively called ubercart. Ubercart was somewhat complex but things worked. For the rough edges there were other modules to smooth the edges.
Recently I’ve been working with an install of Drupal 7 and building an e-commerce site. Ubercart is available in a testing state for Drupal 7, but many of the developers have left in favor of a module called Commerce. Which also is in a testing state. What follows is a BRIEF summary of my trials and tribulations in building an ecommerce site with Drupal 7.
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Postgrey and the power of Greylisting to fight Spam
Wow…. Let me just say that I have typically been inundated with junk mail on my primary address. It’s associated with this domain and has been hosted in an older sendmail setup for quite some time (not really by choice, but because that’s what was installed on the old vps.) I’m currently migrating to postfix which I’m a bit more familiar with and had used successfully to at least tag my junk mail as SPAM for sorting at home. Well, my older postfix system didn’t have too many options to add on and tweak and so this weekend I’ve invested some time in migrating the main mail server over to a newer postfix install with amavis and postgrey and a few other tools.
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Kindle Buyers Remorse? Do I regret buying a Kindle?
For the record…. no. Not in the least. I bought a Kindle 3 in December and have been using it quite a bit since then. Of course, the first few weeks I used it an awful lot. (It was around the Christmas holidays of course.) I haven’t had as much time in the last month or two to just sit and read, but when I have it’s been better than having a book. Why?
It’s smaller, yet it holds my entire library.
Well, not technically my ENTIRE library yet, but it does hold quite a few of my books (a couple hundred.)
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Is it a Hardware Problem or a Software Problem?
Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious hardware problem. Then I spent the better hours of the evening trying to salvage everything from the old drive to a new drive, only to have the new drive seemingly show the same symptoms. It is a laptop of course and so I assume it’s the bus for the drives or the cdrom. I pull out the cdrom and it seems to behave itself just fine. This morning as I was checking the last of the package updates it dawned on me how different things would have been if it were a windows laptop. The laptop runs linux and when the system froze I immediately assumed it was either the hard drive or the drive adapter to the mainboard. Why?
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The REAL Physics of Possibly REAL Time Travel
Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the “what if”s are probably the most intriguing. What if I could get a message to someone… what if I could find out what happened …. Would those things even be possible, ethical? Up until now, it’s been more of an intellectual exercise, but I’ve been doing some reading on the subject and there is a very real possibility that time travel would be physically possible. Of course, physics classes for years have talked about how travel into the future should be possible. Simply travel away from the earth at near light speed and then back at near light speed. You will have only aged slightly while much time will have passed on earth. But, realistically traveling into the future isn’t as enticing as traveling into the past. We’re ALL traveling into the future one day at a time on the slow path. Here’s how one could travel into the past….
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Out of Cycle Windows Update – Patch Today
Yesterday news broke of an out of cycle security patch for Windows. The bulletin is available from Microsoft. Apparently the vulnerability was in the Windows Server service (XP, 2003, 2000, 2008, Vista ALL affected though regardless of server/workstation/client/desktop/etc…). The RPC handling (remote procedure call) is the achilles heel this time around. It sounds as though as many as 100 instances of this flaw being exploited had been seen in the wild, but use was increasing which prompted the out of cycle release. This is the kind of vulnerability that could be exploited by a worm that could give rise to a worm reminiscent of the Blaster Worm. (Worms are self-replicating viruses that spread over networks without user intervention.)
