Blog of Adam

This can be easily done with VLC and any ssh terminal. When VLC doesn’t have an xterm to output the display, it converts the video to ascii and prints it to the terminal.

I am always shopping around for web hosting, comparing prices and services trying to get the best bang for the buck and what really fits my needs. Around a year and a half ago when I was first shopping for web hosts it basically came down to Dreamhost (my current host) or Lunarpages. I went with dreamhost because they had ssh. I have had my ups and downs with dreamhost but since I got their new VPS service, it has been awesome. Although I am happy with DH, some things still lack.

Dreamhost downsides

1. ALL services are shared. Even though I have a VPS, my files are on a shared file server, mail, and mysql are still all shared (you can buy a mysql VPS). None of these really bug me except the file server because I notice that the 4.7TB array I am on, often gets to <100gb of space left, right now its at 40gb left. This doesn’t really matter for mysq, mail, etc because those services are clustered and perform pretty good.
2. They don’t offer as much starting storage and bandwidth as some of their competitors.
3. Since most of the services are shared, its really easy to oversell hosting (which most companies do) but when I was on a shared server it would be really slow at times, the server was rebooted at least once a week and they wouldn’t just switch me to a new server and I didn’t really want to fight with them about it.

Dreamhost upsides

1. TONS of features.
2. Complete control over your DNS and many other things (mysql, mail)
3. Very fast network
4. VPS system they have is awesome. You basically only pay for the cpu/memory you really need, you can change it on the fly too. So if a page of mine hits dig, I can bump it up to 2300mhz/2300mb for a few hours then bump it back down when the traffic dies down and only spend a few bucks.
5. The wiki is very helpful and support has always been awesome. I have had email replies within 5 minutes.
6. The new backup service they have is really cool. You can restore an entire domain or if you delete a database you can restore it withing 7 days.

Lunarpages can be very appealing from the outside. 1.5tb space, 15tb bandwidth, cpanel, all sorts of stuff. If you are only hosting one site this isn’t too shabby. What I noticed when I got into the guts of it were a lot of subtle things that bugged me.

Lunarpages upsides

1. Rediculous amount of space and bandwidth (1.5TB space, 15TB bw)
2. Super cheap (I paid 166$ for 2 years)
3. Cpanel is really nice and easy to use and full of features.
4. Servers don’t seem to be oversold much. Mine seems pretty stable and I never see it under a very high load.
5. Its great for a single website hosting plan.

Lunarpages downsides

1. You can only get apache 1.3 with ssh access
2. SSH access cost an extra 2$/mo (tacked on an extra 48$ to my total bill)
3. Domains from them cost 20$ without private registration
4. Their network upload speed is slow. I download stuff from my dreamhost account at 1+ mb/s but from lunarpages, i get 150k-300k. I contacted support about this and they said to do a tracert and nothing ever came of it.
5. Lack of full control over my domain. No custom dns.
6. Its a pain to host more domains with them or switch domains you are hosting.
7. Lots of missing programs and disabled actions in the ssh shell.
8. If you really want to change anything you have to email them. There really isn’t any automatic system setup.
9. chown -R tends to fuck everything up. I did this and lost permissions to my public_html directory. It took my support ticket almost 8 hours to have everything back and working.
10. Everything is hosted on the same box, your web space, email, http, mysql, etc.

Overall lunarpages isnt a bad host, especially if you only have one site and you aren’t doing anything too complicated. It is definatly doing the job for I am using it for, but some basic things (like network upload speed) can be improved upon.

-Adam

Pretty much sums up last week.

There are quite a few websites I read on a daily basis and Lifehacker being one of them. Day by day I see countless stories coming from the rss feed and day by day I read less and less of them. I see myself clicking “Mark All as Read” (I use google reader by the way) more then I do actually reading their site. A lot of the posts there can have useful information, but a lot of it is from other sites, the original sites are usually submitted to digg, reddit, or your favorite social news website, and often times I find tips and tricks or other sites they post a couple weeks before they found it.

Here is a break down of the posts on a given day:

Basically there are two different categories.

Original content: Anything that doesn’t have a link at the bottom. This includes original stories, tips, tricks, etc created by the lifehacker crew and any news regarding the website. I also consider reviews of certain applications or showing/comparing specs of 3rd party hardware or software original content.

3rd party content: A post that usually is a short paragraph and contains plenty of external links and usually a link at the bottom that brings you to the original article.

Feb 8, 2008:

• Original posts: 2
• 3rd party stuff: 14

Feb 7, 2008:

•  Original posts: 2
• 3rd party stuff: 15

Now I have to admit some of the downloads they post can be pretty nifty and useful, but a more database like approach to this is much more practical and useful than a billion blog posts and on the bright side, its not annoying!

But with some of the posts, I notice are on digg, and all the social news sites a couple months before they hit lifehacker. One example is The Nerd Handbook (orginal post, lifehacker post). Now this article hit the web a few months ago because I remember reading it and I ended up buying his book. Is the lifehacker crew just sitting on links and post them X amount of days later? Sometimes is seems like it.

I don’t mind useful information being shared, but if it already has hit the web and all the popular social news sites, why spam the internet with more redundant information?

-Adam

Me being very active on the internet and websites, I get a lot of website ideas which eventually leads to me buying a lot of domains. All my domains are registered accross GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and 1and1. All my domains have private registration except the godaddy ones (because they charge 6$ a year on top of the 10$ registration). To my surprise, the other day I received a business credit card offer from capital one based on the registration information of one of my domains.

I mean come on! Are they really getting that desperate that they are scanning domain registrations for possible suckers? As if I don’t have enough junk mail credit card offers and this is just another forum to spam me with.

Eh, thats all for now.

-Adam

“156-215 is the CheckPoint Security Administration NGX exam. The oracle database exam code is 1z0-042. 350-030 is the code for CCIE Voice Written Exam. The CXFS exam 642-372 is mainly for Cisco systems engineer. You need to have a cisco firewall specialist certificate for the 642-523 exam. The 642-812 exam is the Building Converged Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks exam. The Building Scalable Cisco Internetworks is another qualifying 642-901 exam. The 70-536 exam is a technology specialist exam which can be accessed on private domains. You just need registration.

As you may know, I am an avid perl user. The perl language is very broad and not everything comes with the default install. Sometimes you need to get another module or a 3rd party module. If there is a certain module you are looking for I would suggest searching cpan.

After finding and downloading and unzipping the module you want to install.

Cd to to the directory.

You should see a MakeFile.PL. Just execute the fallowing commands to install that module.


perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install


If all the dependencies are there and there are not errors, you have installed a new perl module!

-Adam

I am on the web pretty much every day of my life. When I’m online, there is a certain list of websites I like to visit and read and I would like to share them with you.

1. Digg.com - Digg is a social news website where stories are submitted by users and voted on by the users. The more popular stories will make it to the front page and usually are worth reading. I am also a big fan of Kevin Rose who started digg.
2. Streamy.com - The best way to describe streamy is an online social network rss reader web os. The whole site is competely javascript/ajax. I have all of my rss subscriptions there. The interface is really smooth, clean, and easy to use. You can easily save a story you like, or share it with somebody on your friends list too. You can also browse popular stories and see what others are reading too. Currently streamy is in private beta. You can view a screencast here.
3. CodingHorror.com - Probably one of my favorite blogs. It is a blog by Jeff Atwood who is a developer at Vertigo Software. Stuff that he blogs about is mainly from his career field as a developer and engineer. He can blog about a wide range of topics from talking about 64 bit on the desktop, to how to help with project estimation. Its a great blog and I really enjoy reading it.

These are the main 3 sites I will actively visit and poke around on, but there are a load of rss feeds I subscribe too, but I don’t really take the time to visit the site.

1. delicious - Social bookmarking website
2. Official Google Blog - Google pretty much runs my life, might as well read their blog too.
3. Google code blog - Google provides alot of public api’s and I like to keep up on them.
4. Read/write web - Blog with internet related news.
5. Reddit - Usually this is just a copy of whats on digg, but I find more pictures on reddit.
6. Lifehacker - A tech blog this is alot of copy and paste stories, but sometimes they have some good stuff.
7. Mashable - Alot of tech stories, but they make the best list stories. ex: 70+ ide’s for developers
8. Google tech talks - Really interesting presentations done by Google employees. Topics can range from mysql clusters to hacking the xbox.

This pretty much sums up what I read on the web. Feel free to comment with any sites you like to visit or think I should read.

-Adam

To find out the exam schedule for the 1Y0-259 exam search on the Citrix website online. IT technicians need to complete 220-602 before completing any other course such as CompTIA SY0-101 exam. You will have to answer over 50 questions for the 70-284 exam. To get help for the 70-536 exam, get routine help is available on microsoft forums. The 642-523 exam has 63 challenging questions on the exam. So prepare extreme well for all exams such as the CISSP exam. A CISSP is ideal for senior level managers of top businesses.

Perl is a very broad language that can do pretty much anything you want and you can create really extensive applications. If you have a application that you want to keep running, you want it to run in the background and as a service. I ran into this delima recently and its a pretty easy solution using fork.

This is an example program that will startup and run in the background printing its pid. Arguments include start and stop.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#create the fork
#this is the parent process
if ($pid = fork)
{
        #parent process exits
        print "I am parentn";
        exit 0;
}
#create the child process
elsif (defined $pid)
{
        #only the child process is left and in the background
        while(1)
        {
                print "child aliven";
                sleep(8);
        }
}
else
{
        die "error $!";
}

Heres the above code in file form.

Now the fun part is creating a way to manage how it will start up and shut down and how to check for that.

-Adam

The Comptia A+ 220-602 is for those individuals wanting to work in a cellphone technical environment. 1z0-042 is the oracle database administration certification. For great IT paths, the ccna or 640-801 certification is highly recommended. To become a highly skilled project manager, PMI-001 is right for you. These coursesare not for languages like PERL but for highly skilled professionals interested in courses from microsoft like 70-431 amd 70-272. But for a citrix exam, you may need to take the 1Y0-259 exam.

I wanted to make this blog like a personal blog too, and I didn’t really like system666 as a blog name either, so I changed things up a bit.

The new address is http://blogofadam.com

My other two domains also go here too, http://system666.net and http://adambronte.com

I want to start blogging more too.

-Adam

I guess spam doesnt stop even when your site isn’t very active. I’ve been pretty busy, not much time to blog at all or work on anything outside of work. My last post, the spam count was at like 300 or so, now its 1,000+.

I’ve been using perl alot for one of my projects and I am really enjoying it. I’ve never done anything really extensive in perl like this, its alot of fun.

Haven’t been working on any websites or this site at all, been kind of boring i guess. Hanging out with the girlfriend and just working alot.

I have some ideas i wanna blog, but who knows if i will ever get around to it.

-Adam

Looks like they added a session authenicator to the end of the file name

?e=1190424013%26h=f8192e391a6f19fe1d6fae5ebbfa4de1 

Is an example and is only generated when you access the members only areas and cant be reused.

Hmmmmm…………… FUCK

-Adam

Added a new page about a week ago and I waited now to post to make sure it actually works.

You can view it her: http://www.system666.net/latest-diggnation

What this page does is looks at the latest diggnation episode, and embeds it in the page. Even when its members-only preview, the episode is still public, you just cant see it on their page.

Enjoy

-Adam

Windows Live Writer is a nifty program to let you post to your blogs from your desktop. In fact, I’m using it to write this post right now. So far, it seems pretty cool with a lot of cool features. This thing is great if you don’t like being stuck in the web wordpress post editor.

It is a great way to manage posting on multiple blogs and setup is really easy. All you need is blog url, username and password and you are good to go.

Here’s a preview of many of the features it has:

Image inserting/uploading. You can easily insert a picture, resize it with ease, change how

it interacts with the text. You can set it to, left, right, or inline with the text as well as rotate it, give the image a border and if all the options this thing provides isn’t enough, you can also view and edit the html. For example, I edited this html of the picture link to add the lightbox effect.

A cool thing this has is the insert map feature.

I don’t know if this is embedded or if its just a picture, we will see when this is published.

I won’t go into all the features, cause there are a lot of them. You can also develop your own plugin’s for live writer and download other people’s plugin’s too.

Not to mention all the basic features live write has such as easy formatting of text, spell checker, save the draft to your computer, tables, web view, html views, web preview (the web preview is pretty cool) etc.

Overall I think live writer is really helpful and makes posting on a blog seem more official because I don’t have to write inside the browser, I can do it from my computer, even if I don’t have internet access.

Windows Live Writer Download

Something I just noticed that I lovvvveeee, is when you insert a hyperlink, it remembers your last option of “open link in new window”. I always chose this option and wordpress has open in same window as the default option.

-Adam

If you want to work at your own pace, 70-271 is excellent. For that network exam N10-003, study as hard as you can because it is one compulsory course. 70-536 is a core course for the mcts certification. For cisco Qos 642-642 exam, there will be Q and A questions. The 642-432 exam consists over 200 questions. You can easily get help for such windows and cisco exams like 640-802 ccna exam from the testking site. There are many study guides that can assist you in answering challenging questions for your 350-001 exam.

Lately, I’ve been trying to spread the wealth by sending out pownce invites and streamy invites through mashables invite section. Mashable’s invite section hasn’t really taken off and its not very active, so I decided to look other places to spread the wealth and I came across inviteshare.com.

Now, when I first started checking this site out I was like, wow, they have a lot of users, and a lot of invites sent. And I started thinking maybe this was a better place to send out invites… until I actually tried to send one out. I guess they do this as a security feature so people cant automate sending out invites, but the email addresses are images.

That means you cant copy and paste! Its especially annoying when the users email is something weird or has different spelling and numbers mixed in. This little annoyance alone has deterred me from using this service.

-Adam

If you remember back in the day before gmail had public sign ups, it was invite only. There was a website (i forget what it was called) that allowed you to donate invites and you could also receive invites to gmail. Well mashable has a service like this, but for all the invite only websites. How it works is, you and request invites to sites, you can also send out invites to sites and the more invites you send out, the higher up on the invite list you are put.

So not too long ago, I got an invite to pownce. New accounts on pownce get 6 invites, and I would send out 5 invites on mashable to random people, then use the 6th invite to create another account and get a new batch of invites, then this would just repeat. After only 13 invites sent out, I was put at #1 and #2 on lists, so this is easily do-able by anyone.

Now, I wish I could do this for streamy, its just a weee bit harder because each new account only has 2 invites. So for every new account, I would send out 1 invite because I need the other invite to create a new account.

If you dont know what streamy is, let me save you some reading by showing this - http://youtube.com/watch?v=xhAGmpocTLA

-Adam

Banks continue to introduce cheaper credit cards. These can easily be applied for through an online bank. In days, you could be approved for a pay day loan. But if you are an existing customer, you are already eligible for instant loans. Start work from home selling cars or homes. This could lead you to make commission through selling insurance also. You can advertise through gmail and send invites to your site. But a better profitable business is selling buy to let mortgages.