crysis wars madness

07Jul09

fun server.  nice folks.  watch out for the guy below…

the graphic above shows the many hours i’ve spent on this game.  yes i live in front of the computer.

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Tags: Crysis, eric235u, ofc

ThePirateBay.org is no more

30Jun09

I have been using this wonderful bastion of freedom for many years and I’m saddened to see it go.  Good luck to peter and the boys.

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Tags: ThePirateBay.org, bittorrent

What Open Source Shares with Science

16Jun09

This article borrowed from zdnet.  Many thanks to conz.

One of the overlooked advantages that Open Source development affords, is that it imitates perhaps the most fruitful and beneficial of all human endeavors: Science. How has the scientific-method evolved, and what can it teach us about the future possibilities of software construction?

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Tags: f/oss, free software, open source, science

Google donates $18,000 to Freenet

13May09

I saw this on the freenet site the other day.  Made me smile.

Google’s Open Source team has donated US$18,000 to the Freenet Project to support the ongoing development of the Freenet software (thanks again Google!).

Their last donation funded the db4o project, which has now been merged into Freenet, greatly improving performance for large download queues while reducing memory usage, amongst other benefits.

We are currently working on Freenet 0.8, which will be released later this year, and will include additional performance improvements, usability work, and security improvements, as well as the usual debugging. Features are not yet finalized but we expect it to include Freetalk (a new anonymous web forums tool), a new Vista-compatible installer for Windows (that part will be out in a few days), and hopefully Bloom filter sharing, a new feature enabling nodes to know what is in their peers’ datastores, greatly improving performance, combined with some related security improvements.

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Tags: freenet, Google, open source team

New Summertime Toy: Honda CRF230M

10May09

I really want to make this an enjoyable summer.  Cruise around, see new places, wander out into the woods a bit more, maybe see Bar Harbor again…  Stuff like that.  Also stop taking the red line into work everyday.  That thing is a sweat box in the summer.  I am happy to say I’ve purchased my first new vehicle.  A 2009 Honda CRF230M.  Inexpensive, great on gas and fun to zip around on.  It’s a little light in the ass and underpowered on the highway but other than that an all around great bike.  Can’t wait to take it on some trails!  Here’s a pic.  (Yes that is a penguin on the helmet.)

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Tags: crf320m, honda, toy

freenet now on github

26Apr09

i’ve been lurking on the freenet developers list.  they have just switched over to git for a version control system.  check out this very interesting project at their github profile.

this project is worth keeping an eye on.

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Tags: freenet, Git, github

A Press Conference with ThePirateBay

19Apr09

In case you haven’t already seen it.  Very interesting to follow this.

http://bambuser.com/channel/Spectrial

Best of luck to him.

But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing hollywood ever taught us.

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Tags: thepiratebay

postgresql on centos / redhat (again)

18Apr09

do to my chronic fiddling i had to reinstall postgresql from scratch.  here’s what i did.  i wrote this after the fact, so hopefully i haven’t forgotten anything and it’s of some use.

1.  install the postgresql packages via yum or the redhat gui.  you may want to add some additional packages for a procedural language or whatever your situation dictates.

2.  make the directory and set up db.

root# mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data
root# chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data
root# su postgres
postgres$ initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

3.  i’m not really into the current default setup so we’re going to change it so everybody has to use a password.

i started the db using the nifty services gui but there’s other ways such as, postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data.

open the interactive shell, psql, and give superuser a password.

alter role postgres with password ‘your_pass_here’;

see more info here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/app-psql.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-alterrole.html

now stop the db, again i used the services gui.

4.  now we will change the default authentication.  go to /var/lib/pgsql/data and open pg_hba.conf with vi.  in the column method change the current value to md5.

for more info see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Client_Authentication

start the db.

5.  let’s test it out to make sure we haven’t screwed anything up.  su to root.  type ‘psql -U postgres’ without quotes at the prompt.  it should ask you for the newly created password.  this is a good thing.

6.  we really don’t want to do everything as the superuser so lets create a limited user.  in this case i’m doing it for a drupal install.  i want him to be able to create databases but not users.

create user drupal0 with password ‘pass_here’ createdb;

to view users type ‘\du’.

i’ve learned a lot at my current job about using oracle’s pl/sql.  feel really comfortable writing functions and procedures and i’m looking forward to playing with postgresql’s procedural languages.  my next post will probably be about how many different ways i can not get drupal to work.  ;)

Filed under: Linux   |  1 Comment
Tags: Linux, postgresql, centos, RedHat, install

Linus at Google on Git

05Apr09

And why it’s better than everything else out there.  The talk is a couple of years old but still very interesting.  I’ve used CVS and Subversion but for my next project I want to try out Git.

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Tags: Git, Google, Linus Torvalds

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

25Mar09

Ada Lovelace, a 19th century British writer who is considered the world’s first computer programmer, will be honored by bloggers all over the world. In the spirit of providing young women with role models, more than 1500 bloggers participating in the first annual Ada Lovelace Day have pledged to write about a woman or women they admire working in technology on March 24th. You can read about Lovelace on Wikipedia.

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Tags: ada, ada lovelace, programmer, women