Slashdot Politics Story | At Issue In a Massachusetts Town, the Value of Two-Thirds
Slashdot Politics Story | At Issue In a Massachusetts Town, the Value of Two-Thirds.
wow. just wow.
99 year-old loves her first computer — an iPad
99 year-old loves her first computer -- an iPad.
cool! =]
On Adobe, Flash CS5 and iPhone Applications at Mike Chambers
On Adobe, Flash CS5 and iPhone Applications at Mike Chambers.
Some guy is sad that Apple won't let crappy Flash ads run on the iPhone ... and considers anyone who disagrees with him 'offtopic' and fodder for deletion (see note at end of ranty post)
And you complain about a walled garden, Mr. Chambers?
Have fun punching your monkey on your Android.
interesting.
Netflix Founder Acquires Online Education Start-Up - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com.
Acer Aspire H340 Ubuntu Server
...that's what I googled, and that's what led me to great resources.
But first, the background.
I have a Drobo. It's sexy. It came packaged like an 'evil Apple' product -- slick lines, black fabricpaper, etc. I really, really like it. But it's kind of slow when I'm streaming HD video off of it and writing to it at the same time. But I'm a whore for storage. That's where my problem begins.
I keep buying larger drives for the Drobo, and I take the old ones out. About a week ago, I looked at my little pile of 'old' 1TB SATA drives and thought to myself, 'self ... we should do something with those. It's really a travesty to have terabyte drives sitting around on top of the IKEA bookshelves for no reason other than that they're not two-terabyte drives.'
And so I bought an Acer Aspire H340 on amazon.com (no tax) even though I originally found it on newegg.com (yes tax). No cost for shipping in either place. I love the internet.
Anywho-
It comes with something called Windows Home Server, which sounds just completely terrible. I decided, since I've been playing with Ubuntu Server at work, that I would run Ubuntu Server 9.10 on it instead. To maximize flexibility of storage (RAID-5) I decided to boot the OS from a 2GB USB stick I had.
The Install: Ubuntu Server 9.10, installed via .iso from VMWare to the unsuspecting little USB stick. It left me with about 800M of free space, which I promptly decided to chip away at with Netatalk, Avahi (install howto courtesy of this nice site), ebox (google it, it's four letters), and the packages lvm2 and mdadm (to enable Logical Volume Management, to expand the volume dynamically; and software RAID, to enable both data protection and the ability to add new drives, bring them into the RAID, and thus increase my storage). The very first article I found about installing Ubuntu on this thing was of great help, especially the comment by 'druhboruch' regarding the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules ... clever fellow. Perhaps ... too clever? I digress.
The Device: Cubey. I called mine 'cube' because I'm super-creative when it comes to naming things. My TV Mini is called 'TV Mini'. You get the idea. I pulled the hard drive out, imaged it for good measure, and wiped it clean. Plugged the USB thing in, plugged it into power and the ethernets, and ... not so much. Restarted, popped the included hard drive out quickly, and ... much! It seems to default to booting from a SATA device if it's installed. In poking around, this seems to be a BIOS setting (as one might expect) and so I bought an unbelievably cheap video card instead of the VGA header custom cable thing to see about being able to change that BIOS setting. We'll see if I get a brick or something in the mail. I digress again. I installed two more of the 1TB drives in the thing (3 total, if you're keeping score at home) and followed the above links to: Partition, RAID, and LVM-ify them. Apparently an empty RAID has to rebuild as soon as it's born, and it's doing that now. I can access the RAID volume (2TB from 3x1TB drives, going to add 1x1TB later) via AFP and SMB (thanks to netatalk and smbd). Had to chmod 777 the volume to allow my non-root user access to it. Yeah, it's unsecure, but I don't care.
The Hope: This little thing has USB ports galore and an eSATA port. The idea is to plug Drobo and another random terabyte drive into it so it becomes my file server. It was amusing to me to see people post negative comments about the thing because it wasn't powerful enough to 'server' for their needs. These are the kind of people with technical knowledge you should avoid. It has an Atom processor -- It's supposed to make files available on your network, nothing more. I'm a big fan of 'lowest-power-for-the-job', but an Atom processor should never be a business server. That's just silly. I have two Atom machines and I love them for what they do.
Massive Attack never gets old.
I am of the firm belief that Massive Attack never gets old.
I moved my desk and got rid of a lot of stuff I didn't need.
I made three bins of clothes to donate to poor people. Hopefully they're okay with out-of-season Abercrombie stuff, because that's a lot of what it is. Need to find a good secular charity to give it to.
Handouts given in the spirit of humanity shouldn't come with metaphysical baggage. The needy are the least prepared to deal with assaults on their worldview. Proselytizing to the poor is a shameful sport -- picking the lowest of the low-hanging fruits. They have enough to worry about, spare them your fire and brimstone moralistic bullshit. It's better discussed over good beer rather than donated clothing.
What Would Jesus Donate? Probably everything. And without the Missionary and Conversion fuckery.
Conservatism is a mental health issue
from a lunatic demonstration on 9/12/09
[photo by MeetTheCrazies on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42448313@N03/3912690083/in/set-72157622224474669/]
Hey, Norway, Germany, England, Sweden, Canada, and the others... how's that socialism thing working for you? Oh, your citizens are provided with health care and various other services that make life better? I see. Well, that sucks, doesn't it. We can't have people that need to choose between food, shelter, and medical care actually getting their broken legs fixed. Psh. Freeloaders.
If they wanted to have their broken legs fixed, they'd have gone to Business school and they'd have a better job. Amirite?
How is such a faulty understanding of reality both so popular and so easily spread? Would any of these protesters, if they found themselves without a job and with a broken leg say to themselves, "self ... we don't have private medical coverage, and that's okay. we're just going to sit here and be alright with that." No. They'd be the first ones screaming that the government 'owes them' some kind of medical coverage.
This level of un-thought-through conservatism must be some kind of neurological disorder. Seldom do you see people so convinced of their message screaming with spittle in the corners of their mouths outside of the insane asylums.
In my opinion, someone should throw these people into the sun. Or shoot them in the face. In my opinion.
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