While I’m In ‘Rehab’ Mode
Australia is about to take another weather hit with Tropical Cyclone Rusty slowly coming ashore in the northwest with 200+ kph [125+ mph] winds and the potential to dump 2 feet of rain near the coast. The sucker is really nasty because is just creeping along which means it will take seemingly forever to get by any area.
[The BBC report does all of the conversions for you.]
It’s not the wind, it’s the water, and this thing has both in spades…
In other news from the BBC Chuck Hagel was confirmed by the Senate as the Secretary of Defense, as McCain and Graham claim they weren’t really filibustering him.
Their newest shiny object is the fact that the DHS has released a lot of undocumented people from detention in anticipation of the ‘sequester’. Keeping people in prison is expensive, and the people released were not considered a threat, so DHS is saving money. The Republicans are having a hissy fit because their actions are having consequences they don’t like.
Duncan has been telling them how to fix the problem, simply repeal the law. Congress can’t pass the buck to the President because they have laws on the books requiring the President to spend the money they appropriate. There is also the fact that the Supreme Court has already ruled in the ‘Line Item Veto’ law, that Congress can’t transfer its power to the Executive branch.
Congress is where the amount of money spent is determined, and Congress should get to work. Congress might find if they worked 5 days a week and didn’t take a week off for every Federal holiday, they might get something done. Congress spends more time at ‘recess’ than a kindergarten class.
85 comments
Awww… Badtux, the jaded penguin! 😉 😆
(I know all about GoDaddy). 😉
Yeah… I remember the old days well Bryan. I survived and came out pretty well. I know the games, and the rules.
This round will all be on my terms. 🙂 I have two plans, one that is the *public* plan, and my own private plan I have been working on for over a decade. If my public plan is all that I can achieve, I’ll be happy enough. I will have made enough to get me to my retirement age of 65, where I will get my substantial Super & pension. 🙂 And I will also have a fairly well hidden trickle cash flow. It’s not hard, it’s only when people get too greedy or blab that they get in trouble. 🙂
I have good reasons to aim for Dubai. I may even live there. I know people there, I have people everywhere that I have been saving for a rainy *day*. And I think it’s pouring! 😆 There are several people in useful places that don’t want to end up in my book! 😈 I keep telling people I’m no Saint. If I think someone deserves a knife, I have no problem twisting it! But I will do all I possibly can for those I think deserve that also. I am not greedy. 🙂 But people often make the mistake of thinking that because I am a *really nice guy* and love kids and animals, that I am a big ol’ softie and an easy mark! If they saw my military record. they would have a much different opinion. I have never been a soft mark, as the bullies in school found out that hard way, and the bullies in Business also! 😀
But I am also not stupid. I don;t jump without looking. I always do my homework. It’s how I was successful. My two failures were due to me not being in control and having to rely on others. That will not happen this time. 🙂
I have no illusions. It won’t be easy, and it hasn’t been. And it never was in the past either. 🙂
Bribery is an art, and there are many ways to bribe people. I know how to read people, I learned many people skills in military, Intel Svc, and in Business. I plan to use them. 🙂
Anyway, we will see. Talk is cheap.
I don’t blame you Bryan for not wanting to do it any more. I don’t want to either. 🙂 But I have no choice really, and I am young enough to have one more go at it. 🙂
Just about everyone in the IT field over 40 needs to have a business ready to launch when they lose their current job, because no one wants to pay them what they are worth. If you don’t have a plan ready, be nice to the people at the local convenience store, because that may be where your next job comes from.
I know that you understand the risk/reward calculus of a start-up, Kryten, or I would be really down on the whole idea. What bugs me is the number of great ideas and projects that didn’t happen for a lot of stupid reasons. I like you concepts, and can see the value, but I’m not a marketing guy, so I can’t tell you how to sell them to other people. You have done this, so you should be able to sell the concepts.
I really hope you succeed, because I have to wade through a lot of bogs when I’m trying to buy goods and services on the ‘Net. Amazon is the best, and it still pulls up crap no matter how specific I am.
Most sites are designed for browsing, not for finding. It is really annoying, and time-wasting.
There are people who I would like to buy from, but I won’t because I don’t think they are secure enough to trust with any information, much less a credit card number.
The thing that amazes me is how few businesses get hacked, given how lax most of them are.
Just go for it, Kryten. If you want it, go for it.
you know you have achieved greatness when a corporation decides to crush you and steal your intellectual property.
The first words out of the mouth of a fellow Jeep club member and security integrator who heard our business plan: “Have you patented that?” Heh. One small business owner talking to another small business owner about the important things in life.
The reality is that we’re like mammals in a time of dinosaurs, scurrying around hoping to keep beneath their notice, sticking to ecological niches that they feel are too small to bother with. Aside from the rather boring service industry thing that should, if it actually works, get us into nine digits, we have one long-term world-beating idea that could turn us into a billion-dollar company. But it’s waiting for the deployed technology to catch up with our idea. That takes a while, because security tends to work on ten-year equipment cycles, i.e., any brand-new cameras out there today aren’t going to be replaced for on average ten years. The very latest gear out there will do what our idea calls for, the majority of the deployed gear won’t. But it will happen…
Oh, regarding whether to do the startup or get a “real” job, well, I don’t actually look my age. When I mentioned it to my boss, he was shocked — he said he assumed I was in my mid 30’s. And there are plenty of people willing to pay me a good wage. One recruiter for a company with 500 employees, for example, said they would give me 10% more than what I made at my last job without even flinching because people with my skills are valuable. But then I would be employee 501. I’ve never been employee 501. That’s probably why people assume I’m in my mid 30’s when I’m considerably older, because it’s being employee 501 or 5001 or 50001 in that giant corporate machine that ages you ;).
People like Stac [data compression] and Golden Bow [altered sector size] who added nice features to MS-DOS were safe for a while, then someone at M$ noted that people were grumbling about the 32MB limit on hard drive storage and they got robbed. Fortunately for them, M$ botched the theft and had to pay to actually implement what these two little companies did.
Yeah, when the bean-counters at the top decide to ‘cut costs’ they start with the highest paid people who actually do something, and the lower level managers are going to protect their friends. If the company was working before you got there, people will assume it will still work without you.
The folks adding little services like that to the Amazon cloud are finding out the hard way that it’s never a good idea to write extensions for a big fish’s infrastructure product — sooner or later the big fish is going to add your functionality to their product, and then you’re out of business.
Security is a business where you need street cred to succeed. Because you need the guys who are sticking cameras up on ceilings and walls and poles to buy in to your solution, and those guys aren’t a real trusting lot (huhn, I wonder why?). Most of the potential competitors who have that kind of street cred are tied to one VMS vendor or one line of hardware, they won’t do what we’re doing because it’d help their competitors. The big iron IT guys don’t understand the street, one of the ways we’re getting the funding to do this is via consulting fees and integration help for one of the big iron companies but these guys are as clueless about security as the security guys are clueless about IT. I think what we’re trying to do is doable. The only real question is whether we’ll be the ones to do it, which will require a few cogs to line up but (shrug). We’ll see.
I worked for the ADT bank division one summer, and those guys are just like the security guys at NSA – professional paranoids. ‘New products’ were things that have been proven to work for at least a decade. Everything is considered a threat.
Integration is certainly a safer platform than enhancement. Yes, someone is going to do it, because it needs to be done, and it’s a growth market. Big iron will probably offer you a job if it takes off, because they do like control.
Hi Guys.
Sorry I’ve not been around the past week. Been pretty busy here with the biz plan, and a new medical issue that’s cropped up.
Also, last night I had to get involved in stopping a couple bad drunks from smashing up the place, and threatening a couple people including a woman that worked there, where I was attending a charity function / fund raiser. I ended up putting two people in hospital, not by choice. I haven’t had to do that for a long time. Not very happy about it and not proud. I won’t go into details, and I just spent a couple hours being interviewed by police over it, and several witnesses also. The Police said I wouldn’t be charged as I was acting to stop members of the public being harmed, and in self defense. Apparently the witnesses all said that the two people were threatening to kill the woman in particular (which they were) and it was obvious that they intended to carry out the threat. They were extremely violent and with the amount of alcohol they had consumed were virtually immune to pain, and I had no choice but to take them down quickly and there was no gentle way of doing so as they refused to cooperate or be restrained. That and the fact that in a room full of people, only myself and two women even tried to stop things before someone was killed! Oh, and the witnesses also said that I gave fair warning that I was combat trained and would stop them if I had to. Which of course was like oil on flames, but as you know Bryan, for legal reasons, I had no choice. *sigh* The law really is screwed up sometimes! Also, I could see that some of the others, who were also drunk, were getting agitated, and I needed to send a clear message that if anyone else tried to get out of control, the result would be swift and severe. The last thing we needed, was a full-on drunken brawl!
The fund raiser was a huge success, but there are always assholes ready to spoil things.
I’m off to bed. I’ll reply to your comments tomorrow (because I want to, but when i have a clear head).
Thanks friends, and g’night.
Oh, yes, there is nothing like telling a drunk that you are a trained professional who is going to stop him. That always works … not! A shotgun is about the only caution a drunk understands, and that isn’t always enough. Once the testosterone and alcohol mix, they have to prove they are the toughest guys on the planet.
The people who make the rules and laws don’t get out much, and don’t understand what happens when the rules are followed. It’s like the people who think torture works – since just the threat of torture would make them spill their guts, they can’t imagine that there are people who won’t. Since they would stop if faced with a trained professional, they think everyone will and there will be no violence.
Chill out and get some sleep. We’ll be here when you get back.
Sleep? What’s that?
I’m playing with a little widget that can be used to bridge a security network to the Internet (but only to a *specific address* and *specific network port* on the Internet!) in a secure manner. It started out as a wireless router. Of course, if you have the capability to flash the ROM and the OS is Linux and the source code to the OS has been released as open source (as is legally required)…. :twisted:.
That sounds like fun, Badtux, so sleep is irrelevant. Now that certainly has a multitude of applications beyond the obvious security uses, and I can imagine messing with someone’s mind by swapping their wireless router with the ‘directive router’. Actually, it would be useful as a commercial product for businesses that offer “free WiFi” to push people through a specific portal site, rather than allowing them free, unfettered access, and would be a more effective way of filtering Internet access at primary schools, than the current process of loading software on every computer.
You have a product – all you need is a business plan.
Hi guys,
One of the people I put in hospital was a woman (but definitely NO lady! A bikie moll, tat’s everywhere, big and mean!) She was actually the worst of the two, and the hardest to put down. I’m afraid I had to get a bit extreme. She’ll be in hospital for awhile. And I am not happy about it. Anyway, I saw a friend of hers who confirmed she was an alcoholic and a mean drunk, but won’t take any responsibility. So I don’t feel as bad as I might have, you know what I mean. I have a real issue with harming *innocents*, but she was definitely not one from what I was told (several arrests for assault etc). I was a bit worried the past couple days. Anyway, that’s a load off! 🙂
Thanks Bryan! 😀
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Patents are only useful if you can afford to defend them in court. Which is why big companies get them.
I’ve dealt with many financial institutions over the years. I setup a secure Unix based server system for Macquarie Bank in the 80’s. They were the first bank in Aus to move from mainframes. 🙂 They wanted to use Mathematica & Imagine That! for their financial systems & bank security modelling, and that can’t be done on mainframes. They had a massive Sun server farm and Mac workstations (Mac II’s at first). It worked wonderfully, and they became the market leader here. 🙂 So, they know me (as do the others!) 😀 (Not all banks are risk adverse). 😉
Yeah, I know all about Stac etc. It was ’84 I’d just been discharged from the Military and transferred to DIO where my first task was to create a software development team for various in-house projects, and I was in the middle of it. and that’s a story for another time. But I know exactly what happened. I learned all about IP that year, and that if you are going to develop anything for the consumer market, you better have a good sized *fighting fund* in reserve! Otherwise, the sharks will eat you alive!
There is a lot about what I am planning that you are not aware of. 🙂 After this week, I’ll get back on track seriously and get the damned blog up if it kills me! I am so sick of all these damned interruptions and distractions!
OK. back to watch a movie and chill a bit with a nice Blue mountain coffee and a couple choc chip cookies a friend made me today! They are about 3″ diameter! Yummmmmmm! 😆 And I don’t feel one iota bit guilty about them! Blood sugar be damned! 😆
Thanks a lot guys, truly! A little oasis of sanity is what I needed right now. 🙂
Good luck and heart felt best wishes badtux! I meant what i said. If I can help at some point, feel free! 🙂 (and I know at the moment that’s a little specious given what I am doing, but I have never abandoned a friend.)
Cheers all. 🙂
Bryan, the product is called for by the business plan in this case, not the other way around. But it wouldn’t be the first time that an ancillary product created incidental to the business plan ended up being more popular than the main service provided by the business plan. But we really don’t want to be in the business of providing or supporting hardware on a large scale… been there, done that, got our a** reamed.
Kryten, as near as I can tell your cops receive about the same level of training as in the US when it comes to ‘unarmed combat’, and the sad lack is because you aren’t supposed to be involved in a punch up, you are supposed to keep the peace. What happens is that the police arrive, get punched a couple of times and lose self-control, as well as situation control. The cops would have probably ended up killing her, because alcoholics are so drunk that they can’t feel the type of pain that would normally bring compliance.
You didn’t kill her, so she’s lucky, and will dry out in hospital.
Based on ABC reports you seem to have the same level of biker violence that we had 50 years ago. We still have some, but it is nothing like what it was. In that kind of environment, you are not going to reason with them – they’ve seen too many Mad Max movies.
Trust me, you were a much better solution than the police, and there was no ‘collateral damage’. The cops were certainly very happy that you dealt with it so they didn’t have to. I would have been.
When you are ready, let us know.
Well, Badtux, you could ‘license the technology’ or just save it for a down turn. Yeah, hardware is a loser. The rule at HP was three calls on a piece of hardware and the profit for that unit was gone. If the unit had to be exchanged, it was at a loss. The markup people will tolerate for anyone but Apple is just too thin.
Still operating on a serious lack of sleep. Trying to get a camera farm up in the house so we can have another site to monitor. And yes, it is truly a site, I have a half dozen computers, a pretty spendy Layer 3 switch, a nice router, a big storage server, … I’m thinking that I’ll do five cameras, one pointed at the cat box, one pointed at the fancy electrical cat feeder, one above the front door (easier to get the wire to there than to point it out the front window because I can run it out the garage eave), one on the side of the house pointed at the front gate, and one pointed at the cat bed on top of the dresser (you’ll note that I’m pretty keen on violating my cats’ privacy but not on violating my own 😉 ). Our camera guy already set me up with the software, it’s just been a case of setting up a virtual machine with Win2k8r2 on it while working through some hardware issues (pushed in six new used drives into my storage server for video data and set them up as RAID10, that brings it up to fifteen drives, huhn, I have more storage than most medium-sized businesses sitting in my house, nevermind at the office!), and then tomorrow he’s going to find a PoE switch for me and some cameras that will work.
My little widget is sitting on the shelf above my desk right now. Sigh, so much to do, so little time in the day…
You should check California law on the camera on the cat box. Some prosecutor running for re=election may decide it is a bathroom and get in a bother. PETA would probably file an amicus brief. 😉
Are you sure you want to know what the cats are doing when you aren’t around?
That does sound like a major project in its own right. Testing a bathtub painting kit [epoxy paint] sort of pales in comparison.
Ugh. Time for bed (past time, actually). I’ve spent the last two evenings rebooting Windows 2008R2 over and over and over again to get all its friggin’ updates installed. I figure tomorrow night I get to plug in my POE switch and a couple of cameras and install the Milestone software to monitor them. Meanwhile, I am officially no longer furloughed from my prior employer but am now officially laid off, due to the fact that they sold their last assets yesterday and officially died. Yay, means I get to dare the fangs of COBRA… what a mess, sigh!
Hi guys,
Badtux, you need this free tool. It will keep updates for all win & office. Then you only need to update once. If I’d known, I’d have posted it before. Been using it for a couple years.
http://www.wsusoffline.net/
Good luck.
PS. I’ve not been getting sleep either. Eyes are bloodshot to hell. had a busy day yesterday with my major annual pathology run. (I get pathology done quarterly, but once a year is the major *test everything* one. Takes a couple days to recover. *shrug*
Bloody M$ – I spent the weekend updating Win 7 on two machines and XP on one, then I had to update XP on the two Win 7 boxes. Then I had to deal with random Java updates, Adobe updates, LibreOffice updates, and updates to other to my other software.
When I think of it I update Linux/Ubuntu and they update everything at the same time from a single source. It is so much easier, and I can do it when I have the time, not when they think it’s necessary.
That crap about ‘you can continue working’ doesn’t hack it. You can’t trust them not to blow things up before you can save what you are doing.
If this keeps up we are going to have to start a grumpy old men chapter.
So, Badtux, in the midst of everything else, you have to deal with the bureaucracy over health insurance and unemployment benefits. America – land of opportunity [if you are already rich].
Kryten, this is the one and only Windows 2008R2 (virtual) box in my infrastructure, and was installed specifically for this test. Milestone is probably the most popular VMS used by our potential customers, and it runs only on Windows.
Bryan, Fedora in particular goes lickity split fast, because they have some kind of special update RPM that only brings in the specific files in an RPM that changed. Ubuntu is a bit slower to update, but has the advantage that it can serve as a Windows domain controller because it uses the European version of Kerberos rather than the MIT version like Fedora. Theoretically. I’m still working on getting that working. I’m trying to make it work with Zentyal (a Ubuntu derivative), so that I can do a unified Windows / Unix login (that is, you get the same home directory on the file server whether you log in via Windows or via Unix, and use the same password for both). Unfortunately doing anything complicated in Linux is an exercise in frustration — you don’t know whether it’ll even do it to begin with, and when it doesn’t work, you don’t know whether it’s you, the software, or the inept documentation. I set up some big storage servers on some old commodity storage server boxes (two 12-disk boxes, two 12-disk jbods, maxed out with 2tb drives since that’s the biggest that SAS1 will handle) and it’s an exercise alright. I was using a Big Iron storage box that had an integrated storage manager, you basically did a ‘volume create’ and it automatically created an iSCSI share for it and waited for you to tell it which initiators had permission to talk to it. With native Linux I have to do all that storage management by hand, via multiple layers of LVM, MD, and so forth, and some of the things that the 2006-vintage big iron will do — like transparent replication to a warm standby server — just by typing ‘create replication volume=foo dest=server:share’ (after creating the share on the destination first!) which could be done *while the volume was in service* can’t be done on Linux, period, without taking the volume out of service, layering a drbd device on top of it, then telling the iscsi share to export that as a lun rather than the underlying volume, at which point you can put it back in service.
People: *Taking a storage server out of service to do tasks like this is simply unacceptable*! That 2007-vintage box was running Linux internally, but had a custom-written storage stack (as in, it never even touched the Linux block layer) that let you do pretty much everything while the volume stayed in service. You could extend the volume while it was in service, create a replica of the volume elsewhere, make a snapshot of it, etc., but the volume would stay online and providing service. (You’d probably have to re-scan at the initiator level to pick up the larger size, but that’s an initiator issue). Modern HP, EMC, etc. boxes are the same way — you never have to take them down. The native Linux storage stack is a *toy*. Pathetic. Simply pathetic. Of course, the native Windows storage stack is even more pathetic, but that’s another issue.
Oh yeah, I have the cat cam up and going. Not much happening, since I have motion detection turned on it only records when there’s motion. If I wave my hands in front of the camera I can see my RAID10 flash, otherwise it mostly just shows an empty cat box. Well, I just checked it and it did capture TMF using the cat box, heh. So the motion detection does work for its intended purpose :). This particular camera needs to be mounted above my front door because it’s the only hi-def camera with microphone and speaker in the bunch, but I need to get a mount for it first, it uses standard tripod mount rather than having a ring or fixed base (I have it mounted on my camera tripod at the moment on my desk, pointed at the cat box).
Off to bed…
One of the major weaknesses of Linux is the lack of contributors with enterprise experience and knowledge. They don’t have the gut feeling for things that ‘should never be required’. The process tends to get too inbred in the development, and issues that should be obvious are missed, or even worse, not seen as important.
Being better than Windows is not much of a goal for systems software.
It would be wonderful if WordPress would adopt the Fedora model, instead of shipping the entire program for every upgrade. It takes entirely too long to do upgrades which is why I stall on performing them until I hit a dead period. A few times I’ve taken the trouble to do a compare on the old and new versions, and created my own upgrade file, but that’s a PITA.
The system should be interesting when it is up and running. You’ll never miss the visits of the Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses again…
Well, got my big iron talking to my Linux iron today via 10 gigabit switches, found a bug in the SMC firmware of my new (old) SMC switches where in cluster mode it won’t route VLAN packets across the pair. WTF? Had to do VLAN mapping because the old storage network was 192.x.y.z while the new storage network is 10.200.y.z, so I added a vlan on the 10 gig fiber downlink to map ingress packets to vlan 2 (and only send out vlan 2 packets and strip the tag in the process) and added a vlan interface with a 192.x.y.z address to my Linux storage boxes. So anyhow, had to move all my wires around to put the two storage boxes on the same switch as the 10 gig fiber, rather than in a failover configuration across the two clustered switches. (I’m using trunked quad-1gbit Ethernet cards for their storage network connection).
Found an area where Windows is superior to Linux. The old iron is mostly used for Windows shares. So I exported my Linux volumes via iSCSI to the Windows server’s iSCSI ID, told Windows to scan the two storage servers for iSCSI volumes, and voila they appeared. I set them to ‘Active’ in the disk manager, did same thing for the existing volumes, then ‘Create Mirror’ on each drive letter. Voila, my data started replicating from old to new. Windows did have to take the volumes offline momentarily to switch them from being ‘Basic’ to ‘Active’ volumes, but I don’t know of any way I could do this at all with Linux short of just mounting the new iSCSI volumes as new directories and rsync’ing the old directories into them. Definitely *not* a click-click-click thing! When done, I intend to detach the old iSCSI shares from the mirror then turn the new iSCSI shares back into basic volumes.
Looking at the Milestone “timeline” I note the hours at which my cats are on patrol. Basically they’re on patrol at dusk and dawn, and every other time they’re apparently asleep. Well, I keep them awake later in the evenings but when I go to bed, they go to bed. They don’t do anything when they patrol, they just saunter past the camera as if having nothing better to do. The things you learn from watching video surveillance :). Too bad the fans are howling big-time, adding the POE switch to my pile of gear didn’t help the noise factor at all…
Cats eyes are the best during the gray periods around dusk and dawn, while that is a tricky time for most of their prey. Like most carnivores, cats spend most of their doing nothing and only spend about 4 hours a day looking for food. That’s a major reason I needed a low light camera to get pictures of the ferals, they are only available to me at sundown.
I bought a heated pad for Sox to ease the winter cold. It is sealed for use outdoors. He doesn’t like sleeping on padded surfaces for whatever cat reason. He really likes it.
During the winter I turn off everything because of the fan noise. You can’t hear it when the air conditioner is running, but the heater is almost silent so it is really annoying. The electric company is going to love the changes you made.
Even a blind hog will stumble upon an acorn. There had to be something that was easier in Windows. 😉
Hiya,
Been busy. 😉 Forgot I had a fancy dress charity thing on Sat. Good thing someone called to ask what time I was going! 😆 Oh well… And no punch ups or nasty drunks! A nice bonus. I did have to contend with a very teary eyed 6yo girl that has adopted me because I let her play her favorite Dora games and coloring book games etc on my PC! (Her mom is a good friend that looked after me last year after hospital etc, so i look after her 3 kids who like me, and this 6 YO loves me for some really wierd kid reason! Don’t they know I am a ‘mean ol’ SOB??!” Hmmph! 😉 😆 Awwwww…. It was heartbreaking! :'( The poor kid even offered to sleep on the floor!! Serious! She really didn’t want to go. (It’s because I got sick Sat Night, had a turn, lot of pain. had to take a couple Endone, and she wanted to stay with me to make sure I didn’t die! She lost her pa a couple years ago.) I feel so sad, she’s a lovely girl! Always gives me BIG hugs… 🙂 So, I spent quite awhile assuring her I wasn’t gonna die and we agreed (with Mom) that she could visit on Sun to make sure! (which she did, and we all had a nice picnic in the park! And just between us… 6yo girls are REALLY sneaky! I am certain she iz trying to set me up with her Mom! (who thinks it’s very funny!) Hmmph! Hmmmm… And her 12 YO is just as sneaky, and her 3YO boy is too smart for anyone’s good and totally fearless! Heh. 😉
Ahem… sooo, onwards!
I had a hell of a time with iSCSI on Linux. Then I came across this and just shrugged.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/scst/index.php?title=ISCSI-SCST_and_Zero-Copy_Data_Sending
Don’t forget that cat’s know when you are looking at them! Even via camera, and like to be smart-arsed and have an evil bent! 😈
Spent more money on biz stuff (developer subscriptions to a few sites, and some software I needed). Been VERY lucky so far, lot of deals are around, business must be bad out there! You can get s/w and even dev sub’s for a song! I’ve literally spent about $60 on s/w that at normal prices would have cost me several hundred bucks! And these are all full legit licenses too, and then the companies flood my mailbox with their other s/w deals for like 60% off etc! Never thought i’d see the day… I am have serious misgivings about my biz now. Oh well. *shrug*
Here’s an example I got from onOne (they supply top professional plugins for Photoshop thet I use):
“Perfect Photo Suite 7.1 Premium Edition for only $149.95 (reg. $299.95)”
Here’s the kicker, I’d already bought this a couple months ago, so I emailed them and just had a little complain, I wasn’t expecting anything… and they not only gave me a 50% refund, but they gave me one of their newest tools (onOne Perfect Effects 4.0.2 Premium, not in the Suite yet) for free! (Normally $99.95).
Well.. color me purple with pink polka dots!
I am actually going mad trying to keep up with all the stuff being thrown at me! Seriously… I get a dozen or more emails a day now from all the s/w companies I’ve ever reg’d at over the past decade! 😆
There is a BIG drive on to raise $1mill for joomla . org (it’s called “Joomla! HumbleBundle”, and several joomla! developers are giving great deals (’cause if j . o goes down, they are out of biz!) 😉 I got this deal:
JA Developer Club Membership (normally $499/yr) + Compojoom Developer Bundle (normally $195/yr) + $50 donation to J . o, for… $70! I kid you not. Here’s one of the confirmation emails…
“Hello Paul,
We are sending you this email to confirm that your new Developer Bundle subscription on our site, Compojoom – awesome joomla extensions!, is now activated. The subscription will be active up to Sunday, 23 March 2014 21:24.
We’d like to remind you that you have registered on our site using the username Kryten42 and email address…”
(and yeah, I am using K42 as my nic on all this stuff! 😆 Why not? may as well! I have the domain!) 😀 Should see the PWD they sent! 32 hex char’s! Paranoid much? Sheesh!
Remember all the problems I was having a month ago deciding on a VPN? Then I bit the bullet and got one at a big discount so figured what the heck? Well, now I have THREE! And two were free! Geez… Here’s the latest:
“Secure your Internet connection with SecurityKISS Tunnel. We are a leading VPN provider to protect privacy, ensure anonymity and bypass Internet restrictions.
Easy to use. No registration, No usernames, No passwords. Download, Install, Connect – and you are secured. Long server list to select from. OpenVPN, PPTP and L2TP protocols. All platforms supported. High anonymity – no logging, and much more…
Our gift to you to give us a try: FREE 3 month VPN!”
I think I’m starting to get a tad paranoid… 🙄
Anyway… I am off to get a new video card, mine died and I’m using the really crappy on-board gfx! No way i will run PS etc on that! 😆 but… I got a good deal on that too! 😆
‘PowerColor Radeon HD7870 2GB Myst Edition’ AU$216
It is a new one that actually uses a slightly cut version of the Tahiti (7900 series) core (it’s unofficially called the 7930) It performs almost the same as the 7950 for about $100 less, or in my case, $140 less!) 🙂 It’s probably twice as good as the one that died that I paid about the same price for a year ago. *shrug*
OK… off to the store I go! TTYL! 😀
And to add to the noise factor, I just hauled out my old desktop computer and installed ClearOS (a router / small office distribution built on top of CentOS) on it to build a VPN / firewall box. This is actually a testbed for a firewall at work, we’re retiring the old 2006 vintage Cisco because we can’t get support for it anymore even if we could afford it, meaning we need a way to VPN in to our network, though since we have that spectacular American “high speed” Internet (in quotes) that is almost an exercise in futility. Luckily we have literally piles of servers. Unluckily we have neither power nor space to do anything with them, but at least I can repurpose a box that sold for $5,000 when new as a router without feeling bad about it, since it’s not as if we could get more than $1K for them selling them on eBay (which we’re going to do of course, there’s a ridiculous amount of gear back there in the warehouse that we inherited and eBaying it will pay salaries for a couple of months, amazing what a company that lives for ten years then goes bankrupt can accumulate, and probably 90% of it got discarded before the move!).
So now I can OpenVPN into my network at home from anywhere on the planet — it works with iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, and of course Linux (duh!). Will test all of that, of course… but already tested the hard ones (iPad and Android) and they work fine. So it goes.
Off to bed. Tomorrow I dig in that warehouse looking for the mounts for the cameras, they have standard SLR-style fittings but the actual mounts weren’t in the boxes that I got. Oops!
Sleep well, and remember to have some fun Badtux! 😉 😀
Hey, if you need a VPN service for free, I have a couple! 😆
Well… My luck continues (it can’t last! And when the other boot drops… It’s gonna be a BIG one if this keeps up!) 🙁 😉 😆 Ehhh… “Make hay while the sun shines!” Right? 🙂
I wanted a GOOD single multipurpose IDE. Been looking at several, but the one that apealed (because of it’s good range of plugins for framework/app support, such as JQuery, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, CakePHP, etc) is CodeLobster Professional Edition. Now, with all the plugins, it normally retails for US$499.95. I got an email (I have been a past customer) with an offer of 75% off. Well, ‘Good deal’ thinks I! So I emailed them with a few questions, explained what I am doing and hinted at my meager funds… and they came back with an offer of… AU$37.88 (basically, another 70% off on top of the 75% discount! So I, not being a complete idiot, grabbed it before they changed their minds! And this includes a full 12 months premium support!
I tells ya… It’s too freaky!! Mind you, I did say that I would give a fully impartial and accurate review (which given my past experience with it, and their great help when I needed it) will be a positive review I’m sure. 🙂
Got a baaaaad feeling about this! ooooh… what was that? phew! Just the dog!
LMAO
My IDE is called Emacs :twisted:.
Well, actually, for Java/Groovy/Grails I’ve been using Eclipse lately. But for C/C++ it’s hard to beat Emacs if you have a ‘make tags’ target in your Makefile to re-create its etags file as needed so that ESC-. will bring you to the definition of whatever you’re looking at, and if you’re exercising good code-fu by putting Doxygen tags everywhere and have ‘make doxy’ in your Makefile if you want a nicely hyperlinked version. Being able to have multiple views into the same file is such a no-brainer when trying to see some code referenced elsewhere in the file without losing your current place that one wonders why Emacs is the only programmer’s text editor I’ve run across that will do it.
Of course, the fact that I’ve been using Emacs since 1981 may also have something to do with my fondness for the beast. (Wait, is that 32 years? Wow. How time flies!).
Regarding VPN services, thus far not an issue. My biggie right now is getting away from Cisco. Those people are pure unadulterated evil and I don’t want Cisco anywhere in my infrastructure. Need a service contract to download firmware updates for my hardware? Need to pay extra $$ beyond the $$$ already spent on the Cisco for a web GUI to make my CatOS switch easier to configure? For realz? Luckily I have plenty of perfectly serviceable SMC / LG-Ericcson gear to take its place, once I handle the VPN issue… at least they aren’t evil. Just inept, heh!
LOL Tell ya what… How about a test? Your IDE vs my dev system to create a fully adaptive/reactive HTML5/CSS3 WP biz site, and we’ll see who finishes first! 😉 😀
Time is money, right? I could do it all n notepab++… but it would take 3-4 times longer, and probably have a lot of errors & bugs, and also probably wouldn’t be as good. Things have changed a lot since the old HTML3 days. *shrug* 🙂
When I was a *Permanent Contractor* for Myer’s in the 90’s, we had to find room for a large project office for 60 developers and a whole lot of equipment. The only space in the HQ building was what they called their *Trash & Treasure* room. basically where a lot of IT equipment was left and forgotten about. Took a team 3 days to move everything out on pallets. They had a ton of stuff in boxes that had never been opened, all the way back to original IBM PC XT’s! We even found an unused Cisco 7000 series router! (And yeah, I hate Cisco also! They go out of their way to make their crap as complex as possible so you have to pay extortion fees to get stuff working!)
Anyway, I went to the store to get my new GFX card… and they didn’t have what I wanted, and not sure when etc. So, I had some lunch and thought. Then went to my bank across the road, and had a chat with one of the Biz development managers. I had my Biz/Mkt Plan with me. I told him I really needed a new Dev PC, but couldn’t afford it. He asked me how much I’d need, so I said I’ll get a quote and he said good. I went back to my PC store, got a quote, and went back to the bank. The guy said it should be OK and he’d get back to me in a couple days. basically, I’ll be borrowing $2,000 unsecured @ 3.3%/yr interest over 2 years. A pretty good deal. 🙂
This is the spec:
1 CoolerMaster CM 690 II Advanced USB3.0 Case $109.00
1 DEMCi Flex CoolerMaster CM690II Advanced Filter Kit (5 piece) $49.00
1 CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800W PSU $179.00
1 ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z Motherboard $285.00
1 AMD FX-8350 8-Core 4.00GHz Processor $215.00
1 G.Skill Trident X F3-2400C10D-16GTX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 $169.00
1 Galaxy GeForce GTX 670 GC 2GB Graphics Card $379.00
1 Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB SSD (Retail Box) $259.00
1 CoolerMaster Storm Trigger Cherry Black Mechanical Keyboard $119.00
1 CoolerMaster CM Storm Sentinel Advance II Mouse $65.00
1 Razer Vespula Dual-Sided Mouse Mat $35.00
1 Corsair Hydro Series H100i CPU Closed Loop Liquid Cooler $145.00
TOTAL: $2,008.00
All I can do now is wait. 🙂 He seemed pretty confident it would be approved as he said they are actually looking to help new small Biz startups, and I have a long and good history with them. 🙂 I guess I’ll find out soon enough. 🙂
I don’t do HTML or CSS (that’s web slingin’ stuff for web slingers and I’m a bare metal kinda guy :twisted:) so I’ll pass on that one. We have a good web slinger type at work to do that kind of thing, I do the wires and drivers things. I’ll race you on who can first fix the Intel ixgbe driver to work with Finisar optical modules on the x590 10 gigabit network card though ;). Today I fixed the targetcli iSCSI target configuration program for LIO on Fedora 18 so it would accept the initiator names of our ancient ESX 3.5 boxes, so that tells ya the kind of thing that I’ve been up to recently. What can I say, my daddy was a mechanic and I’ve always been more of a guy who likes things he can touch rather than things he can only see.
Sounds like the business climate in Arstralia is a bit better than here in the Untied States of America. ‘Round these parts, our Too Big To Fail banks aren’t interested at all in lending money. Why do the boring job of making money off the interest rate spread between deposits and loans when you can instead gamble the money on risky derivatives then be bailed out by the federal government if your gamble doesn’t work out? Yes, we are so FUBAR here in the USA….
I think we are going to have to move this discussion because the post is a month old, and the system closes threads after a month. What you haven’t seen are the spammers that have been trying to drop comments on this thread because it is an old post and assume no one is paying attention.
Only the top spam posts are getting through the filter, but that’s why comments get automatically shut down after a month.
Oh, the top quality, most believable spam is currently coming from Germany for some reason. A better grade of English than the former Soviet Bloc, and they save the commercial until the third paragraph, so it isn’t obvious in a quick scan on the dashboard.
Cisco is just following the US corporate tradition of milking the cash cows to death. Everyone wants to ‘rent’ you things, rather than selling something that works. It gets to be a real PITA to have to pay to be a beta tester for the greedy scum.
The best IDE is the one that works the way you do. Generally speaking, it isn’t the newest version of the program.