Glenn’s Blog

Harvey Milk speech

Sunday, October 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Landscape photography assignment

Sunday, October 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Tags: College, Photography

My first digital photography assignment

Saturday, October 4th, 2008 | College, Photography | No Comments

Tags: College, Photography

So it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog.

Sunday, December 9th, 2007 | College, Life | No Comments

A lot has happened in the past year and change. Both of my parents have passed on. I’ve transferred to a new position at work. I’ve started therapy. Lots and lots going on.

When Mom was in hospice, I promised her I’d go back to school and get my degree. So, to that end, I’ve been looking at colleges–right now the top contender is Thomas Edison State College.

I’m looking into their BA in Computer Science program. It would allow me to take some courses in other things I’d be interested in, as well as the computer science stuff I like. I’m waiting to get their information packet in the mail, and going to go from there.

Server OS vs. User OS

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 | Tech, Unix/BSD | No Comments

I recently decided to try to load FreeBSD 6.0 onto my laptop (an old Latitude C640). I’d had it running fairly successfully in the past, but could never get my Netgear WG511 (rev 1) Cardbus card to work with it.

So I downloaded the ISO from FreeBSD, burned it to disc, and loaded the OS. A while later (around an hour), I had a functioning FreeBSD install. Sort of.

At least, if I didn’t care about sound, or my Netgear card working. Off to Google. No love there. Just “Try this (unsupported, un-tar’d, not even apparently supported by the author) driver from…” for the Netgear. No love. Wouldn’t compile, even after sniffing through the C files to see that, oh yes, we must go to this other site in order to grab this other file needed for compile. Oh wait. That didn’t work either. I gave up. Sound? Hah! No such luck.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge BSD fan. It’s secure. The ports system is the easiest way to install new applications. And, I’ve been running it on servers (including this one) since October of 2000, and have had nothing but good things to say about it. And since most servers don’t need sound or cardbus wireless cards, it’s not an issue there.

However, as a desktop or laptop OS? It leaves a lot to be desired. It’s just not mature enough, and requires spending too many geek points to get it to work. I gave up after a day of trying to get this to work on the laptop. I will, however, be happy to update my server here to 6.0 when I can.

So, what, preytell, did I do about the laptop? I went to Ubuntu’s site and downloaded a DVD image from the UK. That took 3 hours or so. Then 10 or so minutes to burn to DVD. Then about 40 minutes later (less time than the FreeBSD or even an XP install), I had a fully functioning system, complete with sound, WG511 support, and just about every app I would have wanted to install, with the exception being Thunderbird. But ok that took all of, 3 minutes or so to download and install

And the best part? The fact that it was up and running in that time. No futzing. No beating my head against a wall. It. Just. Worked.

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox!

Sunday, December 18th, 2005 | Tech | No Comments

I was browsing on The Official Google Blog tonight, and I happened to see a mention for the Google Safe Browsing Extension for Firefox! Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I’m an immense fan of both Firefox and Google. I’m also a big fan of helping to prevent my family and friends from being made a victim of bad Internet scams (hence why I also love Thunderbird for email). Now, with this nifty extension, Google takes a shot at identifying phishing scams, and warning users when a site tries to purport it’s something it’s not.

After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, Google Safebrowsing brings up a dialog box asking if you want to enable “Enhanced Protection” or not. This will send any URL you go to, through Google for quick verification. Before agreeing, make sure you like Google’s Privacy Policy, as you should before accepting any software agreement.

Links to download Firefox & Thunderbird are in the sidebar… You can also check out Google Firefox Extensions for some Cool-gle tools!

SBC CEO claims Google, Vonage and others should pay so his users can access their sites

Monday, October 31st, 2005 | Politics, Tech | 1 Comment

Techdirt:SBC: We Own The Internet, So Google Should Pay Up

This has got to be one of the biggest bonehead manuvers in ages. Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC, has been quoted as saying:

(Quoted from the BusinessWeek article)

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Ok. It seems obvious to me, yet so far, not obvious to SBC shareholders, that this man needs to be fired. He has no clue about how “teh Intarw3b” works, and has no clue as to why his customers buy broadband access in the first place.

Hell, man–if I can’t get to Google from my broadband connection–or Slashdot, Craigslist, LiveJournal, etc? I’m not going to be paying you for that connection. I’ll take my business elsewhere, where they have a freaking clue about how the Internet actually works.

Stopping Linux desktop adoption sabotage

Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 | Tech, Unix/BSD, Windows | No Comments

Stopping Linux desktop adoption sabotage, part one. John Terpstra, one of the maintainers of the Samba Project, posts some thoughts about why Windows is dominating the PC market. There are links in this well-written article to the other two parts.

Microsoft And Yahoo To Let IM Users Talk To Each Other?

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 | Tech | No Comments

Techdirt:Microsoft And Yahoo To Let IM Users Talk To Each Other?

My question is.. when will we be able to IM to anyone using any client? That would be the cool thing. Want to use Google Talk because of the nifty Jabber server? Cool! Want to use MSN because you’ve had that username forever? Fine! Or YahooIM? Or AIM? Cool! But, it would be very nice to be able to IM (for instance):

rain...@gmail.com@talk.google.com (in an older, Banyan-style address format).
rain...@yahoo.com
rainbearnj@AIM

Y’know?

Time Management for Sysadmins!

Sunday, October 9th, 2005 | Books, Tech | No Comments

Finally! Tom’s latest book is ready for pre-order on Amazon! Tom’s other book, The Practice of System and Network Administration, is a definite must-have for anyone who works in IT–from help desk, all the way up to the top of the IT food chain! I’m confident that this new book will be another must-have for anyone in the industry!