Year: 2008

  • JumpBox: Super simple way of getting web services deployed.

    If you read our “Open Source Lovin’ for your Server” earlier this year and thought “that’s too much trouble”, here is an even easier way to sample preconfigured Open Source Application Servers at your own leasure. Be it for developement, fun, backup or even production, you can not beat JumpBox at simplicity. What they’ve done…

  • Transcode and stream DV to mpeg4 via firewire using VLC and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

    Well kids are you ready for todays lesson in transcoding DV video. So first you need a decent machine. I’m using a P4 2.4Ghz oldie that has Firewire on-board and am chewing up 50% CPU for NTSC encoding. Then you need to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed. Once that’s done use the following command to install…

  • WRDL or is it Wordle….which ever way you say it, it spells fun :-)

    Head over to wordle.net and try your hand at creating a work of art using only words. It’s fun and if you’re lucky will only entertain you for a couple of hours (not days). Now back to WRDL for more ANMTD WRD PLY FN.

  • Styrobot….Something creative my mind never came up with

    Yeah, now I know what I am gonna do with the packing foam that comes with the purchase of our next 50 Dell Servers. Michael Salter’s creations can be viewed at San Jose Museum of Art, Robots:Evolution of a Cultural Icon, up thru 10/08. Totally cool and creative. Definitely one for the “I wish I’d…

  • TinEye Image Finger Printing Technology….Find out who’s stealing your images

    Just came across Idée’s new baby, TinEye. Have you ever wondered why it is that you can’t just go to google images (or similar image search engine) and look for images based on image content and not tags, names and such. Well it’s because it’s damn hard to do and frankly until now I haven’t…

  • Toronto Strobist Group meets at Ryerson

    Yesterday TSG (Toronto Strobist Group) had their 3rd meeting at the Rogers Communications Centre. Lots of new faces, lots of new ideas. I definitely learned alot and generally had a blast. Got to try some of my homemade equipment which was kinda cool and also got to try my hands at shooting some fake kick…

  • Tunnel to locally running mysql server using ssh

    Running and administrating mysql can sometimes be a hassle especially if you’re running a semi-secure environment. This usually means that your mysql server will not accept connections from outside and only localhost connections are allowed. There is a quick way of getting around this if you’re stuck somewhere and really need to use that graphical…

  • Four little Security tools you should install in Ubuntu

    These should probably also be installed under other linux distros (might already be). But for the sake of completeness here they are: 1) denyhosts: great little package that’s already 98% configured after apt-get install process. It runs as a daemon and monitors /var/log/auth.log file for unsuccessful ssh logins and takes measures to ban the originating…

  • Twitter from Unix/Linux/OSX command line

    Yep, you can. Here is the recipe: 1) You need to install “curl” for your OS. OSX comes with it by default which is nice. Most unices out there also have it installed or have it available for download (Ubuntu, Debian users can use “sudo apt-get install curl” to install).2) Edit a text file using…

  • Some Unix/Linux Coolness…..

    I think every admin must do something stupid atleast once….right? Well my brain fart happened during a System upgrade (another story I’ll be ranting about later). I made backups of all the files I thought were important (/home, /etc, /var/lib/mysql and other userdata we had on the system) and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the server.…