This guy’s take is that BSD 4.3 was the greatest software ever written, and based on his arguments, I would tend to agree with him.
Category: Geekdom
MTV Now Owns A Bunch Of College Newspaper Sites’ Domains
Sorry I didn’t hit on this earlier this month when this news first hit, but I’ve been busy.
Many years ago, I worked for a company that provided an online content management system for folks. When we started taking on a ton of college newspaper clients, we spun those of into another company that eventually became another company who then sold management of over a hundred of its college newspaper clients to another company (long after I left there).
The thing is that now, the parent company of that other company has been bought out (official press release) by MTVU, an MTV Networks-owned channel geared toward college students. While this would be fine and dandy, from the little bit I know about College Publisher, I know it registered a lot of the domains in their own name, meaning that the domains for many of these sites are now the property MTV/Viacom.
OpenDNS — Anybody Using It?
The DNS system is the fundamental building block of the Internet, and a bunch of your time online is spent doing DNS lookups. Why not make that process faster? I was getting really slow lookups from my office’s DNS servers (we’re using the ones provided by the ISP). I recently switched to using the OpenDNS servers. My DNS lookup times are stupidly fast now (at least in my initial testing), and Open DNS protects me from phishing scams, as they block access to those sites.
Granted, I’ve only been using the thing for about two hours, so this is a limited bit of experience, but it seems much faster than Unicom’s DNS lookups (we have a T1 through them at the office I’m at).
The one problem with the system is obviously the question of how OpenDNS makes money. If you incorrectly type in a domain (that it can’t automatically correct, as it does fix many typos in your requests) it will send you to a search page that has ads on it. So obviously that’s how they’re making money, and I’ve yet to see if this causes problem with domain lookups.
As somebody who recently had a co-worker nearly get scammed by one of those sites, I’ll be making these the name servers on at least one of the office networks I work at. But has anybody had experience with this setup, good or bad, that would cause problems?
Getting Back DMA For Your CD/DVD Drive
I’m mostly bookmarking this for my reference, but maybe somebody else will run into this on a Google search and it might help.
After struggling all week with poor DVD drive performance (DVDs were skipping really bad, data transfers were really slow, burning took forever, etc…). Come to find out that, for some reason the drive had been switched to “PIO Mode” instead of the faster DMA transfer mode. How that happened, I have no idea. I figured it happened when I upgrade the firmware for the drive last week. So switched it to use DMA if available, rebooted, and it was still in PIO mode. Removed the drive to have it reinstall/redetect on reboot, still no dice.
After looking around on Microsoft’s site and reading all about the CRC errors that can cause this to happen (along with a partial fix), I came across this fix as well. Did both, and am now back up with DMA mode, and everything is hunky-dorey.
Any Interest in a Local Web Developer/Designer Usergroup?
I know Jon and I floated the idea of a PHP user group a while back, but it never came to be, probably because of its too specialized of focus. However, a broader usergroup that encompassed web development as a whole might not be a bad idea. Any takers?
cPanel Tutorial
If you have a Web host that gives you cPanel as part of your Web hosting package (many hosts do — go to yourdomain.com/cpanel and see if it loads something), you’ve got a great site control panel at your disposal. I use cPanel on all my servers, and while I’m fairly good at it, I know there are many folks out there who are a bit afraid of it. There’s help out there….
Is There A Zombie In The Vatican?
Apparently the Vatican has emerged as a source of spam traffic. Not intentionally, I’m sure, but there is probably a zombied computer somewhere in the Vatican that is sending out spam (and according to one study, 80% of all spam comes from zombie computers). So if people would just run their computers effectively — patch often, run a firewall, run antivirus software, use Firefox instead of MSIE, scan for spyware regularly — I’m sure the world would have far less of a spam problem (wishful thinking, I know).
And before I hear it, yes, they could buy a Mac or use a Linux machine and not have these problem. But realistically, that’s not going to happen for most people, and I think we all know that.
I could also see this being a new Mac commercial: “Devine intervention is still not going to help your PC stay clean.”
AMD to Buy ATI For A Buttload of Money
I didn’t see this one coming. Subsequently, there are rumors that Intel is going to take away ATI’s license to make chipsets for Intel processors. There are some good thoughts here on what this means for the computer enthusiast.
The processor wars are really heating up as AMD slashes prices as Intels new chips are coming in faster and cheaper than AMD’s.
Still, folks aren’t sure how AMD is going to pay for this deal.
And if you didn’t understand a word of any of this, this really probably doesn’t affect you.
I Love FixYourOwnPrinter.com
If you’ve never been over to FixYourOwnPrinter.com, you’ve missed out. On more than one occasion, I’ve had an issue with one of the laser printers here at the office that was beyond a simple clean up or paper jam fix. But a quick trip to their forums has almost always netted me a solution, and their repair kits (which I’ve bought this and this before) were tremendously helpful.
So why bother doing all this myself? Because I work in Sunriver where the nearest printer repair places are in Bend and on-site service to Sunriver usually costs a minimum of $75 plus labor for repair. The couple times I’ve had printer guys come out to Sunriver, they’ve usually been stumped and had to go order parts. So why not just order the parts from them ahead of time and do it myself for a ton cheaper? Yeah, their parts are a bit expensive and the instructional videos are a bit cheesy, but they work. I just spent a couple hours and $30 (for parts) dismantling a Xerox Phaser 860DP to replace the internal heat lamps for the thing that I would’ve probably have cost me $200+ to have somebody come and do it (plus parts) . It was a stupidly complicated printer to take apart, but it got done (probably would’ve got done quicker had I not tried to take apart the wrong clutch, but that was my fault), and the stuff from FixYourOwnPrinter.com only took two days to get here.