I’ve been dieting for nearly a month now, but I’m not talking about the Medifast diet, rather the media fast as recommended by the The Four Hour Work Week
Coyote Blue is a good read. Moore again takes established mythology and challenges what we “know” about said myths, this time interweaving Egyptian and Native American gods. The main supernatural focus of the book is the Indian god Coyote, the trickster. Moore sets him up as a guy you love to hate from the get-go. The other main and supporting characters are largely likeable and memorable, despite their character flaws. I particularly liked “M.F.” (guaranteed not to stand for what you think it stands for) and am looking forward to seeing him in Moore’s other books
While this book won’t go down as one of my favorites, I definitely recommend it as a great way to get a few hours of solitary entertainment
ECFiber Finds Underwriter
It was announced this evening at the regular ECFiber governing board meeting that the group, representing 23 towns in east central Vermont with an aim to build a municipal fiber-to-the-home network, is in negotiations with Oppenheimer & Company, Inc. to underwrite an $80M investment to create the network. Sovereign Bank has been hired as a financial advisor on the deal, and Greenberg and Traurig, LLP has been chosen as financial counsel to ECFiber and its member towns.
Fixing Active Directory Replication/FSMO Transfer issues
For several weeks, we’ve had some odd behavior at our internal network here at Paradigm. In typical shoemaker fashion, I have not looked at this issue because we’ve been busy taking care of client issues instead, but I finally decided I’d had enough and today was the day.
One of our domain controllers has been acting up. It would fail to process logons sometimes, not give us the right logon scripts, fail to allow joining to a domain, not deploy software, etc. – very annoying.
Since the first controller was acting up, I decided I would simply strip all of its functions and transfer them to the second one, which was fine, except that it was down to 200MB of free disk space and, as a result, still didn’t have Service Pack 2 installed. (Are you starting to see why I was putting this off?) A new virtual disk and a quick application of partedmagic fixed this issue, so I was able to resume working on the actual problem.
I followed the standard procedure to trasfer the FSMO roles from Microsoft, and everything went well until I tried to transfer the RID Operations Master role. This failed because the current RID master could not be found!
Fortunately, a little Googling revealed this article, which suspected the issue was related to the AD replicas being out of sync – something I had personally observed. I followed the steps and within moments, the AD replicas were again in sync and I was able to transfer all roles from the old server to the new.
Are spam magnet addresses worth it?
It’s a common practice to maintain email addresses such as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc., addresses for Internet email domains. The theory is that these provide a generic address which can be used to contact a company if the sender doesn’t have a specific address to use.
The problem is that these addresses are what I refer to as “spam magnets.” These, as well as emails which are [email protected], are likely targets for automated spam generators and, in my experience, in excess of 95% of the messages sent to these addresses are junk. Despite using a variety of spam filters, including SpamAssassin, GFI MailEssentials, or GMail‘s, Outlook‘s, or Thunderbird‘s built in junk email filters, they still get swamped.
At the domains I control, we are removing these addresses altogether, and replacing them with “less guessable” replacements (like [email protected], or [email protected]) to make them a little less obvious. Overnight, the difference is noticeable.
What’s your opinion? Is there any value in maintaining these addresses anymore? Do people still blindly send email to these addresses, or has their usefulness fallen by the wayside?
Moving Grub from the MBR to the Install Partition
I realize this is nothing new to experienced Linux users, but I figured I’d document the process I used to move GRUB from the master boot record (MBR) of my notebook’s hard drive to the partition where I had Linux installed. I got the steps straight out of the Ubuntu forums as a result of a Google search for “move grub mbr.” The reason I am moving it is because, as I write this, I am using TrueCrypt to encrypt my entire Windows partition. To be able to boot Linux, I needed to move GRUB to make room for the TrueCrypt boot loader, since the MBR ain’t big enough for the both of them!
So, the process was:
- Identify the partition in which Linux is installed.
mount
Look for the/partition, which, in my case, is/dev/sda2(as/dev/sda1is where Windows lives on this machine). sudo grub-install /dev/sda2
Voila! GRUB now lives in/dev/sda2(as well as in the MBR).
Of course, there’s no real way to verify that this will work until you overwrite the MBR with something else, as GRUB still lives in the MBR, so effectively nothing has changed. In my case, I installed the TrueCrypt boot loader in the MBR. I then booted and selected my Linux partition from the TrueCrypt boot loader, which brought up my friendly GRUB boot menu! Now assured that things were working and that I could get back into Linux, even if I somehow hosed my Windows partition, I continued on with encrypting the entire partition.
Christopher Moore's "Practical Demonkeeping"
I just read Christopher Moore’s book, “Practical Demonkeeping
Medifast – Steady as She Goes
I’ve been sticking with the Medifast plan since June 13. As of today, I’m down about seven pounds. It’s been surprisingly easy, and the toughest part has been the hour just before dinner, when I’ve been very hungry and concerned that there wouldn’t be enough food to satisfy me. Fortunately, this is not the case, and I have not once gone to bed hungry. Continue reading “Medifast – Steady as She Goes”
(Medi)Fasting – Day 3
My wife started a new diet a couple of weeks ago. I decided that weight loss was something I too was interested in, so I started it too. We are doing the Medifast plan, a diet that consists of a lot of pre-packaged foods (shakes, soups, etc.) with minimal preparation required. Continue reading “(Medi)Fasting – Day 3”
Stop Stealing My Focus!
A few weeks ago, my friend Dave Yates announced in his podcast how he accidentally typed his IRC password into the chat room that he was in. I can easily see how this could happen, while someone was trying to identify themselves to the server. To prevent this, he could have taken a couple of steps to ensure that he was not typing into an active chat window, so that even if he had made the same typo, his password would not be exposed. Alternately, just being careful might have prevented this.
Then again, it might not have… Continue reading “Stop Stealing My Focus!”
Installing Ubuntu Netbook Interface
I decided to give the (recently much-ballyhooed) Ubuntu Netbook Remix a try on one of my virtual machines. Here are the steps I followed to get it installed:
sudo su
cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-team/ubuntu hardy main
Ctrl-C
apt-get update
apt-get install go-home-applet window-picker-applet maximus human-netbook-theme \ ume-launcher
Once installed, I logged off, then logged back in and wham! I was in the new interface. Except, I wanted to see what it would look like on a small screen. I changed my resolution to 800×480, and it fits great, but the fonts did not scale accordingly, so they were unreadable.
I figured the quick fix might be to uninstall the packages I added, set my resolution to 800×480, then install them, because presumably it would detect and choose the correct font size then.
That didn’t work so well. I was able to remove and re-install the packages, but now the new interface won’t come up, and all I have is a little GNOME desktop.