etbe

I just read an interesting post about proposed new laws in the US prohibiting exposing underpants [1]. This is not a new thing and is part of a debate that has been taking place in many countries since the trend of “hip hop” saggy pants.
The first thing that occurs to me is to wonder [...]

Someone asked on a mailing list about the issues related to whether to use a label, UUID, or device name for /etc/fstab.
The first thing to consider is where the names come from. The UUID is assigned automatically by mkfs or mkswap, so you have to discover it after the filesystem or swap space has [...]

Below is a strange Google advert that appeared on my blog. It appeared when I did a search on my blog, it also appears on my post about perpetual motion. It seems quite strange that they are advertising their product as a scam. It’s accurate, but I can’t imagine it helping sales.

Share [...]

I recently joined the community based around the TED conference [1]. The TED conference is expensive ($6000US) and has a long waiting list (the 2009 conference is sold out) so it seems quite unlikely that I will ever attend one. But signing up to the web site is easy and might offer some [...]

Colin Charles writes about a woman who is selling advertising space on herself [1]. Like Colin I haven’t bought a t-shirt in about 9 years (apart from some Cafepress ones I designed myself). So it seems that the price for getting some significant advertising at a computer conference is to buy a few [...]

Over the last week I have received five phone calls from Wyndham Resorts asking if I would like to be surveyed. Every time I tell them that I am not going to do their survey, on all but one call I had to repeatedly state that I would not do the survey for more [...]

I’ve just joined SAGE AU - the System Administrators Guild of Australia [1] .
I’ve known about SAGE for a long time, in 2006 I presented a paper at their conference [2] (here is the paper [3] - there are still some outstanding issues from that one, I’ll have to revisit it).
They have been doing good [...]

A few of my clients have asked me to configure their routers to block access to Facebook and Myspace. Apparently some employees spend inappropriate amounts of time using those services while at work. Using iptables to block port 80 and configuring Squid to reject access to those sites is easy to do.
So I [...]

Recently I’ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having one item mysteriously fail is something that happens periodically, but having multiple items fail in a small amount of time is a concern.
One problem I’ve had is with CD-ROM drives. I keep a pile of known good CD-ROM drives because as they have [...]

Yesterday I received two new machines from DOLA on-line auctions [1]. I decided to use the first to replace the hardware for my SE Linux Play Machine [2]. The previous machine I had used for that purpose was a white-box 1.1GHz Celeron and I replaced it with an 800MHz Pentium3 system (which uses [...]