• personal,  sites

    Hike the Geek

    If you’re into the technical side of life and you’d like to get some excersize and you’re in Los Angeles then this site is for you: www.hikethegeek.com/LA. They organize outdoor excursions around the basin all the time, to places like Griffith Park, Topanga Canyon Park, Arroyo Seco and Switzer Falls. Good people, definitely worth a try.

  • personal,  sites,  Social Networking

    Microsoft Blogging

    Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a team of Microsoft employees. They operated in a black box, a silo of noncommunication. In order to learn what was in the new products they were developing you had to wait until they were released. There were no seeds, the prerelease software distributed to partners was codenamed with words like longhorn and the developers, if they spoke out of turn were publicly flogged with cat-o-nine-tails made of rusty old x86 hardware, known as flogware. But then something happened. Microsoft, to whatever degree, embraced a world of openness. The developers for various teams were suddenly encouraged to blog, speak…

  • sites

    Site Changes

    Made some changes to the site to hopefully make it run more optimally (both for visitors and for the poor server). Apologies for any downtime that may have occurred. Also made some minor layout changes. Hope they look OK (if you have any recommendations for changes let me know, I’m open to new ideas and not very graphically inclined myself)…

  • Business,  sites

    Google Outage

    When a large company loses email and other services the help desk is abuzz with calls.  But who do you call when an outsourced vendor goes down?  I’ve read a number of reports about the Google outage from a few days ago.  Having millions of users without service, or with deprecated service, is a lot of potential calls.  Just like tens of thousands in an enterprise is  lot when those users cannot access email.  In the reports I’ve read people were taking a very strong stance on the outage, not necessarily with Google directly, but identifying cloud support options across the board as having “no one to call.”  Really?  There’s…

  • Consulting,  Network Infrastructure,  sites,  Unix,  VMware

    S3 Command Line Part II

    Earlier we looked at using s3cmd to interact with the Amazon S3 storage cloud.  Now we’re going to delve into using Another S3 Bash Interface.  To get started, first download the scripts and then copy the hmac and s3 commands into the ec2 folder created in previous walkthroughs. To use the s3 script, you need to store your Amazon secret key in a text file and set two environment variables. The INSTALL file included with the package has all the details. The only tricky part I ran into, and from the comments on Amazon, other people ran into, is how to create the secret key text file. Now go into your…

  • Business,  Consulting,  Network Infrastructure,  sites,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Amazon S3 from the Command Line

    In a previous article we looked at how to upload Final Cut Server content to s3 using Jungle Disk.  We also looked at how to upload ec2 images to s3. But now we’re going to take a deeper dive into using s3 from the command line. There are a number of tools that have been developed by the community to leverage Amazon’s S3 Storage Service.  This isn’t as cut and dry as using ec2 due to the fact that the Amazon tools are written in Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python.  However, I’m a shell kinda’ guy to a large degree and I was able to find a couple of places where people have written…

  • Consulting,  Network Infrastructure,  sites,  Unix,  VMware

    Custom VMs using S3+EC2

    I’m obviously enjoying using Amazon for a number of testing applications (in addition to of course buying books and light bulbs from them, and not one showed up broken).  So far, I’ve done articles on getting started with Amazon ec2, using the command line with ec2, whitelisting an IP address, deploying ec2 en masse, and setting up a static IP for ec2.  But the S3 articles have been sparse.  So, now let’s look at using Amazon’s storage service (S3) from the command line.  Funny enough, if you’re going to upload your own custom Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) you’ll need to leverage S3. When you go to bundle an image, you will have a…

  • sites

    Pull Movies from YouTube

    There are tons of ways to download movies from YouTube, but this is likely the easiest I’ve seen yet:  http://keepvid.com/ Basically, open the site, paste in the URL from YouTube and then click on Download.  KeepVid will then ask you if you want to download the video in flv or mp4.  In this example click on mp4.  When it’s done downloading go ahead by default you’ll find it in your ~/Downloads directory called simply video.mp4.  From there, you can rename the file and move it into iTunes.  Once there it can synchronize to whatever device you enjoy watching videos on and enjoy offline!

  • Articles and Books,  personal,  sites

    https://krypted.com/ Shirts Now Online

    Maybe it’s too many years at Defcon, maybe it’s just trying to make shirts I would like to wear myself. Either way, https://krypted.com/ is now offering schwag. Not the free kind (I wish I could) though. So if you need to get your geek warez on head over to the shiny new Shirts tab of the site and check out what I’ve got to offer. This is the first batch. Time permitting the next batch will hopefully be online soon. Hope you like…

  • sites

    iPhone Skin

    A few months ago I noticed that a pretty hefty percentage of my visitors came from an iPhone. Looking at the site from an iPhone was pretty darn painful, so I added a skin (Plugin) to the site that is specific to users of mobile devices.  While I have slightly modified it for my own purposes (testing in the Simulator every step of the way), I must admit that I didn’t write it.  I’ve received a few comments about it so to give credit where it’s due, it’s the WPTouch Plugin from Brave New Code. It’s a really small Plugin, easy to install (drop into your plugins directory and then…