sigma.squared

A while back, I posted an article on building your own DIY webserver from scratch, using ClearOS.   ClearOS, is a fantastic distribution, but it does require some tweaking in order to run your favourite PHP based apps such as WordPress or Zen Gallery due to the default permissions structure. Read on to find out how to get these running like a charm.   This article assumes that you already have your ClearOS installation up and running, and have started up the Web Server and MySQL portions of ClearOS.

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Something you see more and more of nowadays are hard drive based set-top media players. While these players (such as A.C. Ryan’s PlayOn! HD) are excellent and garner rave reviews from users, they are relatively expensive in comparison to stand alone players. After borrowing a projector for a weekend, something sparked in me wanting an all-in-one solution to media. Armed with a few hundred rand and some time, I decided to embark on a quest to create my own. This article is the end result (or is it?) of that quest.

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Having been in the IT techie game for some time, I’ve lived through some pretty hairy formats where data has been forgotten, excluded or just plain ignored, all at the client’s expense. To this end, I’ve developed my own little formula over the years when it comes to doing this.

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So, after being really busy over the past year I’ve decided it’s due to time update the ol’ blog. In the business (busy-ness), I have since moved into a post requiring a vast amount more paperwork and organizational skills, to that end I required some kind of note taking system that was a tad more efficient than the exam-pad-per-month method I was employing.

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Well, I’ve been scarce for a while, mostly due to work.   Recently while on holiday I was reading up on a great little feature on Windows 7 for speeding up your initial boot time.   This is going to be as short and sweet as my boot time which is now 7 seconds…

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Situation: You have a bunch of VM’s on a Server 2008 R2 RC instance. The RC expires and dies a horrible death at the hands of the IT manager, who complains for more time than it takes to reinstall the server about someone actually loading an RC onto the server. You now have a working server, but an empty Hyper-V manager, zero snapshots and no config file backups. In the rush to reinstall, VM’s were not exported, but instead just had their VHD and AVHD files copied…

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Last week sometime, I got a notice from Poken Africa on their Facebook page saying something along the lines of ‘sign up to come and view the Gautrain’. I have been interested for a long while in seeing what the technological marvel of the Gautrain was all about, so I notified the lass and we signed up.

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Well, I am sitting here with my whiskey and reading blog posts, and I’ve decided that SSO (single sign-on) is definitely the way forward. I recently tried to comment on a friend’s blog (a brilliant post!) but on commenting was greeted with a “please register” message. This just ticks me off.

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So, I figure its high time for a non technical post. I commute via motorcycle on a 26km stretch of highway every day (N1 and M1, Johannesburg) and thought that I might post some of the wisdoms I’ve picked up during my 6 odd years of commuting. In South Africa, it is legal (please lets not argue the semantics of this on this post) to lanesplit between vehicles in traffic, meaning you ride in-between two lanes of cars. Here are my top 10 handy hints for doing so safely, in no particular order;

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There, I admitted it, but it does. I have not found general/business purpose hardware quite as high quality as Microsoft; this also coming from someone who 5 years ago considered the company name to be “the M word”. I have to admit as well, after seeing Windows 7, working on Windows 7 and being part of one of the first Windows 7 logo signed ISV’s, their software is just as good. Put the two together, and you have a winning combination.

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