Feb 26
Ladies and Gentlemen, my personal favourite viral video of all time, Tarzan Rubberband!
After googling long and hard for a better quality version of the Tarzan Rubberband video, I’m very sad to find that the website of the artists, Jew B. & Milky Whyte, is no longer. However, you can still buy the album in MP3 format from Amazon! Click here to buy it!
Feb 25
I’ve recently moved this blog to a virtual server hosted on Rackspace. Many things impress me about Rackspace, but the one thing I’m really excited about right now is the backup system. On our old managed shared hosting, HostGator, the few times we messed something up and needed to restore a full backup, we had to pay US$15 for the privilege. Now on Rackspace, I can do the same thing with a just a few clicks! Now whenever I update WordPress (for example), I make a manual backup through the rackspace management panel before proceeding, just in case I break something!
It’s this easy:
3 clicks to the backup settings
Now it’s just a matter of specifying a name for the backup, and clicking Save Backup.
Make a manual Backup
While the backup is running, you’ll see an icon of a camera with a little grey clock overlay. When the backup is complete, the clock turns green. On my 10GB VM, this took less than a minute.
Backup in Progress
Once the backup is ready, restoring it is just as easy. Just select the backup you want to restore and click Restore Selected.
Restoring a Backup
Absolutely no sweat! Thankyou Rackspace! The official Rackspace Blog also discusses a WordPress plugin for backing up WordPress files and database to storage on EC2. That’s something I’ll have to try out next! After all, this is Serious Business.
Feb 25
The results are in for StreetGeek Viral 2009!
StreetGeek Crotch Party by M took out 3rd place
Read Between the Blocks by Snax took out 2nd place
My Definition of a Good LAN Party by DrFrag took out 1st place
Why would you want to add a uBuntu client to a Windows Active Directory Domain? I got to this point because I was unable to resolve by uBuntu servers by name.
ping beans Ping request could not find host beans. Please check the name and try again.
Well, I never completely solved this problem, but I did work around it by adding my uBuntu servers to my domain. Then, although I still cannot resolve beans, I can now ping beans.mydomain.internal. And, it was really easy to do with a neat piece of OSS called Likewise Open.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install likewise-open sudo domainjoin-cli join mydomain.internal Administrator sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start
Where mydomain.internal is the domain you want to add the computer too, and Administrator is the user who has the rights to add a computer to the domain.
I rebooted at this point, but I’m told it’s not necessary to do so.
H:\>ping beans.mydomain.internal Pinging beans.mydomain.internal [192.168.0.30] Reply from 192.168.0.30: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.0.30: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.0.30: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.0.30: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
It works!
