Frozen Light at the State Fair

For the 2nd year in a row I tried my hand at taking long-exposure images of the carnival rides at the Kansas State Fair.

Though the rides were mostly the same as last year, I was able to get quite a number of photos that are quite different from the year before.

As last year, …

I was interesting in evaluating MarkSpace’s SyncTogether program as a potential solution for keeping 2 Mac OS X address books, owned by two different users, in sync.

Well, right off the bat I ran into problems. Immediately upon launching the program I received this error:

An SSL certificate for mike@terrapin-pro could not be generated.

Contacting customer …

Two things that I found useful this weekend when working on my Ubuntu Linux system. There are a lot of good Linux distributions to choose from; we use Debian at work, so Debian-based Ubuntu is a logical choice for home usage.

Disable Desktop Effects

If you turn on Desktop Effects and your hardware doesn’t …

There was a minor kerfuffle on the intertubes earlier this week as Digg tried unsuccessfully to limit links to web sites that contained a 16-digit hexadecimal number that is part of the built-in copy protection system used in HD-DVD players. The reason Digg undertook to limit these links is because the …

For some time I’ve been wanting to upgrade the firmware (built-in software that controls most modern electronic devices) in my wireless router. I use a Linksys WRT54G, which is a typical wireless router that acts as a wireless access point, 4-port hub and internet router, all in one small package.

To some degree the reason …

I’ve been experimenting with a variety of virtual machines running under VMware’s Server product, and hosted on my home linux computer. Along the way I’ve run into a number of fairly standard issues, which I resolved fairly quickly. Then were a few issues that were tricky enough to resolve that I decided to note them for future reference.

VMware Console Startup

One of the first problems I encountered was that my VMware installation had a problem starting correctly after each reboot. It prompted me to rerun the configuration script, vmware-config.pl, every time I started the server console. Obviously not a good long term plan, and after a bit of research I came up with the solution, described at Jeremy Coates site.

I’ve put a copy of the steps in the extended entry area, just in case the primary site goes offline. In addition to the steps noted above, I found it necessary to add the following line to my rc.local file:
rm /etc/vmware/not_configured

Starting a Stored Image

One of my experiments is to compare the speed of actual machines versus their virtual counterparts. I do that by creating a Norton Save and Restore image on the original computer, and then restore that image to a virtual machine under VMware Server.

One of the restored images booted part way and then halted with a STOP error, similar to this:

*** STOP: 0×0000007B (0xF9DA0528, 0xC0000034, 0×00000000, 0×00000000)”

The fix turned out to be fairly straightforward. One simply needs to set “scsi0.present” to “FALSE” in the appropriate VMware config file:

/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/*.vmx”

The original tip came from the VMTN site; search for SCSI on that page.

Solaris Networking Config

Over the years I’ve had ample opportunity to hone my HP-UX sys admin skills, but have only ever seen or touched a Sun computer running Solaris maybe once or twice in my whole life. Sun has a very solid reputation and with the advent of their free X86 port of Solaris, and a virtual machine environment where it’s easy to setup new machines, I couldn’t resist satisfying my curiousity. I downloaded and installed Solaris 10 with no problems, but the auto config of my network didn’t work. I quickly found exactly the right recipe to get on the air at this cuddletech site.

I’ve copied key segments of the aforementioned code/instructions in the extended entry area in case the source sites become unavailable.

I spend a fair amount of time and money working to do all I can to preserve my large and rapidly growing image collection. How large and how fast? 4 years ago, when I first established an online image archive, I had 20 gigabytes worth of images. I currently have almost 140GB. …