Category Archives: Technology

What Every Website Owner Should Know About Copyright Trolls

This is important if you publish your own work, including CG and renders. Be wary of companies like Apple who want to sue every Tom, Dick and Harry.

What Every Website Owner Should Know About Copyright Trolls.

Corporate Linux

Virtualization madness

Had my first encounter of Linux, or specifically, a linux-like environment in a corporate environment. The IT peops were trying to setup an environment on Xenserver, and they had setup a storage space to copy a virtual machine image onto. But they kept running out of space. It took me a while to figure out what they were doing (wrong), though.

They were trying to copy onto the PV partition, and Xenserver had setup its environment to use LVM, so the PV partition was already allocated to the LVM system, and therefore had no space to copy onto.

After figuring out which LV was the one they wanted to use, I had problems mounting, with mount saying I had to specify the filesystem. After trying various switches with mount and specifying a filesystem (only NFS, ext, ext2 and ext3 were supported by Xenserver. No vfat, ntfs or btrfs. Admittedly, however, the Xenserver version the IT people were using was an older version), I soon found out that the IT people had created the storage space, but not done anything else. Therefore, that would explain why I couldn’t mount it — it hadn’t been formatted. So a simple mkfs.ext3 (remember ext4 wasn’t supported) on the block device in /dev/mapper/ meant I could mount it without specifying filesystem. scp’ing into the server and copying into the path proved it worked.

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LPIC-1

Linux Professional Institute

I’ve finished studying for the first of two exams for the LPIC-1 certification, and I have found some exam questions (about 600 of them), and have started to go through them.

The first thing that struck me about these questions is either I’ve not been studying all the topics, or some topics have been removed out of the exam. For example, some of the questions reference LILO, but according to the LPI page on the 101 exam, there’s no mention of LILO (but there is mention of Grub 2 and Grub Legacy). Then again LILO and Grub Legacy are quite limited by today’s standards, so it could be that they really are removed out of the exam. Guess I’ll have to take that chance.

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Mugger apologises to victim 30 years on after finding him on Facebook

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?

http://nypost.com/2013/11/30/mugger-apologizes-to-victim-35-years-later-after-chance-facebook-meeting/

Memory

Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.

In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva — none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.

I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.

Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.

Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.

So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D

Cause: Faulty 2GB memory

Dilbert comic strip for 11/28/2013 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

 

If you go blind from monitoring my internet activity, that’s not my fault. It’s yours for eavesdropping on my activity in the first place.

Dilbert comic strip for 11/28/2013 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive..

Striking Back Against Censorship

Paul Sieminski's avatarWordPress.com Blog

The mission of WordPress.com is to democratize publishing. We’re inspired every day by the ways creators use our platform to bring their voices to the world. Unfortunately, we also see many cases of censorship aimed at WordPress.com authors and users.

One area where we’ve seen a number of problems is the censoring of criticism through abuse of copyright law. Two recentcases of abuse really caught our attention and made us think that we needed to take action to fight back on behalf of our users and everyone who believes in the internet’s promise for free expression.

Censorship by DMCA

A common form of censorship by copyright stems from improper use of legal creations called DMCA takedown notices. The DMCA stands for the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” which is a US federal law that created a system for protecting copyrights online. The DMCA system works pretty well, but has a…

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