First, a bit of history. Cable TV started in the 1970s when TV consumers just outside the range of commercial Over The Air (OTA) broadcasts banded together to create community “Cable” TV systems. An antenna was posted at a high spot on a mountain and pulled in signals that were out of range for households, […]

Recently picked up a “Phillytablet” from the local newspaper publishing group, Philly Media Network (PMN), publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and a few other smaller news publications.

Read on to view my review of the actual hardware (The Arnova/Archos 10 G2 Tablet) and of the Philly Media Network applications that you are subscribed to.

Doing some integration work with WHMCS, I found the need to export some of the announcements into Wordpress. Since there isn’t any native implementation of this, I found the best way is to export it directly from the database. The PHP code to do this is fairly easy…

The dirty little secret about SSL certificates is that:

The tools to become a certificate authority, and therefore to publish your own SSL certificates, is included in a wide variety of systems – chances are if you have an Ubuntu or CentOS install you already have the capability of becoming an SSL certificate authority via OpenSSL.

Fellow tech friends, I have a find for you. If you have a job, or hobby, or whatever where you find yourself meddling with a bunch of .iso files, whether to boot off of them or just to access the data on them, then I have the device for you. It all started after I […]

At home I have an (admittedly small) ZFS array set up to experiment with this neat newish raid technology. I think it has been around long enough that it can be used in production, but I’m still getting used to the little bugs/features, and here is one that I just found.

After figuring out that I had 2 out of 3 of my 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives fail, I had to give the array up for a loss and test out my backup strategy. Fortunately it worked and there was no data loss. After receiving the replacement drives in from RMA, I rebuilt the ZFS array (using raidz again) and went along my merry way. After 6 months or so, I started getting some funky results from my other drive. Thinking it might have some issue as with the others, I removed the drive and ran Seatools on it (by the way, Seatools doesn’t offer a 64-bit Windows version – what year is this?).

The drive didn’t show any signs of failure, so I decided to wipe it and add it back into the array to see what happens. That, of course, is easier said than done.

The hald – Hardware Access Layer Daemon – runs several processes in order to keep track of what hardware is installed on your system. This includes polling USB Drives and ‘hot-swap’ devices to check for changes along with a host of other tasks. You might see it running on your system as follows: 2474 ? […]

The Boxee platform had so much promise. Since releasing the Boxee Box in November 2010, Boxee has absolutely abandoned the PC users who brought the platform to prominence. Having waited since November for Boxee 1.0, PC Boxee users (including me) are now in open revolt.  I've been a huge proponent of the platform since the Alpha in October of 2008. […]

I’ve been busy lately on a number of projects, one of which is a programming class I am currently taking. The class itself is interesting, we are learning about the different types of programming languages. For our latest project, we were tasked with writing a simple program in Pascal. Pascal isn’t used too much any […]

I keep various VPSes across the globe for research purposes. One of those locations is in Egypt. So what happens when I do a normal traceroute? [root@vps01-eg ~]# tracert google.com traceroute to google.com (74.125.230.81), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1  host-x.com.eg (196.x.x.x)  0.033 ms  0.024 ms  0.017 ms  2  host-x.com.eg (196.x.x.x)  0.780 ms  0.883 ms  […]