David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’ve been moving files between Linux servers, and to and from Windows boxes, as part of my server migration. I started to write about how I’ve been doing it, but it seemed oddly familiar.
Yep, I’ve written about SCP and its Windows port, PSCP, before. Do this long enough and you find yourself repeating yourself.
So you’re downloading a large ISO image like a Linux distribution, or Windows with an integrated service pack. You get the download going, then go to work, and come home expecting to find a it waiting for you, only to find your computer went to sleep after just an hour. It makes your day, doesn’t it?
A free, portable program called Coffee–I guess it’s named that way because it keeps Windows from going to sleep–can fix that for you without you having to diddle with power settings and then having to remember to change them back.
There is some unfortunate misinformation circulating on various train forums. I first read this misinformation in the outstanding book by Peter Riddle, Trains from Grandfather’s Attic, published in 1991. As Classic Toy Trains editor Bob Keller noted while we were finishing up my article late last year, incorrect information in print lasts a long time. A very long time, sometimes. Lionel 1121 switches and Marx trains are rumored to get along famously. I am sad to report they do not.
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Another question from the big bag ‘o search queries: When you’re shopping for an SSD, is TRIM better than Native Command Queuing?
It’s an interesting question, and my first inclination is to say no, because TRIM and NCQ solve two similar but distinctly different problems. But the more I think about it, the more I understand why it’s possible to confuse the two.
Blogging pioneer John Dominik, inspired by my Michelangelo memories, wrote about his memories of viruses later in the decade. So now I’ll take inspiration of him and share my memories of some of those viruses. I searched my archives, and at the time it was going on, I didn’t write a lot. I was tired and angry, as you can tell from the terse posts I did write.
My new server is up and running, and let me tell you, it’s spectacular.
And if you’re reading this on 6 March 2012, you’re probably wondering what I’m talking about, because everything looks just as slow as usual. That’s because the new server is still behind my firewall because I’m struggling to get my content all moved to it.
Here’s a nifty-looking program: Firefox Addon Maker, which allows you to create customized Firefox installer packages.
This is helpful if you install Firefox a lot, whether in corporate or home settings.
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I got my new 64-bit web server up and running today. Now the main task that remains is to get my data moved over to it. I talked myself into going with an Apache setup, since one program I want to run (Webtrees) is designed for Apache and its search engine optimization seems to work better under Apache than Nginx. It’s fast anyway; displaying the 17-person family of Andrew Davis McQueen of Leesville, Mo., briefly consumes 2% of the available CPU time in Webtrees with the APC PHP cache installed and enabled. And that should get better, seeing as newer, faster, better versions of both Apache and PHP were released in the last month.
As I built my new 64-bit web server, I messed up MySQL a couple of times. When you break MySQL beyond repair, here’s how to start over with a fresh MySQL install and a fresh /var/lib/mysql without doing a Windows-like reformat and reinstall of the entire operating system:
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Bill Gates says the rapid advance of computers created unreasonable expectations for the advancement of energy technology. The argument makes sense. And while desktop computers did advance very quickly, I think people have a misconception of even how quickly computers developed–which makes it worse, of course. Some people seem to believe the computer was invented by IBM and Microsoft in 1981. Far be it from Gates to lead people to believe otherwise, but the direct ancestors of modern desktop computing date to the early 1970s, and the groundwork for even that dates to the 1940s, at the very latest.
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I saw a question earlier this week about working with Lionel tubular track. It doesn’t snap together quite as easily as modern Fastrack does, but it’s a lot cheaper, especially if you already have a bunch of it on hand.
I probably have 100 linear feet of tubular O27 track (Lionel, Marx, and K-Line) on my layout, so I’ll give some tips for working with it.