Look, I don't like to bag on Comcast, but heck this is about the dumbest name ever. If you are going to have infinity in your name, you can't be going around yelling about limiting bandwidth hogs! OK Comcast?

Perhaps they are just referring to the ability for their monthly bill to become infinitely large? Or maybe they want to describe how long you need to wait at home, while missing, work for one of their repair techs to show up? 

I don't get the rebranding at all. I'm pissed that some of my monthly payments was actually used to pay some marketing jock to come up with this horrid idea. Pants on the ground Comcast! 

I Just finished watching the Apple announcement online via live.twit.tv (Over 114,000 viewers!). The biggest piece of information is probably the price point. It is much lower at $499 that I thought it would be. Additionally the $14.99 250mb/month and the $29.99 unlimited price points for data plans with AT&T are lower than I expected as well.

I think all of the so called "ebook" readers out there (Kindle etc...) are in serious trouble. The fact that the iBook store exists is huge. I'm not a big fan of Apple's closed attitude towards their hardware and software, but having the iTunes/iPhone/iBook eco system is very user friendly. Its something that perhaps only Google, at this point, could ever compete with. Certainly Microsoft doesn't have anything close to this as far as content and ease of use.

As an Ubuntu user, I enjoy the easy to use repository of free applications that are available to me without any hassle. iPhone and now iPad users enjoy a similar easy of use to get to applications (those poor Apple fans have to actually pay for a ton of their apps though!). What does Microsoft have? Nothing. They have a huge number of apps, but they are horribly smushed across the Internet in an unrelated uncaring mishmosh. With no useful easy to use eco-system. Microsoft just doesn't have a chance.

So I've been working on getting all the Mac Workstations setup to use ARD at the college that I work for. I ran ARD on our Xserve to search for and capture all the Macs in one of our labs. But since then I haven't been able to remote into the Xserve. I keep on getting the following error.

An administration application is currently running on this computer and will not allow you to remotely control the screen

Well that stinks! Now I have to go way up to the computer room and see what is going on. Or do I? Heck no! I figured that the "administration application" that was currently running must have been ARD. So I can just kill it from the command line. So I ssh'd into the server and ran:

ps aux |grep Remote

That lists anything running with the word Remote in it. ARD is listed as "Remote Desktop". So I copied its PID number and ran:

kill -9 [PID of Remote Desktop]

Then I could once again remote control the Xserve from my desktop. However I wanted to make sure I wouldn't have to go through this all again. So I started poking through the preferences of ARD. Under "Security" I found a check box called "Allow control of this computer when this application is running". I checked it and now I can remote into the Xserve just fine again.

I love ssh!

In other news, the earth is round. Consumerist reports that Best Buy is up to their usual dasterdly tricks. They advertise an inexpensive computer. Then when you go to purchase that computer they only have ones that have been "optimized" by the Geek Squad for $39.99 more than the advertised price.

This is shameful and it should be illegal. Not only because they don't seem to be able to sell an item for the advertised price, but because their optimization service is a monumental joke. At best it will remove a few icons from the desktop (but not the actual crap programs that they point to... Like AOL, Symantec Virus Protection, etc...). At worst, they will lose parts for the PC like power cords or actually make it run slower! Good Lord people!

This just in! Consumerist Reports that Best Buy's Mac Optimisation Service Also Sucks!

How do you avoid this problem? NEVER EVER SHOP AT BEST BUY! Unless you are getting a price on something that makes you feel like you are ripping them off (hardly ever) just run away from that horrid place. There are plenty of other places to buy great computers from. Namely, I would look at Amazon, Newegg, HP, Dell, ASUS, and... well ANY other place.

Microsoft and Fox cooked up a sponsorship of Seth and Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show. Seth and Alex of Family Guy fame. Not exactly your "this sitcom rated for corporations" kind of duo right? I guess South Park wasn't available? Well I guess after seeing a rehearsal of the cutting edge comedy they dropped the sponsorship like virus infected Vista PC and ran back to Seattle.

Microsoft isn't cool enough to pull that off anyways. Especially after seeing horrid stuff like the "Windows 7 Party" video. Microsoft couldn't have pulled off sponsoring reruns of "The Golden Girls" (R.I.P. Bea!). Balmer is not "Steve Jobs" cool. Balmer is a goofball who reminds me of a junior high school gym teacher. I'm sure he's a perfectly find person. He just doesn't seem like a leader or a visionsary type of guy to me. Gates didn't seem to be much of a leader to me either, but he sure had the visionary/schemer thing down. The execution of his visions made lots of money, but never inspired the rabbid loyalty or fandom of the users of his technology.

Ah Drupal! How I think you are the most awesome! Well the White House thinks so too! As of October 25th, 2009 http://whitehouse.gov is now Drupalized!

Geocities is dead. I don't miss it at all. I avoided Geocities like the plague like MySpace. The clashing colors, the blinking and scrolling text, the chance that some horrid  tune would start playing, and worst of all, finding a site that hadn't been updated since the 90's made me want to claw my eyes out. Just like MySpace does.

There are so many ways for someone to "be on the Internet" and at the same time prove that they are completely ignorant of technology. Its like Yahoo bought Geocities just to laugh at all the users' sites created there. I hope it was worth it Yahoo! Now we can cross out having a Geocities site as one of the havens for the technologically ignorant. Don't worry! All you lost Geocities luddites! MySpace is still around, at least for now. Sign up quickly so you can update your "Internet presense" with more vommit inducing colors and ear piercing music. It will take some getting used to. But I'm sure you can handle moving from 1998 to 2003 technology. 

Wow! This nasty virus I have is really making me grumpy. 

I purchased a Macbook Pro about 6 weeks ago. Its been great for the most part. Rather than immediately putting Kubuntu on it, I've been forcing myself to learn OSX. I like it, but its not all that much different than my Linux user experience has been. In fact, when it comes to USB audio devices, its been worse. Linux was 100% plug and play for all of my audio devices. Two of which are my Belkin TuneStudio and my SoundBlaster Extigy. I use the TuneStudio  to record podcasts on Skype. It works awesome! Just plug in your iPod and you have a very reliable, simple, almost pro quality device for recording with your computer. The Extigy is just a play awesome usb device. Even though its old it just rocks. Lots of digital options and very high quality sound.

On my Macbook, the TuneStudio worked, but the Extigy didn't. I tried one fix found at this thread on the Apple Support forums. Basically you replace the AppleUSBAudio.kext file with an older version. But it didn't seem to work and, in fact, made the problem worse because now both the TuneStudio and the Extigy didn't work. I kept looking and found a related post that also replaces the IOAudioFamily.kext file as well. Once I did that everything worked. I didn't even need a reboot. Here are the steps that I took.

One of the sites that I run (http://lordsoftyr.com) has been getting hammered lately. It was a real mess. I use Dreamhost to host all of my sites. They were good price wise and their support wiki and their techn support are really great. My site was taking up 90% of the shared server resources that I was on. Drupal was dying on about 70% of all the pages because the server just could not keep up. I had already slowed down the search engines with robots.txt and by telling google to crawl at the slowest possible speed. But none of that helped. It was time to move to a virtual server.

Dreamhost's PS server is priced based on memory usage. So it is vital to keep your usage at the minimum possible level. Drupal has some built in caching, but it is only really useful for anonymous users and even then, its still hitting the database for stuff. I decided to check out some of the caching modules available for Drupal. There are a number of modules, but none of them seemed as read for production usage as cachestatic-6.x-1.2-beta1. It requires some changes to your .htaccess file in the mod_rewrite section. Simple stuff reallly. Dreamhost has a monitoring page for your private server (PS). The first week they let you use all the memory you want so you can "right size" your server memory usage. I let the server run until the afternoon and then installed Cache Static. I pretty much just took all the defaults for this module.

Is the US CIO scamming us? Check it out over at Dvorak Uncensored.  From the sounds of it, with the right contacts I could have had the US CIO job! At least I have 15 years of actual IT experience. Yes I was an art major in College, but IT is one of those industries where a computer degree of some kind doesn't really mean much. I vividly remember helping all the so called "computer majors" at my college who had to ask me, a computer tech in the lab, how to format disks and save their files.