Mikes Thoughts

Its getting to be that time of the year again. People are booking rooms in San Francisco, packing up suitcases, perhaps traveling at the behest of their company. They’re seeking out news of the Penguin in the wonnerful city by the Bay. They may travel long or short distance and if they’re exhibitors their feet [...]

Linuxworld Expo in SF is just around the corner. Its time to go to the show for my requisite one day and see who’s left that I know that goes. Last year was the last time I arranged a lunch for some of the folks. I just got an idea that the time had come [...]

I am reading a article with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu about criticism regarding the release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I’ve thought about this for awhile after using 8.04 and being somewhat dismayed with how difficult it actually was to get Firefox 2 working with plugins after doing a Hardy Heron install. The plugin architecture appears [...]

I’ve blogged a few times about my habilis habits. A habilis (like homo habilis) is a tool-user. The originals lived some million years ago give or take a flaked-stone tool and were the earliest known hominid to make tools. A tool is either a subtractive or additive process. If you are making a flaked-stone projectile [...]

Some software out there (free, shareware, or commercial) just makes the difference; give you an edge, lets you communicate, see, or share. I’d like award a few companies or open source projects my first and only awards of Good Edge Software ™. So here goes:
VMware - what a novel concept! Boot one OS inside [...]

Baby steps. Its all about the size of the step. But the length of the leg may not relate to the step. I was talking with friends about my departure away from so many of the Linux and open source things I’ve done. It seems like with each job, I move further away from this [...]

Been looking at a few different snapshot based backup programs which either use rsync or something close. I don’t want or need some amanda or arkeia type thing. What I’ve settled on now are:
rsnapshot - this one does some real magic with creating incremental snapshots of data files and its quick. I like the configuration [...]

I happened to find the little Shuttle above on sale at NewEgg and grabbed it up. I’ve been playing around with NAS solutions for awhile and wanted to take one of these, put in a AMD64 5300+ chip, 4g of memory, and make it into something a bit more memorable. Lets face it; these things [...]

I started out with Linuxcare as the second real employee (if you go alphabetically). There were the three founders; Art, Dave, and Dave. Then there were Ed, Bryan, and I. We first worked out of our homes and had staff meetings at the VC offices. To say we were childlike, having fun, watching where Linux [...]

I found a bit of NAS happiness on the road recently. I could never get NASLite to actually work. Try as I might, installs would just not work so I reserve opinion on that one.  It must be cool; but i could not testify it. Next stop was FreeNAS. This is probably the best one [...]