Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

Oh, my blog, how I’ve abandoned you

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Dear Blog, I've been a very poor care taker of you. I post once a month, maybe; and, when I do, I post uninteresting stuff like the tale of my trip back to California. I don't, through you, even tell the story of my trip to Berlin, Belfast, or Wales, or ...

Boxee: An Interim Review

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Over the last few weeks, I have been trying out Boxee at my new place. I have it running on a few year old (but still perfectly good) Mac Mini, plugged into a slightly-better-than VGA projector and surround sound system. Pretty much the perfect little home theater. If you're unfamiliar with ...

Medical Records

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

One of the major elements I've heard in the health care reform debate was the need to optimize how medical records are kept and accessed. The chief complaint revolves having to coordinate data between multiple providers. If this is a major problem -- then I must say, there are some providers ...

The Exceptional Case

Monday, June 21st, 2010

As I'm getting my townhome ready to sell and gearing up for a big move, I'm struck by one thing: Americans, as a culture, prepare for, no, we expect the exceptional case. You see it all over the place. We choose larger homes, just in case we have kids or get ...

ZFS Update

Monday, June 14th, 2010

I've spent the last few days toying with ZFS on protego (FreeBSD 8); and I must say, I'm very happy! It's refreshing to have this degree of control over a logical block of storage (2x500GB drives). I used the ZFS Quick Start Guide to get started. I also cuddled up with ...

A Free Day

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

My morning routine on the weekend usually consists of: wake up, brew coffee, drink said coffee (possibly watch a little TV), then go about my day. Indeed, today followed this pattern -- that is, until I realized that I had nothing to do today1! That means it's time to play around ...

The exploding power supply, the fried motherboard, and how 2.6GHz became 3.5GHz (if only briefly)

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

This last few weeks have either been 1) a little spot of computer hell or 2) a comedy of errors. At this point, I'm not sure which. It all started with episkey, my main hosting server. For about 2 years, it had been colocated at Red Rocks Data Center (these guys ...

iPhones in Redmond

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The Wall Street Journal has a rather interesting article about iPhone usage by Microsoft employees. It's a good (if perhaps not a bit silly) read, but more importantly, I think it's another pointer at Microsoft's stunning self-delusion when it comes to producing consumer products. Take this quote (of a quote) for ...

An experiment

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I'm trying a technical experiment at home to maximize my computing "infrastructure." I have a great setup here: a mac mini (1.83GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB), a MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB), a FreeBSD server (1.4GHz Pentium 4, 1.2GB), and a Gigabit Network. One of the major challenges I ...

DIY Time Machine Server

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

The fine netatalk folks have done it again: added Time Machine support to their software! It even works! If you're looking to roll your own Time Machine server, and don't want to shell out for one of Apple's Time Capsules (say, if you want to integrate Time Machine into your existing ...