Over the weekend, VaServ and its subsidiary companies were hacked, resulting in many machines losing data.  Lots of clients were left with virtual servers that had been completely wiped.  Many of those folks were also lacking working backups… myself included, for this particular machine.
Wondering how to proceed, I began searching Google and other engines for [...]

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Walking to lunch today, I passed this dummy on Mount Vernon Avenue in Alexandria.  Later, I heard that the bailout bill finally passed.  How appropriate.

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Sometime last year, Microsoft released an ad campaign with fake newspaper headlines from a periodical called the “The Highly Reliable Times”.  With today’s news about the London Stock Exchange having a 7 hour outage I had to think back and laugh.
Exhibit A:

“London Stock Exchange Chooses Windows over Linux for Reliability”
Exhibit B:

‘Doh!
Here’s the Reuters story, and [...]

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Whether on call or on site, the system administrator can always use another way to care for his or her systems.  With the emergence of the App Store and its multitude of available tools, it’s now possible to get some productivity boosting admin-fu on your phone, without breaking that pesky EULA and jailbreaking your kit.
Here, [...]

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After searching a bit for a worthwhile flash MP3 player suitable for a large collection, I finally came across something that works well. The problem with most of the freely available players is that most require a playlist to be created in XML or .pls format beforehand. That’s not what I wanted. [...]

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I switched back to my ISP’s nameservers after getting fed up with OpenDNS. I love the idea of OpenDNS and thought I would like the service a lot. Turns out that it ended up pissing me off far more than any generic service, but that rant is for another post. One thing [...]

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Two weeks ago, a good friend and I were chatting about what features would make life easier in our day to day jobs of web design and system administration.  Among what we discussed was the ability to edit remote files in VIM without having to open a remote shell to the system in question.  We [...]

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I was heading over to IMDB to check out the listing for This Film Is Not Yet Rated when I spied an advertisement for anti-wrinkle cream.  The first frame was a very old, very, very wrinkled lady.  I had an idea of what was coming next, but didn’t want to believe it.

Bravely, I rolled over [...]

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Slashdot posted “A Walk Through the Hard Drive Recovery Process” today.  It was essentially an advertisement for the data recovery service used in the article with little to no real information.  This is typically known as a slashvertisement to those familiar with Slashdot.
Hidden in the comments, however, was a gem — a link to Defcon [...]

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I had a lot of fun with Linux Multi Media System.  As far as I have been able to find, it’s the closest thing to Fruity Loops that I’ve been able to find for linux.  It doesn’t take a whole lot of learning and is just an apt-get away on Ubuntu.
Here’s a little tune I [...]

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