posted by steve | Category: Uncategorized

I recently ordered a Raspberry Pi kit from Adafruit with the goal of making a motion detector.  However, after receiving it, I started to think about other uses for the board.  Specifically, I’d like to get asterisk with an external ATA to PSTN working (that’s a story for another day) and also get a firewall running on it.  Granted, this will end up being multiple Pis but for now it’s all more proof of concept. [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Linux & Open Source

Upgraded to Debian Wheezy last night.  Followed the official upgrade instructions.  Things went generally well and I’m amazed by how well major upgrades go with Debian.  Wheezy is the second major release for this particular server and it had an uptime of 476 days before today’s upgrade. A couple problems were noted, specifically with the upgrade of the mysql server and dovecot.  Both seem to have breaking changes.  For MySQL, the breaking change is that [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Random Rants

Before I started writing, I never spent much time reading a book’s Preface or other front matter, I just skipped right into the book and went from there.  After writing my share of books for a variety of skill levels, I find the Preface and other such introductory material to be of great importance.  The Preface can be used to tell the reader what skill level they need in order to read the book and [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Uncategorized

Installed Microsoft SkyDrive on OS X but stopped from starting automatically on boot. Then I lost it. Couldn’t find it. Turns out that the Skydrive.app stayed in the Downloads folder after install rather than going to the Applications folder. Moving it to Applications solved the riddle.

posted by steve | Category: Random Rants

This post is somewhat difficult to write. I’ve been involved in a few book revision projects over the past 10 years where I’ve picked up another author’s book and had to revise it for a new version of $widget or just to update it. When doing so, I notice that my writing approach is different than some authors. I can’t or won’t claim that my writing approach is better, in fact it may be worse, [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Microsoft & Closed Source | 1 Comment »

Attempting to add the DirectAccess role to a Windows Server 2012 domain controller today and kept receiving “There may be a version mismatch between this computer and the destination server or VHD”. I unchecked the Remote Access role and moved to the Features screen, went back to the Roles screen and checked Remote Access again and it worked. I think those are the steps. Some combination of back and forth in the Add Roles and [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

Lighting for bands and DJs has come a long way since the non-grounded 120V household switches with hot electricity running right below your fingertips. I’ve tested two lighting controllers and in the coming weeks and months I hope to post some reviews and primers on DMX lighting.

posted by steve | Category: Random Rants

I read some articles, which I won’t cite for lack of wanting to start a small war, that refer to HTML5 as a collection of technologies that describe how the new web works, in much the same way that the term Web 2.0 was used for years to describe a collection of technologies including AJAX to provide higher interactivity to web pages. In these specific articles, HTML5 was referred to as including HTML, CSS, and [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Useful Items That I Forget

Attempting to build a simple JavaScript application using Visual Studio 11 on the Windows 8 Developer Preview today and received the fun error “Unable to activate Windows Tailored application”.  I’m running the software using Virtualbox (4.1.8).  Turns out that my screen resolution wasn’t high enough in the virtual machine.  It needs to be at least 1024×768 and I had left it at the Virtualbox default of 800×600.  Changing the screen resolution and then attempting to [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Linux & Open Source

I was working on a patched Debian system recently using PHP functions feof and fread.  I went to run my test script and managed to auger Apache in while at the same time dumping over 1GB worth of errors into the Apache error log in a matter of minutes.  Over and over (over 5,000,000 entries, actually), with these errors: [Wed Dec 07 11:17:00 2011] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] PHP Warning: feof() expects parameter 1 to be [...Read more...]