Just found this guy the other day. Use 'sudo !!' to run the last command as sudo. So when I am just typing away and get that permissions error, that's an easy way to rerun the command without hitting up and then correcting the line, or retyping it. It does echo the newly formed line before asking for a password.

Labor day weekend, woo! Like I don't play enough already

Drives back, gaming computer up!

Terabyte drive in, backing up servers!

Windows 7 rockin' and printer drivers a go!

2 drives out for RMA, 2/3 storage servers haven't crashed and dad's laptop functional again. Promisingly, the Dell I donated to my parents keeps on chugging. Next: reinstalling Windows Vista and then 7 on top of that so I can have printer drivers(apparently windows 7 doesn't have printer drivers built in but vista does. HPs website says to use the driver that comes with windows and does not offer a download, Brilliant!). Backing up data from storage servers, trying to retrieve data from Video RAID. Should i repair my laptop or not...? Convincing the Green Recursion to install and setup a music server on hardware that's been cobbled together :)

This has been a pretty bad week for me concerning technology and electronic devices at my household. First the RAID with videos/movies goes down, I get my 1TB drive a couple days too late to back it all up, WD Diagnostics now reports the TB drive has a faulty read head, then the RAID 5 in my main machine fails fantastically. My laptop has suffered video card wear and will only boot in VGA mode. So right now I'm enjoying a little music streaming in 640x480 goodness. At least my phone hasn't had any problems.

Of the 2 kinds of people that exist when it comes to data loss; there's those who haven't lost any data, and those who backup religiously.
Up until last night, I've never lost any significant data that I was aware of. Sure I had the odd floppy go bad. An old school assignment, CD-Rs that have been laying around forever with a *nix distro I'd never think to install because it's so old. Or maybe files in an old digital backup that I had forgotten about and no longer needed or had any interest in keeping.
Well, I lost the RAID on my Video server. 1 disk out of a 2 drive RAID 0 array. And all the data is gone. I noticed the share wasn't appearing as normal, and today I checked the software configuration and noted neither disk was showing up. A quick check in the BIOS confirmed the array was dead, and only 1 disk is appearing as being recognized.
So I deleted the array, attempted to recreate and it's only showing 1 disk on the second channel, and no disk on the first channel (should be 1). Alas, I fear even if the drive is recoverable, and/or any data remains it will be impossible to rejoin them back into the same RAID and dredge up any lost data.
The kicker is I ordered a terrabyte drive this weekend so that I could backup the videos and audio from my network share servers.

It appears the default action in Windows 7 for automatic updates defaults to downloading and installing and restarting at 3am. I'm not sure what it was previously with Vista, or even XP at latest SP, but I know I don't like my computer to automatically restart (which is a stated result of installing updates) when I might still have programs open.

Not 'make configure' or ./config(ure)..... /facepalm

I installed Free BSD onto my Sparc after playing around with OpenSolaris for a while. After spending the weekend setting up virtual hosts in apache I decided to break ports by choosing an incorrect branch to follow. That was simple to fix since I simply had to choose a correct branch and update again (had not yet updated anything out of the broken ports). I've gotten FTP to jail sessions and sshd humming along. Maybe this week I'll try out mail services again and see if I can get mailman running for the heck of it.

So, I decided in my utter stupidity to once again try to add a HD at my whim to my main desktop machine. As usual my bios freaks out and refuses to boot to any device without a 2 minute time out to think about my horrible actions. The reason this time is that a person I know sent me an executable which is supposed to be LOL OMFG AWESOME LMFAO! So I'm thinking I'll just put a spare (small) HD in, install a minimum windows system and run the thing. If it screws up so what. I can just reformat the 1 GB hd in a minute. So after I remembered this I decided to just go ahead and run the damn thing. Turns out that it was just a stupid thing that screwed up all of my network connections. But at this point I don't care because I have to reinstall Windows anyway to get rid of my stupid BIOS problem. Now, I have to wonder why in the past, and currently, reinstalling windows cures these bios ailments. It's obviously some bios funk. Which leads me to this final conclusion. Not only does my bios suck, but mostly all bios suck. As discussed in a previous Slashdot article, BIOS has become a patched upon clutter of utter chaos. I don't know/claim to know/ a thing about HD or CDROM addressing on startup but there has to be some better way. It's just so aggrevating to me that I am being limited in a technical aspect that simply shouldn't exist. Can't HD manufactures agree to 5 or less ways of minimal addressing so that bios doesn't have to change and be patched all the time? Or is it something completely different and I'm way off target?

So, as some of you already know I have a stalker. Sometimes they show up around night time. Other times it is during the day. I'm not even sure of all of the times they've been looking in on me. It's really scary to think that someone is watching me without me knowing. Anyway I managed to nab a picture of the stalker the other day, I'll put a link at the bottom. They've got a funky looking nose and they look hairy, which is totally gross. I've only seen my stalker twice but I imagine they've seen me more than I've seen them.

If you have any information on who this is please notify me right away!

Photo down! :(

I've been putting off surfing around for a wireless card for my powerbook for a number of reasons. First off it has some bad hardware, aka processor. Secondly this requires OS 9 and not OS X (1-2 etc). So I've been contemplating possibly upgrading to a new laptop since the processor replacement would rival the cost of a newly used laptop.

Saturday afternoon I finally looked around and stumbled upon this site. So I called up my buddy RecursiveGreen and persuaded him to bring over his PCMCIA linksys wireless network card. Amazingly enough these people from Cambridge have written drivers for many PC-centric cards to enable them to work on Apple hardware. So we walked around, tried multiple spots for the router, and even walked outside with the laptop and found that we had good signal strength even outside the house. With WEP it's not much of a concern, and hey maybe I'll actually go outside a little bit now.

So I ordered a v3 Linksys WPC11 Wireless-B Notebook Adapter from amazon.com and can't wait for it to get here. The drivers will cost $20.00 but I'd rather pay a software developer $20 and someone reselling on amazon $40 than $70 to apple for their proprietary airport card. This way I can hopefully upgrade the card cheaper as they release new versions of the drivers.

This is going to enable me to do alot more. Especially since I have bad hardware, it sometimes freezes up on script heavy webpages, or other processor tasking things like opening large applications etc. With network access I can create a Virtual Network Connection to my linux box, and run virtually any type of program. The only difference is I don't have access to local storage space which isn't even important when I begin to do all my work from within the VNC. Now I don't have to worry about it freezing, or crashing, or freaking out. Basically with my new wireless card I can do anything, before I could do hardly anything.

This monday (today) marks the start of my 3rd week of college at CLN (Computer Learning Network). This is the most bored I have been in a long time. The first week was worst of all, covering such advanced features like resizing windows. The second week involved Word and that was it. Now we're covering PowerPoint and all of it's really really "cool" stuffs. someone put me out of my misery!

Although there is an upside. I now have more daily access to the internet than I ever did at work or High School. :P

My first day back at Slashdot. After a 2 year vacation I find that my brain has dystrophied and must be exercised, and what better place than here.

Hello Slashdot World.