This happened to catch my eye, so I figured I’d post it. It’s an article from Wired that details a program a grad student wrote to see who was actually editing wikipedia entries. I could detail the entire article, but needless to say companies such as diebold, microsloth, and the cia and fbi are all editing entries. Some of that could be good and some bad. Sorry for such a useless post - aside from the article. I started writing and kinda went outta it.

Not many people are worried about filtering out websites or blocking things, but I ran across an open source program that does what the Barracuda network firewall does and sonicwall. It’s called untangle and it’s got everything that you get with one of those $600 boxes. Here’s the best part. If you have an old shitty computer around, it’s the perfect candidate for it. So why would you want to use any of this? Ok, so let’s say you’re getting a shitload of spam or you’re having a problem with intruders and people trying to get into your computer or you’re tired of your kids going on that god forsaken website myspace. Download the .iso image, burn it, and restart your old computer with it in the cd drive. Let it run through the install and bam. you’re done.  Now no one will ever be able to get on myspace or eharmony or whatever the hell else you don’t want them on again. You can filter out instant messaging and other protocols as well.

It’s not something I normally write about, but I thought this program was so damn good that I had to write about it. Because people come over and do nothing but spend time on the computer, I actually think I may put this in place here. Myspace. The worst thing to happen to the internet. Later.

Ok, so I’m in the process of scanning in the pictures that we have - all of which were taken by my Uncle Phil {Thank you so much for that. We really appreciate it} - and I realized that I bet a bit of family and friends might have some images so I’ve setup an ftp account on my server here and so that if people want to upload images they can and then I’ll move them here and share them on the site. Make sure when you’re putting pictures up to put them in the upload directory and make a directory with your name on it and fill that up with your pictures. I’m not going to put the login information into cyberspace, because that’s just idiotic, but if you’re interested email me at john-and-jenn[@]comcast[dot]net with the subject: wedding ftp and I’ll respond with the login information. And do identify yourself for me, so that I’m not giving it out to some random person. I’m a bit paranoid about my computers, is all. So thanks and once all our images are up they’ll be up here for everyone to see! Now get to uploadin’!

Alright, so I was perusing for some backup software on cnet (because the windows backup utility keeps doubling the data every night, even though it’s set to incremental - only change files that have been changed) and on their front page an article grabbed me. Naturally, it was about Ubuntu Linux and how a regular windows user can install it without even repartitioning their hard drive.

Basically a program called wubi runs the installer, downloads the iso and rewrites the boot.ini to boot up ubuntu when you first power your pc on. You can check it out here. I would highly recommend anyone who is curious about Ubuntu or Linux to throw it on there. If anyone is interested I’d be more than happy to help troubleshoot and assist people with installing it on their machine.

Well if most of you don’t know, my server has been down for about a month now. I was working on someones computer and inadvertently passed something onto my network. I noticed it immediately and disconnected everything until I sorted it out, but nevertheless it was a pain. In the process, I made some serious n00b mistakes and lost a lot of my data, so now I actually have a disaster recovery plan in place now to alleviate that problem in the future.

Linux has a few really good tools for backing up and actually keeping it in a human readable format - tar.gz for the most part. On the other hand winblow$ uses a non human readable format - .bkf. I know I could buy something for a backup, but seriously why the f&(* should I pay for more software for a lackluster OS? Regardless. I found a great tool to convert .bkf to human readable .tar! It’s called mtftar and is sweet. Only thing that would scare a newbie from it is that you have to compile it from source. Well here’s 5 steps to do it.

1. download it
2. next sudo apt-get install g++ *note: skip if you already have a c++ compiler installed
3. open a terminal and type tar -zxvf mtftar.tar.gz && cd mtftar *note: you must be in the directory that you downloaded it to for that to work so probably “cd Desktop” first
4. now type make
5. now type sudo cp mtftar /usr/local/bin

And now you’re done! I forgot to mention that this is for Ubuntu although I’m sure that it would work equally as well on any other distro with a tweak to the sudo command. Just a little tidbit of info.

Alright, so I’ve had a few requests and questions about pictures, so here’s a quick little note to everyone:

I will be putting up pictures over the next week. I will also be setting up an ftp account for family to upload images too. After I pull down the pictures everyone uploads, I’ll resize and put them up there and I will tag them with a note about who submitted the image. All family pictures will also have an album dedicated to those pictures alone. If you are interested, please email us at john-and-jenn [at] comcast[dot]net (← stupid spammers make me do that.)

To everyone who was at the wedding. Thank you so much for everything. We had an amazing time and we hope all of you did as well.

-Mr. and Mrs. Neumann