I decided to actually go all out and test to see how well my blog here would run on a virtual machine. I started by downloading VMWare Server (Free), and then grabbed a VMWare Appliance from their “Virtual Appliance Marketplace” that provides a nice, minimally sized LAMP server… I picked up one simply called “LAMP Server” from Virtual Appliances.

The whole process only took around 30 minutes, including the downloading of the software and migration of my blog.

I installed VMWare Server and rebooted, double clicked the LAMP Server appliance and started it and set it to a static IP I had laying around idle… I then changed all the default passwords and SSH’ed into it.

On the former iDude.org server, I tarred up the root, backed up the database and CURLed it all over to the Virtual LAMP server… Un-tarred the content, restored the MySQL Dump file, linked it all up and was done. Then finished it off by change the DNS to the new static IP.

Very simple and it seems to be working fine. The virtual machine is running under a Windows 2003 Server host using most of the available memory on the host. I could set it lower, but have no need to at the moment, the 2003 server is just a mostly idle secondary DNS server and isn’t doing much.

I recently ran across a “new” (to me) virtualization software that is very similar in function to VMWare workstation.

I downloaded Innotek’s Virtual Box software, which quickly and painlessly installed, seeming to be a little faster to install than VMWare and MUCH less bloated… The entire self-extracting install is only 13.3 mb. I restarted my XP (Media Center) laptop and created a virtual machine with 512mb RAM, 64mb Video memory (I don’t remember VMWare having this feature), and a 10gb Virtual HDD, which should be more than enough for a CDR of Xubuntu 7.04.

I am typing this from the Xubuntu installation right now. I just got done installing the “VBoxAdditions” which are basically contains the same enhancements that VMWare tools offer. It was also much simpler and easier to install in Linux than VMWare tools. After I reboot, they should become active.

So far, this Virtualization product seems very stable, and is free for personal and evaluation use. I didn’t see any pricing structure on the website for companies, but I’m sure it would be reasonable.

A friend of mine, Mircat, sent me this link over at HotAir that I felt compelled to re-post. Gave me the chills in parts.

PLEASE PASS THIS ‘REFRESHER’ ON TO AT LEAST 10 FREE CITIZENS, ALSO TO ANY MISGUIDED PEOPLE WHO MAY THINK GUN CONTROL IS THE ANSWER.

With the recent VT shooting and the Dems still sore about the “Assault Weapons Ban” sunsetting in 2004, they are going to be preparing an all-out assault on the second amendment and the approximately 80 million U.S. Citizens who exercise it. Contrary to what they want you to believe, less than 33 people would be dead now if 1 or more of the people in that building had a firearm. Yes there still would be fatalities, but not to the magnitude to make it the “Worse One man Shooting spree in U.S. History”.

1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
3. Colt: The original point and click interface.
4. Gun control is not about guns; it’s about control.
5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?
6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
7. “Free” men do not ask permission to bear arms.
8. If you don’t know your rights you don’t have any.
9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
10. The United States Constitution (c) 1791. All Rights Reserved.
11. What part of “shall not be infringed” do you NOT understand?
12. The Second Amendment is in place in case the politicians ignore the others.
13. 79,999,987 firearm owners killed no one yesterday. (Based on 80 million)
14. Guns only have two enemies: rust and politicians.
15. Know guns, know peace, know safety. No guns, no peace, no safety.
16. You don’t shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
17. 911 - government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.
18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
19. Criminals love gun control — it makes their job safer.
20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.
21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens, tries to control them.
22. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
23. Enforce the “gun control laws” we ALREADY have: Don’t make more.
24. When you remove the people’s right to bear arms, you create slaves.
25. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
26. “A government of the people, by the people, for the people…”

As the Supreme Court recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973, this issue is complex and highly personal; the rights and lives of women must be taken into account. It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.” -Hillary ClintonI strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman’s medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.
- Barack Obama

The Democrats are angry because the Supreme Court is opposing the “right” for women to hire “hitmen” [the doctors] to murder newborn babies AS they are being born, in the process of birth. WTF is wrong with these people?!

“Partial-birth abortion” is also a legal term of art, which has been defined by federal statute as any abortion in which the fetus is extracted “past the navel [of the fetus] . . . outside the body of the mother,” or “in the case of head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother,” before the fetus is terminated.”

If I had to compromise, I’d vote to allow abortion in the first trimester before it is viable (able to live outside on it’s own). But AS it is being born, coming down the birth canal, the head is outside the womb, in open air and it is “terminated” by cutting it’s little skull open and sucking out it’s brain. Sometimes they come feet first and the forceps and tube are inserted and the same procedure happens.

They [the babies] don’t always die right away, sometimes it happens to quick and the are almost all the way out before they are “aborted”. Abort means to stop something before it happens, Not AS it is happening. Sometimes there are complications.

Here are some pictures of the aftermath…(NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH).

People go to jail for killing kittens, puppies and other animals… But it’s OK to kill HUMAN BABIES!

Things like this just amaze me!

KABUL (Reuters) - rumors swept through Afghanistan on Monday that a deadly virus was being spread by mobile telephone calls, and government officials scrambled to reassure the public the talk was rubbish.

Many worried Afghan mobile phone users called family and friends, warning them not to answer calls from strange numbers. Some people said they had heard that several people had been killed by the mystery virus in Kabul at the weekend.

“Don’t answer any strange number because it contains a virus that will kill you,” said Ahmad Fawad, a shop owner in Kabul.

The rumors appear to have spread from neighboring Pakistan where last week a similar scare frightened countless mobile phone users.

Officials from the Afghan interior, communications and health ministries appeared on television and said the talk was baseless.

I saw a link to BOX.NET when I was doing my daily browse through AJAXIAN.COM… I always try and check out the websites linked from there that are specifically trying to capitalize on the Web 2.0 movement.So, I went ahead and signed up for a free account. I played around a little and was VERY impressed to say the least. The guys at Box.net have done a very good job of making this Web 2.0 “application” very powerful, yet very simple, to use.

• The free account only offers 1gb of storage, 10mb max file size and that’s about it.
• The Premium account offers 5gb total space with a 1gb max file size
• The Professional account offers 15gb and ALL other features they offer and that includes no max file size, up to the 15gb limit of course.

One nice thing about the professional account is that you can assign up to “20 sub-users” that can have various levels of access… Read, Write, Read & Write or FULL access usage of your space. This is really nice for people who need to collaborate on a project, they can upload files to the rest of the group and so on.

I went ahead and thought I’d upgrade to the professional account and found that I was given 100 sub-users. So perhaps they are offering more than they’re advertising. Or maybe it’s a glitch, I’m not sure. But it’s fine with me. I created a box for my brother and my buddy mattbob to play with. You can even lock the sub-user into their home folder.

A few other nice features are:

• When you upload common image formats, it displays a thumbnail in the file listing.
• MP3s, when you open them from the box come up in a streaming flash MP3 player, so you can play your music from anywhere.
• The ability to embed a folder on your website or blog. (see bottom of post)
• Nice upload progress windows
• The ability to Email files into your box. (As long as you send it from the email on your account)
• Share Files and/or Folders & Send links to them to others, even non-subusers.
• Tags to make things easier to find as you start filling things up
• Ability to download an entire folder on your box. It zips it up into “Foldername.zip”

That just about covers it… Here is another little screen shot and below it is an example of how you can embed it into your blog.

I have a Thumbdrive, a 4gb Lexar Firefly. It’s performance has always been marginal.  Much slower than the rest of my smaller drives… I figured it might be due to the larger size and lived with it.  Some computers seemed to read/write to it a little faster than others, but it wasn’t a huge difference.

Well, I picked up a new Lenovo 3000 J Series PC tonight and set it up with the standard Windows Vista Home Premium edition that came with it and plugged in this slow drive… It read off it about 10 times faster than any PC I’ve ever used… From laptops, to servers, to a dual core dell at work that has 4gb of RAM.  Not one of those computers read it as fast as this Lenovo.  I was able to copy a 1.6gb ZIP off this thing in less than 4 minutes….

I always knew there were differences from PC to PC, but never realized it would be this big of a difference.

Linux isn’t as hard as it looks to do some cool things…

This server was down earlier today due to, I believe, a power outage.

Even though the server has pretty massive battery backups, I think the momentary kick over to battery might have caused it to poop out.

In any case, the server issues made me want to consider running some regular backups, but without using some packaged software or whatever, it could get complicated and annoying to run all the time.

So I decided to use some command-line tools to accomplish the task. I created a new script called “backup-www”. (Be sure to chmod it 755 so it’ll execute).

Each line is a separate single line in the BASH script.

#!/bin/bash

cd /var/

TheDate=$(date +%m-%d-%Y)

mysqldump –all-databases -h localhost -u root -ppassword >> /var/www/ALL-DB-$TheDate.sql
tar -cvvf ALL-WWW-$TheDate.tar www/

gzip ALL-WWW-$TheDate.tar

mv /var/ALL-WWW-$TheDate.tar.gz /var/www/idude.org

curl -T /var/www/idude.org/ALL-WWW-$TheDate.tar.gz -u username:password –URL ftp.TheFTPServer.com

Here is a brief description of what the above script is doing:

• “cd /var”
• Set Date Variable
• Do a MySQL Dump of all my databases into the /var/www folder to be backed up in a next step
• TAR up the entire WWW folder (recursively) under /var which contain my websites (all of them).
• GZIP the TAR file I just created to save some space.
• Move it to my webroot (personal preference, no necessary)
• Then I CURLed the newly created gzipped tar file up to a different machine on the same network. Since the network here is gigabit, it takes less than a minute for me to upload the ~215mb file via CURL FTP upload. (Longer if you are using a remote server on the net)

Now, instead of manually running this script every day, I decided to look up cron jobs on WikiPedia and figure out how they work.

I proceeded to create a .crontab file called “backup-www.crontab”… I wanted to schedule this task to run every night at 11:50pm, so I entered the following information into the file.

50 23 * * * /var/backup-www

The “50″ is the minute, the 23 is military time for 11pm, * * * are for the other time increments. I only entered the pertinent ones then put the command I wanted to run… /var/backup-www

After saving the “backup-www.crontab” file, all you have to do to schedule it is type “crontab backup-www.crontab” and it the crond will run it every day at the specified time.

I then waited until just before 11:50pm and started watching the filesystem and remote FTP server for the activity and wa-la, It worked like a charm.

If this might seem a bit novel to you Linux gurus, remember, I’m a bit of a noob when it comes to these command line things.

I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04, the “Feisty Fawn” the other day, installed it on my spare 40gb drive, as usual, and booted it up.

Installation is a “Live CD” type install, it boots into the OS, therefore making sure it will boot on your system before wasting time to install it. If you successfully boot off the CD, you will then have the option of installing it to a hard drive.

I was successful, so I started the install. It took around 15 minutes on my AMD X64 3000+ machine with 2gb DDR SDRAM.

The must really say that I like the GNOME desktop manager, it overall hasn’t changed much, but the icons are smoother and it overall feels much more stable.

I took a few minutes to go download my favorite Mac OSX background image and set the GNOME theme to “Glossy” which is a bluish color scheme and The OS now looks just like I like it.

I just got done downloading the VMWare Player and Server for Linux and am going to fire up Windows XP SP2 to see how it works. I’d prefer to use Ubuntu on this machine and keep the VMWare Player for XP.

Also turned on the Compiz Desktop effects. They’re relatively subtle by default, but I’m sure there are more settings I can tweak. To use them, I had to install the nVidia driver for my 6200 OC and even that was fairly painless on this Ubuntu build. Couple clicks on a button and it was install. Rebooted and the effects were active.

I plan to keep this version around for a little while.