So it was sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2003, I was installing HPUX on some new servers for a big Oracle upgrade project I was working on for the Bank at the time. And apparently said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

So, around fall of 1998, I was working as a UNIX sysadmin for the ticket company, and taking classes at CSU trying to get my EE degree.  I had attempted to take the networking class without taking the pre-req UNIX class first.  I figured I was a UNIX admin, had been doing this stuff for a few years at this point, the class would just be a waist of my time and money. Well, it turns out, I got caught and was kicked out of the class for not taking the pre-req.

The Bitscope DSO program can save files of the read data in a simple CSV format.  There are many easy ways to handle those files.

In the manual, they describe how to import them into MS Excel, they also talk about the limitations of Excel, which really isn’t the best tool for this job. However, it seems that AWK would be perfect. Using Python and numpy might have some interesting possibilities as well. Even Perl would probably make a good choice, but Perl wont be covered here.

Some times it’s necessary to calculate a series, be it a summation or integral that has infinity as one it’s boundaries.  Well, most modern scientific calculators aren’t really Computer Algebra Systems and therefor don’t understand what infinity is. But, depending on the accuracy needed, and how fast it converges, normally using 100 or 1000 is good enough. Sometimes, it does take a little bit of tweaking.  But, in general, it’s not hard to work out.

One of the cool things about the 3rd Gen Mazda 3’s is the Connect infotainment system.  One of it’s capabilities is to play MP3 files off of a thumb drive inserted into one of it’s USB ports.

So, I took an empty thumb drive I had sitting around, and loaded up a bunch of MP3 files on it. And sure enough, it can play the songs.  It will let you select by song, album, artist, etc.  And for the most part, as long as your ID3 tags are in order, it works pretty good. But, it has a problem with properly ordering the songs in an album for some reason.  

Using LVM to upgrade a disk in a Linux system is very easy, assuming everything is set up correctly ahead of time.

Obviously everything ( except /boot and if applicable, /boot/efi ) needs to be in LVM. And the disk being upgraded should be 100% LVM, but it might work otherwise. 

You’ll also need free port, SATA, SAS, SCSI, what ever your system uses, along with appropriate power.

The way my Linux system is configured, I have / and /boot on a SSD.  I have swap, /var, and /home on a spinning platter drive.  I recently upgraded it from a 1 TB disk to a 4 TB disk.

Using the method used by Thales to find the height of the Cheops pyramid eons ago, you can find the height of anything that the sun casts a shadow of.  Oddly, it seems that few people I know know this trick. I'm pretty sure I learned it in 6th grade geometry, maybe I taught it to my self, I did learn most of what I know about mathematics and physics on my own. But this does seem to have been forgotten or otherwise unknown to many.

I’ve been backing up my Facebook data for years this way, and since I’ve recently started using Google more, I decided it was time to start backing up that data too.  Of course, even if you don’t care about backups, you might still be interested in what they actually have one you, this will give you a chance to review that.

Configuring sendmail to use either gmail or iCloud as a mail forwarder has a lot of nice advantages.

Configure sshd to listen on port 443?

Why would one want sshd listening on port 443 might you ask?