08.17.05
Posted in life, tech at 12:35 am by mridley
Like many people, I’m sure, I am always interested in making a little extra money on the side. I work full time, so I am not really available for “full scale” contracting engagements, but I certainly have plenty of time to provide remote support and consulting.
For a while I’ve been using/browsing sites such as Guru.com, E-Lance.com, and even the “Gigs” section of craigslist.org. So far, I have had just about no luck with these sites. It seems that the types of jobs that get posted are typically posted by individuals or VERY small companies who really have no idea what the market value of the work they’re looking for is. Or else they’re looking for someone to configure their home firewall for $50 or something. Maybe I’m a snob, but that’s just not worth the effort to me to go through the paperwork of dealing with something so low-end.
Is there any hope for sites like these? I know the work is out there. I have friends who have stable part time gigs, but they didn’t find them online. Perhaps I’d be better off going out and pressing the flesh at business mixers, and I may end up doing just that. But it seems like the online freelancing sites are a good idea in theory. Why don’t they work? Does anyone have success with these places? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Posted in tech at 12:06 am by mridley
I had written on my dearly departed other site about my quest for broadband at my new place. Well, I have my Speakeasy DSL up and running now. So far, so good. I do consider it to be a bit pricey, but I’m getting the speed advertised and I do like the “no-BS” approach they have. No port blocking. 8 static IPs. Sane AUP. Good stuff.
In between my home network and my DSL modem, I have a Linksys WRT54GS router/firewall/wireless access point. I installed the Sveasoft Alchemy firmware, and have set up some nifty firewall rules with the excellent FWBuilder application. I hadn’t used FWBuilder before, but it’s very straightforward to setup firewall and NAT policies and then deploy them. The interface reminds me a bit of the CheckPoint firewall admin GUI. Check it out if you’re in the need for such things. It supports various *NIX based firewalling schemes (iptables, ipchains, etc.) and I believe there is some plugin support for it to generate Cisco PIX rules as well, though I’ve not used that.
Tags: Linksys, Sveasoft, FWBuilder, Networking
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08.13.05
Posted in tech at 5:29 pm by mridley
I wrote a piece the other day stating that I had reconsidered my initial assessment of OpenSolaris, and that it may turn out to be a more powerful project than I had first thought. If you don’t feel like reading what I wrote, the bottom line is that OpenSolaris is developing a strong community and communities are powerful.
I think there is something else SUN could do, however, that would also have a strong impact on their ability to re-ignite the IT world’s interest in Solaris. Push harder into x86 and migrate away from UltraSPARC. I highly doubt SUN will do that, as they seem pretty bullish on the platform. Personally, I’m not so sure. Hear me out.
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Posted in tech at 3:51 am by mridley
As I wrote before, I’m trying to figure out a good strategy for getting my personal data in my home network protected in a more safe and robust manner. Still in research mode, although I’m not sure that “backing up”, per se, is going to be feasable. I am leaning towards setting up a fileserver with a RAID configuration. I’ve been browsing the OpenFiler.org web site and am intrigued.
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Posted in life at 3:38 am by mridley
…probably not. I was reading this story about Aston Martin sales being up, and I figure - hey…when volume goes up, prices go down, right? So I expect to get my Vanquish in a couple years for..oh…$20k? Yeah, probably not. Guess I need to work on getting those AdSense clicks up.
Tags: Cars, AstonMartin
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08.12.05
Posted in life at 11:58 pm by mridley
Very strange problem today. I noticed earlier that my RSS feed was reporting as broken in Bloglines. Also I noticed my site traffic today was down to NOTHING. Now I know this is not the most popular web site on the Internet, but it’s odd to go down to barely anything out of nowhere. But I double checked everything and it looked good to me.
I was looking at the stats again, and I realized that my last visitor was around 7 AM (it being almost midnight now). “Hmmm…” I thought, “perhaps this is a DNS issue” I then remembered that I had created a static entry in my local hosts file for this domain so I could set the site up before the DNS changes had propagated. Sure enough, when I check in DNS instead of the local hosts file, my site resolved back to one of GoDaddy’s hosts and upon opening the URL I find that it’s using an ooooold redirect I had set up ages ago to point to a static page.
I went back into the GoDaddy user admin panel and I think I’ve fixed everything now, but I am not sure why that would happen all of a sudden. Overall I’ve had a great experience with GoDaddy as a registrar and my NS server. Perhaps it’s a coincedence, but today is the expiration/renewal date for this domain. Maybe that’s what set their servers all a-flutter.
Very strange.
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Posted in life at 9:58 pm by mridley
For some reason my RSS feed is showing up as “broken” in Bloglines again. The last time that happened it was because, well, my feed was broken. But I fixed the feed and Bloglines loved me again…but now I’m on its enemies list again apparently. My poor RSS feed feels shunned.
Oh well.
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08.11.05
Posted in amuse at 8:50 pm by mridley
This video is very amusing. Not necessarily work safe, though. Some foul language. Worth a watch, however.
Tags: Friendster, SocialNetworking
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Posted in dc, life at 7:10 pm by mridley
One of the things I’ve noticed after moving back to DC is that I’m not as “plugged in” as I was when I was living in Silicon Valley. I read a lot of web sites and I manage to keep on top of most of the big news in the tech world, but it seems like I have less interesting conversations here. Which is somewhat ironic, because I consider California (yes, including the bay area) to be a bit of an intellectual wasteland. One of the things that bugged me about living out there was that everything was rather vapid.
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Posted in tech at 6:24 pm by mridley
A colleague of mine pointed me to a web site I wasn’t aware of today. DrunkenData.com is a storage news site. Covers all kinds of enterprise storage - EMC, NetApp, fibre channel, iscsi, etc. etc. I just started reading it today, but I enjoy the author’s cynical commentary. Clearly he is a veteran of the storage world. I’m not as plugged in to enterprise storage as I used to be, so I have added it to my daily reading list. Reccomended.
Tags: Storage, IT, EMC, NetApp
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