So, everyone has their own linux quick reference guide. Here's mine:

Processes
Show running processes	ps -A
Show running processes	top
Kill a process	kill pid
Show stopped or background processes	bg
Resume the most recent process	fg
Brings process pid to foreground	fg pid
Show running processes	ps
System Info
Show who is on the system	w
Show who you are logged in as	whoami
Show running Kernel	uname -a
Show CPU Info	cat /proc/cpuinfo
Show Memory Info	cat /proc/meminfo
Show Memory usage	free
Show disk usage	df
Show who is on the system	w
Show system uptime	uptime
edit Cron Jobs	crontab -e
Show Networking Information	ifconfig
Other Commands
Change the default editor	update-alternatives --config editor
Secure File Copy between hosts	scp
Get a file through http	wget
Show possible location of program	whereis program
Show which program will be run by default	which program

find stuff: find -name a2enmod* -print

Last Updated: 02/19/2008 at 11:15:52 For: Anyone
in: Computers > Operating Systems > Linux

Welcome to 2006. We've been here over 9 months, and there still aren't any *real* devices that replace all these gadgets in my pants.

Sure sure, Verizon has phones with VCast music, and games, and you can put your mp3's onto SD cards and listen to them on the go. What's missing though? You can't compute with these devices. You can't really go to websites online; you can't use a word processor, and you don't have the usability of a real computer. That's really what's missing.

So, you go with a "smart phone" right? Well, you're still in the same boat. It's large, clunky, the battery lasts for 2 hours of use, and you're still only able to cram 2 gigs worth of data into the machine. That, and it's akward to use - you need to pull the stylus out to find things, But at least you've got a pocket version of Internet Explorer, right? Well, erm, yeah, it explores, but I wouldn't exactly write home about it. At least you've got Word, and Excel. Pocket terminal services are handy, too, because you can get on your server or home workstation and use an actual computer, or in case of emergency. But still, something's missing. You can't use it as file storage. You can't cram data into it. Real amounts of data. You're still limited to a few gigs, and it's a slow few gigs at that.

In my other pocket, I have an iPod. It plays music; it's elegant. I even have DVD movies on it. I have more than 10 hours of video. I have all my mp3's on the device, and I have listened to more than 12 hours of music at a time half a battery. The specs suggest 20 hours of battery life for music, and I have no doubt that it would, in fact, meet that.

If you've seen V For Vendetta, you may have noticed their communication devices. They're cellular in appearance, and yet so iPod in appearance, too. One of the TV show hosts (the preaching sonofabitch) has a gold-plated device that he uses as a remote, a phone, and I'm sure a bottle-opener or some similarly-fashioned device ;-) And that got me thinking.

Why can't we have C for CellularPhones?

I mean, real devices that can do all of this stuff and more. A simple looking, elegant device that carries gigs of data, can play our music (and really play it - not with a clunky interface like our current generation Vcast enabled phones), play our movies, allow us to carry our important information, and allow us to check out the Internet. I mean really surf the web - something with real IE, Firefox or some other equivalent rendering capability. Something that had good battery life (More than 72 hours on standby, at least 200 minutes of talk time), along with a size that was pleasing to anyone. And I want to be able to see the screen, and actually be able to have some interface where I can input data into the device. Oh, and a camera. Like 2 megapixels or greater. None of this cheap ass 1.2Mpx stuff that's out on the market right now. Would you pay $600 for something like that? Something that could replace your cell phone, your iPod and your smart-phone or other similarly enhanced Pocket PC type device? I would.

The way I see it is this: Apple can cram all their action into a 60 gig iPod, right? It's sleek, it's thin, lightweight, battery-saving, and does what it was designed to do very very well. A cell phone, which can be the same size as some iPods I've seen, does the phone thing well; does the battery thing okay, but they can't do the music or other similarly added features. Why not? They all look like they took a phone and wrote some (usually poor) software so they could play mp3's. The hardware changes are always minimal. So, start with hardware designed for all this. Start with a computer. No, I mean it. Create miniature, attractive, power saving computers, and run full operating systems on them. Windows; Linux; OSX; Whatever. Keep that 60 gig hard drive (have you seen the drive itself in a 60 gig iPod? They're tiny. Even the 4G Hard drives are small), add a small camera CCD, and put a keypad on it, or use a touch-screen like Apple's recent patent-filing along with some software ingenuity, and keep it all in a reasonably decent form-factor, and you've got the best damn cell phone, ever.

I know, I know - easier said than done, right? I mean, Canon only makes the world's smallest cameras with their digital Elph series; Apple only makes the best mp3 players with their iPod (and as a general rule of thumb, I hate Apple); and Motorola only makes some of the thinnest phones with their RAZR phone (although this article about Samsung's T509 would contradict that - in any case, they both make small phones). Yeah, I'm sure what I want would be absolutely impossible ;-) Honestly though - how much of this hardware has commonalities? They all have LCD screens; they all have batteries; some form of memory; some processing capabilities; some form of common input; and some form of common audio output. The only thing lacking from the iPod is a lens and CCD; the only thing lacking from the cell phone is the CCD most new cell phones have CCD's built in, even though they have awful picture quality. So, I figure a full three-quarters of the hardware can be used and/or interchanged between these devices, if not more. A screen, a battery, a huge hard drive, input, output. Sounds like a portable computer to me. I think it's more possible than most people think. With any luck, Steve Jobs will agree with me and release the iPod Phone. I hope it's everything I want in a portable media device.

Last Updated: 09/05/2006 at 17:37:48 For: Anyone
in: Technology > Gadgets

Don’t reward oil company for its lack of planning

This guy is totally right :-)

And this is ridiculous: State of Alaska freezes hiring because of Prudhoe Bay shutdown

No, not the article itself, but the statistics. Alaska is losing 6.4 million per day in royalties and taxes, which accounts for 41% of the state's revenue. They claim to only be able to stay "in the black" for two months like that.

Uh, I'm sorry, but you're saying Alaska takes in more than 13 million per day in royalties and taxes from oil, and they can't find a way for the government to operate on that budget? Oh my god!

Last Updated: 08/10/2006 at 13:14:31 For: Anyone

Dear friends, family, supporters:

This is not my presidential nomination speech - this is my speech about spammers. Vox, my DNSBL, has been taken offline. Last night, a DDOS attack started. I don't have the resources to take on spammers that do illegal things in order to try to stop s tiny (tiny tiny) DNSBL. If you guys are DDOS'ing me, you must really have no other real fights to take on. Barely anyone knows about VOX, and barely anyone uses it. But, apparently it was affecting spammers on some level. All I have ever tried to do is stop spam to my own mail server - what other people do with it did not matter to me.

Vox was written over the course of about two evenings. It worked the way it was, and so I made it available to others. It was never a serious piece of equipment, and was never designed to be pummelled by spammers. They're like the bully that beat up the scrawny kid at school for 35 cents. Where's the principal when you need him? Unfortunately, the principal is never around.

It's unfortunate, but VOX is no longer open. Queries to it will go unanswered, because I've pulled the entire zone. In fact, the vox.schpider.com site is down, and my Spam News aggregator is also down. with any luck, I will bring my spam news aggregator back online soon.

Last Updated: 06/01/2006 at 12:11:14 For: Anyone

To sum it up in one word: Fuck.

That's the first thing that came to mind when I found out this morning that Blue Security called it quits yesterday. That sucks.

Sure, I didn't use BlueFrog, or anything else from BlueSecurity, but they were part of the fight to help end SPAM. It's kind of amazing that some guy up in Russia was able to shut them down permanently. I suspect that he's got SPAMbots all over the place due largely to unpatched systems and/org spyware type programs, but that's still unbelievable, crazy, and just plain wrong.

Last Updated: 05/18/2006 at 10:36:50 For: Anyone
in: Computers > Internet > Spam

Part of the reason I started GA was to have a way to blog about things. This also led to some news aggregation. Because of both of these things, I'm able to blog about the end of SpamKing's blog.

I don't personally know the guy, but there's a lot going on over at Spam King's blog right now. Basically, the guy is giving up blogging about spam. Now, I don't actually know how the author came to get a book published, which led to the blog, but I must say that it's quite an impressive feat. I've been aggregating spam news for years; I tend to know all there is to know about spam. Schpider is my spam news aggregator. While I've been bad lately at keeping up with the site, I still tend to know what's going on with spam.

In any case, this blog posting is saying goodbye to another resource that's informing people about SPAM. You will be missed. :-(

Last Updated: 05/17/2006 at 21:27:17 For: Anyone
in: Computers > Internet > Spam

Yay! RSS feeds for user Blogs are online :-) We'll have them included in pings to ping-o-matic soon :-)

Last Updated: 05/03/2006 at 21:51:28 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

Wow, I'm geekedabout these RSS Feeds :-) I've wanted to do this for a while now, but have been busy with a bunch of other things. So, this morning I knocked them out. Cool :-) I'm on vacation anyway, I should be able to do this if I want to :-)

In any case, in the news sections, you'll now see a calendar (which was added a few days ago) and RSS Feeds for the main news section, and any interest you click on. Pretty cool. I've also made an attempt at throwing some things to FeedBurner and pinging other services on the Internet (Pingomatic, Bloglines, Syndic8, etc) So with any luck that will help synidcation of the feeds. I'm very excited about it all.

Plus, you can now use your own RSS Reader to read Geekedabout news :-)

Last Updated: 04/20/2006 at 10:27:04 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

The idea about blogging on the phone is a little weird, but I don't really have much else to do here for the next few minutes, and I am a geek.

So yeah, coming up with new ways to do things on the computet and the internet has brought a lot of ideas to the front of my brain. I think that we'll are hundreds of new ideas in the next five years about bringing mobile access to the forefront of convenient technology, even moreso than it already is. People will be able to do more wirelessly with any form of mobile technology, and that will be because of new mobile devices with better usability and higher access speeds. With any luck, the cost will go down, too.

I am writing this blog entry on my new blackberry. I had a blackberry at this time last year, but it didn't have the capability that this one has. Off the top of my head, I can't tell you the model numbers of the phone that I was using, nor the phone that I am currently using, but this one is so much smaller, as easy to use (keyboard wise) and has even better battery life and more features. So, I finally have a phone that I am reasonably happy with. Now, if I could only find a program that would allow me to use RDP toremote desktop to a server, I would be all set :-)

Last Updated: 04/09/2006 at 12:35:05 For: Anyone
in: Technology

I've been thinking about something very similar to what we do here at GA, and I've been trying to come up with a good way of defining exactly what it is we're doing here. We aggregate *tons* of data on a daily basis about news article, happenings, and the like, and that pretty much gives us a good idea on what's happening "around the web"

That's pretty cool, but there's so much more that we can do with this data. Right now, it's just in here, indexed, and ready to search. We've been working on some SEO type tweaks, and we've been doing a reasonably decent amount of stuff with regards to Internet traffic (although the forums don't exactly reflect that - they're so tantalizing that nobody posts to them :rolleyes:)

In any case, I want to be able to take the temperature; the climate of the web on any particular day. I just haven't completely figured out how I'm going to do that.

In any case, there's some new stuff going on at GA that you will see. Aside from the SEO stuff I mentioned (which is more behind the scenes, unless you like to look around META tags) we've also got some other things popping up. I'm going to update the news page here in a little bit, and you'll see that a bit better, and more open. I'm also going to update the homepage, and you'll also see "main" type blog indexes so that you can easily find other people (when they're here) and their blog entries. I'm also going to make it so that you can create a friend's network, and that will add a bit of social networking to the site (with any luck, anyway). So yeah, new stuff coming. Let's do this.

Last Updated: 03/31/2006 at 17:15:29 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

Whoa - the front page of Schpider shows the headline Six Apart confirms $12M in venture capital -- may launch anti-spam - but, of course, the URL it's pointing to is invalid. Suck. Man, sixapart is a machine. Typepad, Livejournal, and MovableType. Now they're considering anti-spam alternatives (I imagine it's for their blogging platform). Nuts.

Last Updated: 03/17/2006 at 11:57:58 For: Anyone
in: Computers > Internet > Spam

Alright, so I have a little more work to do, so that you can add/edit/remove and see some interest information in the blog section, but last night I spent a bunch of time making it possible to link blog posts to interests. So, in the future, whatever you post in computers, for example, will show up in computers in the main blog section on the site (which, actually, doesn't exist yet) along with showing on the main page so that people have an idea of what you're talking about when you make a post. I'm actually going to post my update here in a second to the Geekstuff interest :-)

Last Updated: 03/15/2006 at 21:32:48 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

The form login page has always had a checkbox that states "save info in cookie?" and you've always been able to check it, but it's never actually done anything.

That's not changed. It now takes that, and actually stores that data in a cookie. In addition to that, it also automatically logs your ass in if you've got that cookie stored. With any luck, it also won't break your browser if you deny the cookie, either ;-p So, I'll have to check that stuff out later when I have the chance and make sure it's working properly.

I have a lot more stuff to update. I'll have to tell you about it later :-)

[edit]Okay, I made a bunch of updates yesterday. I was using Maxthon, and checked IE, and Firefox. I didn't have any issues with IE or firefox, but Maxthon (a browser that uses IE's rendering engine, but is tabbed) was having fits about how the auto-login was supposed to work, so it didn't work very well - sometimes not at all. So, I did a bit to disable the auto-login, and it should be working now - it's been re-enabled.
[/edit]

Last Updated: 02/06/2006 at 16:43:53 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

I had a friend of mine look at the site. His response was "Where do you have time to do this?" - well, I do this stuff in between doing other things. This site is exceptionally useful to me. I read the news feeds, and I store my bookmars here. It's something that I use every day. Sure, I could sign up on Google Reader, and then on del.icio.us, or Yahoo Bookmarks, or whatever, but I'm a developer, so why the hell wouldn't I just write it my damn self? Well, they have some pretty neat interfaces, that's why ;-p

Seriously, though - I've been working to change the interface around here, and to make things easier for other people to find. The main page has a "Hollywood Squares" kind of layout now that I like - it shows the latest news, blog entries, bookmarks posted, and forum postings, too. So, that's my slightly larger-than-nothing modification that I made in the last few days.

I also went through and updated the bookmarks portion to make the interests show up there, too. Previously, a user would make their own bookmark categories, and then fill the categories with bookmarks. This has all changed. Now, users have a default list of bookmarks, and they can use those, or make their own lists based on whatever they want to do. This way, in the future, after we all have flying cars (or, whever I get around to it,) we'll all be able to search links, news, bookmarks, whatever in the same category, or in child categories. So, when you go to geekedabout.com/cars - you'll see news, and bookmarks for THAT category. It will give individual users flexibillity they need to make pertinent bookmark category decisions, and will also allow flexibility when searching/browsing/finding on the other end.

So, that was a major update that happened the other day, too. Now, the bookmarks are assigned to interests. yay!

Oh, I forgot about one other things: News comments. I've completely revamped the news interface, and users can now comment on any news story, from anywhere. They can also search news with a nice search box on the left hand side of the main pages. That makes me happy :-)

So, to update:

• new homepage layout


• new news page layout


• interest linking in bookmarks instead of categories


• news comments for registered users


• news search added

I've also added a few more sources of news, but I need to get the RDF format figured out. Geekedabout supports RSS 2.0 without a problem, it seems, since we have more than 46000 articles. Yes, fourty six thousand articles. Wow. I'm going to start caching them next, I think. That way, we weill have them indefinetly!

Last Updated: 01/19/2006 at 11:24:51 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

So, I'm working on what we're going to do next here on Geekedabout.com

I have a bunch of other stuff listed that I'm going to do, but I wanted to take a step back, figure out Christmas, and family stuff, and whatnot, and it gave me a chance to bounce some ideas off my brother, and figure out what else I wanted to do with the site. So, here's some more stuff that I came up with:

Integration - integrating the functions of GA into more simple to use interfaces. I'd like to have users be able to comment and post about news stories quickly and easily - I'd also like to do something with regards to bookmarks, too.

Friendly Interests - I want to update the interest pages, as outlined before, so that they're more easily found.

Friendlier Homepage - Updating the homepage so that it's more dynamic, and allows people to jump right into the content rather than having to click on the random stuff on the left hand side of the page. It needs to be cleaned up, and more pertinent.

Caching - I'd like to cache the actual news stories that're aggregated, so that they're searchable.

Searching - of stories, blogs, bookmarks, and forum postings. They all need to happen to make the site useful.

Mapping - of the members on the site so that we can see geographically where our members are located. This is awesome :-) I can do this, it's cake ;-)

podcasting - Atticboy and I have been talking about making a podcast to both perpetuate users and to also talk about interesting things on the site. He's currently all up on his LOTA podcast, but maybe he can make some room for some more podcasting, and maybe I can make some room for a weekly podcast, too. I also purchased a special friend that I'm sure will make an appearance in the podcast, just because it's funny ;-p You'll hear it later.

So, atticboy and I have some things to talk about, and I have a lot of rearranging to do, when I get some time to do it.

Last Updated: 01/04/2006 at 17:10:39 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

So, I've been working on what's going to be coming up next on geekedabout.com. In my head, anyway.

1- tagging blogs and bookmarks with interests. This way members/visitors can see other bookmarks in the interests they want to see.

2- friendly interest page links (http://www.geekedabout.com/computers) so that people are more apt to remember where the hell they want to go instead of having to go to the homepage

3- Users.

4- Arrangement of the content in the interest pages. Basically, I want to be able to go to the page and see lots of stuff, for lack of a better term. Right now, you only see news. I want to show news, blogs, links, and forum postings. Fun! :-)

5- some other things. I'd really like to get some Dictionary information on here to do word lookups and stuff. Hrm.

Last Updated: 12/08/2005 at 16:03:45 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

I did a bit of work and came up with two new things: Interests and News aggregation.

Right now, if you go to the GA homepage, you'll see the new interests listed on the left hand side of the page. Now, this interest stuff is still being worked on, so I don't know exactly what's going to happen to it, but I envision clicking on an interest, and seeing aggregated news, forum posts, bookmarks and blog entries regarding those interests.

In addition to those interests, I'm also now aggregating news for those interests. So, right now, when you click on an interest, you'll be able to see the latest news for the interest.

There's so much potential on what I'd like you to be able to do with this stuff. I'd like members to be able to post and rate articles, post blog entries to an interest, view member's bookmarks in an interest, and forum postings in an interest without making this stuff too cluttered. In addition to that stuff, I'd also like to have members be able to search for things in all of those from one screen. None of this stuff should be too difficult individually, so I think it's just a matter of time before that all happens. I'm excited about it :-)

Last Updated: 12/05/2005 at 10:28:53 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

Okay, so a quick little simple geekedabout.com user list is up on the site. If you click on the "find users" link on the left navigation on the main page, you'll see what I'm talking about. Maybe I'll show what options the user has used, so that you don't have to go through and click on all the users just to find out that they haven't posted anything yet. Hrm... that's an idea.

Last Updated: 12/01/2005 at 23:30:47 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

Ideally, I'd like to make geekedabout all about things geeky. So, I want to have homepages that geekedabout will display broad topics on.

GeekedAbout computers? go to http://www.geekedabout.com/computers and see the latest blog entries, forum posts, bookmarks, and news about computers. Geekedabout cars? http://www.geekedabout.com/cars - there you go!

So, what makes this a little more interesting is that I just thought about adding RSS news feeds for this stuff. This would required a bit of finangling of a few things, but I think I can get it to work properly. And, if I do, how fucking cool would that be? ;-) Integrated online RSS news reader. Sort of. User submitted. Ah, in any case, this will be my first RSS feed:

http://www.autoblog.com/rss.xml

I'll tell you more about it later when I have a better idea of what I want to do floating around in my head.

Last Updated: 12/01/2005 at 10:41:17 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

Okay, so I've been pondering recent developments. Or, more appropriately, pondering recently what I'd like to develop next.

So, I think I'm pretty much set on starting development on the photo gallery system. This is not an easy task, because it's time consuming. I currently have a simple photo thumbnail gallery thing that runs using Coldfusion. Basically, I copy images to a directory on my server, and if there are images without thumbnails, then the system will automatically generate thumbnails for me, and smaller versions of the picture, too. I like the way it works, and it does exactly what I want it to do. But, the photo gallery on GA will be different. This photo gallery will be more album-like - members will create albums, and then add pictures to albums along with descriptions and stuff like that. When pictures are added, I will have the system create a thumbnail, and store the information in the database.

So anyway, that's my next idea. I think I'm going to do it. DO eet!

Last Updated: 11/29/2005 at 12:05:38 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout

This is actually something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and today, I get to :-)

Welcome to the Geekedabout.com site. This is the first blog posting, period, of anyone on geekedabout.com. And, of course, this is my first public Blog posting, because I want you guys to see what's going on with geekedabout, and I want to be able to keep this up to date so that everyone knows what's going on with the new things here at GA.

This post is a long time in the making, and I have a lot of things I want to say in it. First off, I want to thank the registered members, even if you haven't used this stuff in a very long time. I know it's been a bit of "this place is dead" on an off, so please bear with us. This page excites me because for so many reasons:

1- I want to have a place where I can put all my stuff online. I created GA to put and share my bookmarks online, put and share my photos online, put and share my blog entries (although, this blog is really just to let other people know what's happening with THIS site, but more on that later) and put other things that I want to keep organized online... online. In addition to those things, I wanted to have a place to develop and grow a community. In the past, I've done a lot of that with various differing messageboards that I either ran or took part in running. But, things change, and sometimes a set of forums just isn't enough. It's so much better to have a community of people that share the same interests, and allow them to do a bunch of collaborative things in one spot. So, that's what I aim to do.

2- I want to showcase my experience. I'm a computer geek for a living. So, I'm interested in geeky things. One of them is database management, and programming using ColdFusion. So, I wanted to show other people what I'm able to do with CF, and maybe explain some things that aren't commonly done using CF to other people to give them new ideas, so that other people can innovate, too. This site uses quite a bit of custom programming and database design to bring not only just a messageboard, but these other things in the community that you can do. My goal is to make the parts of GA that're utilizing CF the most optimized that they can be, and keep the site speedy, and easy to use. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, or whatever, please feel free to contact me.

3- I want to make a community. As I said before, I've taken part in and/or helped growing other online communities, but I want to have my own community that I can nurter, grow, and see succeed. Please help it out by telling your friends about Geekedabout.com - that way we can all do more with the site.

4- I want to do things other places don't do. Consolidation is one aspect of that process, but there are others, too. I want to come up with other things that the community can do to help all of us become bigger geeks. Maybe it's through RSS feeds, or collaboration, or information finding tools on GA. Maybe it's just through articles, or something else. Whatever it is, I want to develop it. Back to consolidation for a minute, though. That's one of the main things I want to be able to do here. Sure, I could throw my bookmarks on Backflip, and then post this blog to MySpace, but it just makes it harder to remember where you put things. No, we're not out to be Yahoo!, but it'd certainly be nice to have a place where geeks could post geeky things to other geeks that'd have geekgasms about it, and then perpetuate geekiness, wouldn't it? :-) Anyway, I don't want this site to be *the* only place, but it sure would be nice to have it be a colsolidated community.

In any case, This post is getting a bit long, so I'm just going to post it. Welcome to GeekedAbout - in the coming weeks, we'll polish up the main page, and create some other pages so that users can find their geeky friends, or other people with the same interests as themselves. Thanks for reading,

-Scott

Last Updated: 11/28/2005 at 16:40:19 For: Anyone
in: Computers > GeekedAbout