Chris Farris

Preseeds are poorly documented. This is a note to myself on how to reproduce an install sudo apt-get install debconf-utils # It is part of the debconf-utils package. debconf-get-selections –installer > somefile.txt debconf-get-selections » somefile.txt “ via [ubuntu] preseeding installation 8.10 – how to preseed “encrypted directory” prompt? – Ubuntu Forums.

I’m beginning to think vmware people are cult-like. Show And Tell : First vSphere Plugin for WordPress! | Nickapedia.

When I saw the release announcement on WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious), I was excited to see that is was finally integrating in the WordPressMu project allowing one installation of wordpress to handle multiple blogs. I maintain several websites and blogs in wordpress, and have struggled with the operational best practices surrounding it. I was quite excited to see the multisite support so I decided to deploy a VM at the house to test out migration of all my sites to a single install.

Courtesy of Intuit Works to Restore Online Access – WSJ.com: Intuit Inc. said it is trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night, leaving consumers and small businesses without access to online versions of the company’s accounting and tax software. Intuit’s products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon.

I like to buy companies I use. Some stocks I’m considering: VMWare – Cloud infrastructure provider. Amazon – Not of the consumer shopping, but because of all the neat stuff they’re doing with EC2, S3 and Mechanical Turk. Citrix – Xen masters and purveyors of Go To Meeting and Go To MyPC. Apple – the iPad is the laptop killer for causal couch use. It’s a multimedia Kindle. Sucky name though.

@lance (an ATDC startup guy) pointed me to a pretty good Op/Ed from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Let me say that of all the NYT people, I respect Friedman the most. His Lexus and the Olive Tree sits up there with Mystery of Capital as one of the best economics books of recent years. It also sits up there with The Pentagon’s New Map as one of the best national-security books of recent times.

Now this is what we should be spending our R&D money on. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated) Coolant Self-regulating Proliferation potential None Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone via Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke | Magazine.

If your company seems evil, the best programmers won’t work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn’t the embarrassment of the people they hired.

“Businessman Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to bilking investors out of $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme, forcing the Obama administration to withdraw his nomination for secretary of commerce.”

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I asked. “We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. “Come again?” “We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.