Last week I happened to find a Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet, with $75 left on it. What a wonderful discovery! One of the pile of books that I ordered was The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. I’d fully intended …

NOTE- I more or less dropped this project, in favor of a more precise approach, as outlined in Using Google Maps to produce usable, printable maps. This is being left just to give other people ideas.

Background

I was recently asked by one of the officers of our volunteer fire …

If you’ve used Google search from an Android device to search for a business, you’ve probably noticed the two interesting “buttons” to the right of the search listing - “Get Directions” and a button for the phone number. It turns out, these are pretty easy to implement.

The “Get …

I’m not sure how I did it, but I’ve had my Droid for a few hours under a week - the phone’s uptime is about 187 hours - and I’ve already got a major problem. Sometime this weekend, somehow, the volume for everything got set way too low …

The Droid is here (literally, sitting in my pocket), and I have the next two days off of work - plus the weekend. Minus personal commitments, that’s about two full (call it 16 hour) days to get some work done. While I have lots of things that could use my …

Before I even get into how to do this, be warned: this is a really bad idea unless you can ensure total physical access control to the machine. About the only place I’d ever use it is in a non-networked embedded system in a secure location. Its original intent …

No matter how much we may not like it, and no matter how insecure it can potentially be, we occasionally have to run Nagios check scripts (written in scripting languages) as root. (On a side note, this method is also used for my MultiBindAdmin project’s DNS file push). Here …

At a remote location, I have a number of machines to monitor but only one IP (dynamic on a residential connection). Most of my remote monitoring with Nagios uses check_by_ssh. Previously, I’d used one host for Nagios to SSH to, and then chained together another check_by_ssh to reach the …

So, here’s the “official” scoop on the new project that I’m planning/starting to work on. I’m calling it PHPsa for now, and it’s going to (hopefully) be an integrated dashboard/portal for SysAdmins. While there are a number of tools that fit into this general …

Well, I wanted to call this a $#!\^storm, but I don’t think it’s grown to those proportions yet. But any new platform will have its hiccups, and Google is relatively new to the OS world.

So, here’s the news. Google issued a legal Cease and Desist order …