PJ For President » 2008

Archive for July, 2008

I am Now Qualified to Break Into Your Car

As of 12:02 tonight, if you lock your keys in your car, I can totally get them out for you…provided that your keys are:

1. In your Drivers or Passengers seat
2. You have a spade that I can bend handy
3. I am allowed to destroy the paint around your door, and possibly bend it beyond repair.

And I can offer this service for the low, low price of: Gas to get to your location + 1 Taco Bell value meal. Pretty sweet deal, huh?

How did I come upon this new skill, you may ask. Well, I’ll tell you. Read more »

Tags: car, caravan, keys, locked, story

Posted: July 29th, 2008 under Blogging, Commentary.
Comments: 2

more Merb & God

Working on a web ui for God some more. I’ve moved the logs to their own pages. I also got some basic system information up on the index page, like uptime, os version, and disk usage. There is still no authorization, but i’ll work on that sometime soon. If anyone wants to help, i’d be more than grateful.

Tags: git, god, merb, monitoring, Projects, ruby

Posted: July 28th, 2008 under Projects, git.
Comments: none

God + Merb = Awesome!

I hacked togeather a simple webUI for god this weekend, and it’s now in alpha stages. It will start, stop, Monitor, Unmonitor, and Restart services, and also give logs for the past 5 min. It’s powerd by merb, and is actually my first foray into merb, having used rails for the past 2 years. Read more »

Tags: gem, git, god, merb, Projects, ruby

Posted: July 26th, 2008 under Computers, Projects, Twitter, Uncategorized, git.
Comments: none

New York Governer Signs Video Game Bill Into Law

New York Governor David Paterson signed a bill into law last night that requires games to show show the rating they get “…from the gaming industry’s voluntary rating system.” and requires consoles to provide parental lock-out features by 2010. It also provides tax money to study the effect of violent video games on minors.

This bill flies in the face of legal president, set by California, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state, who have all deemed the bill unconstitutional. The New York Civil Liberties Union has already started working on a challenge for the law, citing the aforementioned cases. Robert Perry, NYCLU Legislative Director, says the ‘new law is a “back door” way of regulating video game content.” Read more »

Tags: law, new york, NYCLU, politics, Video Games

Posted: July 23rd, 2008 under Commentary, Video Games.
Comments: none

Posting Problems

I’m having some problems getting Wordpress to post some content. Hopefully I’ll get it resolved soon. Whenever I try to publish a post, I get a 404 error. Weird. It makes me angry. Something about the word Union. Maybe Select too?, No, select works. What about .htaccess ? Yes, that works too. Seems to be just Union.

It turns out it was a false positive with mod_security on my host. Oopsie!

Tags: post, problems, wordpress

Posted: July 23rd, 2008 under Blogging, Commentary, Music, Projects, Twitter.
Comments: none

Creating a Remote Git Repository

Having a local Git repository is great, it lets you keep versioned copies of your work, and doesn’t take up much space. But if you need to share your repository with someone else, such as with a development environment, you quickly find you need a simple way of keeping the repository up to date, and allowing access to other people. Email and thumb drives are soon not enough to keep up with the pace of development. What you need is a server to keep all the information in.

I’m going to show you how we have things setup, and hopefully guide you in your quest to have a remote repository that works for you.

Assumptions:

First off I’m going to assume you have a server setup somewhere, and that you have ssh and root(or sudo) access. This is written for FreeBSD, but the steps should be similar enough on pretty much any Linux or BSD distro.
Read more »

Tags: freebsd, git, hosting, repository, scm, server, Subversion

Posted: July 22nd, 2008 under Computers, Projects, Subversion, git.
Comments: none

Amazon S3 Downtime

This week, Amazon’s S3 service experienced about 6 hours of downtime. While this isn’t horrible in the grand scheme of things, they’re at 99.72 for the quarter, it certainly is a hit for the fledgling (2 years-ish) service. The most noticeable effect of the downtime is probably felt in the hundreds of web start ups and other services that are also hit by the outage. One of the biggest of these is SmugMug, and in their blog today, they had this to say. Read more »