My laptop display is turned to the right, to the left, up or down… Quick Fix
Dec 24th
If you or a little one flipped your laptop display chances are you are freaking out. Stop… Don’t worry you can flip it right back to where it is supposed to be with the following hot keys:
- Ctrl-Alt-Up – right side up
- Ctrl-Alt-Right – 90 degrees
- Ctrl-Alt-Down – 180 degrees
- Ctrl-Alt-Left – 270 degrees (If that doesn’t work try Ctrl-Shift-R)
SIRI released for jailbroken iPhones – Warning sends your data to China!
Dec 21st
The word on the street is if you have a jailbroken iPhone 4 now you too can access the full functionality of SIRI using a Cydia program called H1Siri. But, Before you run and download your copy know that they will send ALL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO CHINA!
According to Gizmodo – Grant Paul has detected that the hack sends your personal information through a server in China. And with personal information I mean email, SMS, calendar, contacts and location. Good luck with that.
Beware of the hacked Siri! If you really want it be patient or go get a damn 4s!
_ThejailBrokenAdmiN_
Google Easter Egg: LET IT SNOW!
Dec 20th
Are you interested in seeing a snow storm cover your Google listings? Google has introduced a new Easter Egg this weekend for those of you looking for some virtual snow and not getting a blizzard like last year!
All you have to do is open up Google’s homepage from any HTML5 compliant browser and type in Let It Snow.
When it is done click Defrost and thaw out!
AtA’s Crashing Issues Have Been Resolved…
Dec 19th
Hey Hey Hey…
It looks like some spam comments were causing the site to crash on all posts… Our traffic dropped from 4k hits a day to 20 hits a day! The comments have been removed, the database has been repaired…
If you see something funky make sure you say something! If you can’t comment email info at asktheadmin dot com.
Thanks for all you loyalty and Happy Holidays!
Give The Gift of Cloud Backup for The Holidays
Dec 9th
Image via Wikipedia
I’m sure that like me, most of you are the tech support for the family. Every time your creepy uncle goes to a sleazy porn site, you have to stop by his house and clean up his computer’s internet VD (Viruses and Malware). You’re mom calls you because she can’t figure out how to print pictures of her precious little dog, and your dad’s hard drive is crashing every time he plays Farmville on Facebook. We at AskTheAdmin feel your pain.
How many times have you just told your family, “screw it, re-install Windows”? Of course they can’t because all of their precious files are on there, and of course they never ever back that stuff up! Why not give them the gift of backing their stuff up for them? Not just to an external hard drive that will fail in 6 months either. I’m talking about true set and forget automated cloud backup!
Back in August I wrote about how I am using some software at work to backup my servers. It’s called Crashplan. Now Crashplan has some pay versions if you want to back up to their servers, but they also give you the option to set up your own cloud solution for free! Plus it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux! That means no matter what you’re relatives use, they can backup using Crashplan.
I said cloud backup though right? This is where you come in. I recommend buying a relatively low-cost NAS device with RAID, or you can build your own Bauer-Power SAN using Ubuntu, IET, ZFS and GlusterFS. Then you can install Crashplan on your computer at home, and backup all of your friend’s and family to your redundant storage; because Crashplan will let your friends and family backup to your machine over the Internet using a simple friend code. You only pay for your home storage.
With this solution their files are offsite, and you are once again the computer guru that swooped in and saved the day!
Now when they call you after pooching their computers, you can re-install with confidence, and restore all of their essential files. You can also drop off an extra drive at their house, and back your stuff up to them. Ulterior motive? Maybe. Awesome idea? Absolutely!
The cool thing about Crashplan, besides it being free, is it also saves data using deduplication and encryption. That means the files you save for your relatives will be secure and won’t take up a lot of space. It’s a friggin’ thing of beauty!
If you decide to do this for your family over the holidays, let us know about it in the comments!
-=El Di Pablo=-
To Open Source or Not To Open Source?
Dec 8th
At my current day job, I work for a small technology start-up in La Jolla California. We offer web-based solutions for some of the nation’s top banks, and housing lenders. We also provide a database for “closing service” providers, so you can hire people like home inspectors, and exterminators at the best price when selling your house. It’s kind of like the “Orbitz” of the real estate closing market.
Any way, the company is only a few years old, and up until now we are running on a Microsoft BizSpark licensing plan. Now that we’re getting a little older though, and we are using more servers to produce our goods, we need a more robust licensing plan from Microsoft. I decided to go to one of my local VARs to work on some quotes, and what they came back with almost gave my boss a heart attack.
In this post I am strictly going to talk about Microsoft SQL Licensing. Just so you know though, the quote we got for SQL was on top of an already ridiculously high $107K three year quote for server licenses. Before I give you the quote I got for SQL, keep in mind this is only for two physical servers running SQL Enterprise.
So we got our quote from Microsoft, and it was roughly $183K for three years. Yes, for two servers it was almost $200,000! That is because at the time of this writing, they were quoting us based on the number of processors. One of the physicals servers has four processors, and the other has two. Bam! Bend us over for $200K!
On top of that, my VAR is telling me that next year Microsoft is switching to a per-core model of licensing. On my server with four procs, each proc has six cores! On the two proc box, each proc has four cores! Now my boss is starting to hyperventilate.
I’m sorry Microsoft, I know you’re just a mom and pop shop, and you’re just trying to make your way in this crazy world, but $200K is too much to pay for a database. The good news for us is that Microsoft SQL isn’t the only game in town. Good news for my company, I’m not afraid to think outside of the Microsoft box.
After getting that quote, the manager of our dev team and I started talking about moving to an Open Source database solution. First he said MySQL, but since they’re owned by Oracle now they have more strict licensing. I’m suggesting PostgreSQL.
Never heard of it? Here’s a description from their About page:
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
Best of all, PostgreSQL provides all of their Enterprise features absolutely free under a Liberal Open Source License! With something like this we can lower our overhead, and use those cost savings to improve our bottom line.
We will have to no doubt do some serious coding changes to make sure our data is compatible with PostgreSQL, but I think in the long run, the cost savings of switching to open source will outweigh the work to get there.
What do you think? Move to an open source database? Stick with Microsoft and suck up the cost? What’s your argument for or against? Let us know in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-