Knoppix

Knoppix is a live linux distribution that you can carry around on (1) DVD. On-the-fly compression also allows you to install up to 2GB of additional software for use. Check it out at http://www.knoppix.com.

 

Konfabulator

I’ve been playing around with a great tool called Konfabulator. It basically allows you to keep “widgets” on your desktop for various things. With the gas prices rapidly approaching the stratosphere, I’ve got local gas prices and the traffic report right at my fingertips! Check it out at http://www.konfabulator.com

In The Trenches

For all you System Administrators out there, you might want to check out the "In The Trenches" podcast. Run by Kevin Devin of Bothel, WA, this podcast has some pretty good war stories and tips for all you SA's. Check it out at http://kevindevin.com.

The "Real Estate Rant"

I’ve been listening to an interesting Podcast called “The Real Estate Rant” on my way to work lately. Run by Palmer Often (don’t think it’s his real name as he’s been referred to as “Mike” on occasion), the show has a lot of good info for Real Estate beginners. Palmer claims his background is in Finance and IT before turning to Real Estate as a profession. Since I have an appreciation for all 3, it’s an entertaining mix. There’s also a forum for links, notes, and general show discussion. Check it out at http://freedom.smassackers.com.

A little about BattleField 2 and corporate management

As we’ve been playing quite a bit of BattleField 2, I started to draw some interesting parallels between the command and control system employed by BattleField 2 and corporate management. Team AlphaForce (http://teamalphaforce.blogspot.com) was playing a few nights ago for the first time together. We had the common sense to setup our own squad and began attacking random targets. After about 15 minutes of futility of dying repeated deaths, we decided to concentrate our efforts on one specific flag. This seemed to work better as it gave us a common goal of trying to take the same objective. But the problem was that we still lacked focus, each of us trying to rack up kills for ourselves instead of working as a team. Everytime we got to the flag, we’d be routinely outnumbered and unable to take the flag resulting in a death. After more frustration, we then organized ourselves a bit better by “specializing”, one being a medic, one an anti-tank soldier, one a sniper, one a support soldier, and the other an assault. We then planned our assault a bit more methodically with the medic and sniper teaming up. The goal was to keep the sniper alive who served as our squad leader and mobile spawn point. The sniper would call out enemies that he saw through his scope and passed the info along to the others. The assault and anti-tank guys would work their way towards the flag, while the support soldier would cover them, with the medic roving around keeping everyone’s health up. Each member of the team now had specific orders that were clearly understood. Each member now also knew each others responsibilities and only focused on their domain. We were now organized and had a plan. The sniper would now call for UAV support and artillery from the commander to support our advance. After only a few minutes, we had the flag that had eluded us for over 30 minutes and moved on, taking two more flags before the round was over. While we did continue to struggle, it was clear that working as a true team with a clear objective, clearly defined roles, and a good game plan made all the difference as the squad score at the end of the round was over 3 times that of the others with members of our squad earning the gold, silver, and bronze stars. Have any of you ever experienced this in the corporate management?

Better start patching!

For those who haven’t done so already, you really should look at deploying the recently released MS05-039 patch as soon as possible. We’ve been pretty fortunate that we haven’t gotten hit, but the following link highlights the critical nature of this patch.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050817/ap_on_hi_te/computer_worm

August MS Patches

Microsoft just released their patches for August. 6 total, 3 of which are deeemd critical. Only MS05-038 is deemed critical on all systems as it’s an IE update. The full information on these patches is listed here:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms05-aug.mspx

BattleField 2 Command & Control Daemon

We finally got the Command and Control Daemon working for BattleField 2. The program provides a GUI interface to a remote BattleField 2 Server and also supports BF2 RCON command lines. It still is a bit buggy as for some reason the .profile for Team AlphaForce keeps getting corrupted and erasing all map info. I’ve taken some precautions by making a 2^nd copy of the .profile which seems to work well. We also tried getting Codebasher’s Co-Op mod to work, but to no avail. We’ll keep trying, but for now, it’s plain-jane BF2. On another note, we’re starting to get some traction around moving up the BF2 ranks, but it hasn’t been without some great frustration. BF2 is beginning to highlight the need for a good C&C structure for battle as Team AlphaForce has been getting worked over on some maps due to poor leadership. Well, guess we’ll have to exercise some of our “Administrative Powers” to take control of the “Commander” roles.

MS Patch Preview

Microsoft has a doozy planned for “Patch Tuesday”. This one contains 6 new patches. Get ready!

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/advance.mspx

 

Battlefield 2 Server having problems already!

So I was a bit pre-mature in announcing that our server was ready for prime-time. In a series of freak events over the weekend, we had 3 separate diskpacks go out. The boot partition stayed up as only one of the mirrored drives failed, but the RAID 5 set actually lost 2 of it's drives. This was extremely unexpected and highly rare, but we got it back up and running at full steam this afternoon. We also noticed that we were not getting a lot of activity on the server so we added a few leading spaces to the server name to hopefully get more traffic on it. Lastly, we did enable VOIP support and gave it a quick run through last night which seemed to work like a champ. Should be good to go so give it a whirl.

1st Real Estate Post

I haven't made any posts regarding Real Estate yet so this one will be my first. Having been pretty much ace'd out during our recent trip to San Francisco, we're now currently looking at more properties on the East Coast. Though new construction is running some small negatives on the cashflow side, resales are looking pretty promising from a cashflow perspective, but the appreciation isn't as strong as other parts of the country. For those new to the Real Estate arena, you might try "Creative Real Estate Online". It's got some good info on various strategies on investing in Real Estate along with the usual e-store to buy everything from real estate books to inspirational material to you name it. The url is http://www.creonline.com

Initial thoughts on Skype and Gizmo

Gayle and I did some basic testing with both Skype and Gizmo. Both worked well at home, but I did have a problem with Gizmo at the office that I'm still working on. Skype bandwidth utilization ran between 8k-13k pps, mostly hovering in the 10k range. This test was done using SSL as the connection method and worked pretty reliably with good clarity on both ends and very little latency.