• Got a job at a media giant, that is somewhat sinking.
• Got enganged
• Picked up ruby and python (python is winning)
• Built a CCNA lab
• Got into microprocessors
• Started to brew beer
• Got more networking experience than ever before
• xbox with netflix changed my life.

Best Tech Things of the Year / Found Out About this Year (to me.. in all seriousness)

1. Adafruit Industries ( actually useful kits)
2. Ponoko ( next best thing to owning a laser cutter)
3. SlugPower (seriously my favorite hack of the year, it’s not hard to control a relay over serial.. but the integration and thought is awesome)
4. Netgate (for the diy router/firewall maker)
5. Drobo ( I’m allowed to say that.. I’ve built almost a dozen different NAS’s)

Here’s some stuff I got:

1. Took a picture of the guy off one of my shirts

2. Did some touch up in photoshop

3. Layered it with clear packing tape and cut out the stencil

4. Placed the stencil on the pumpkin and outlined the design, then cut it out.

I think next year I’m going to get an electric pumpkin jigsaw… because.

http://www.publiccollectors.org/MSPaintAlbumCovers.htm

Looking for a replacement/general web surfin’ laptop I decided to buy an asus eee 1000h.  Newegg had a $100 price drop and I pulled the trigger.  I just got it today and I’ve got to tell you its like deja vu.

The eee has a pretty big following, mainly with ubuntu (eh.) and debian users.  I decided to go with ubuntu just because someone had gone through all the work to make a specific kernel for it.

Installation of Ubuntu:

1. I followed these steps
2. To get the fn keys to work I used elmurato’s script found here
3. To test out the webcam I used “Cheese”  sudo apt-get install cheese
4. oh yeah! the way volume is controlled is a little weird, right click on your volume control, set the master to 100%, then right click on the volume control select preferences and select “front”…. then you will be controlling the front audio channel only (which is the speakers).

I’m pretty happy with it so far, it has nearly the same keyboard as my old lifebook, its decently speedy, I can mount smb shares to my NAS… it’s awesome.

Oh yeah, and whomever complains about the gloss finish leaving fingerprints or the right shift key needs to shut it… its $450..

]]> http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/16/asus-netbook/feed/ 0 http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/15/hello-goodbye-subtext-to-wordpress/ http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/15/hello-goodbye-subtext-to-wordpress/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:59 +0000 Andrew Konkol http://www.copyandwaste.com/?p=28

I moved from my previous IIS/Subtext platform to the old LAMP/wordpress standby.  There are a few reasons why I didn’t like subtext, it sucked.  I left the wordpress world and I just came back, and the changes are awesome!

Subtext chokes on exporting to BlogML if any posts contain embedded youtube videos, so I removed them from my post(s).

Migration steps:

1. Recursive ftp get from old host (grabbed all the files and directories)
2. Wrote down all the links to posts that I had
3. Exported subtext blog to ml file and saved to local machine
4. Changed nameservers at my registrar (directnic.com)
5. Used Fantastico to setup wordpress instance for www.copyandwaste.com
6. Configured Wordpress settings to my liking
7. Downloaded and installed BlogML import plugin, instructions here
8. Imported BlogML file to wordpress
9. FTP put for my images directory on my new host
10. Wrote edited .htaccess for my site’s root and inserted RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^.]+)\.aspx$ http://www.copyandwaste.com/$2/$3/$4/$5 [R=301,L]
11. Fixed some dates for posts using mysql cli

“Pretty URIs” in subtext look like this:

http://www.copyandwaste.com/archive/2008/07/29/building-a-mouse-picture-post.aspx

“Pretty URIs” in wordpress look like this:

http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/07/29/building-a-mouse-picture-post/

As you see, all I had to do was remove the “archive” part.. right?  Wrong.  Subtext allows periods in the URI, therefore I ended up writing 3 more rewrite rules:

RewriteRUle ^archive/2008/05/26/alix-2c.3-openbsd-4.3.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/05/26/alix-2c3-openbsd-43/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archive/2008/06/23/blueboss-v2.0---bluetooth-proximity-alerting.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/06/23/blueboss-v20-bluetooth-proximity-alerting/ [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^archive/2007/12/25/parsing-webrequestmethods.ftp.listdirectorydetails-and-listdirectory.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2007/12/25/parsing-webrequestmethodsftplistdirectorydetails-and-listdirectory/ [R=301,L]

The RSS URI in Subtext looks like: http://www.copyandwaste.com/rss.aspx

The RSS URI in Wordpress looks like: http://www.copyandwaste.com/feed

So yet an other RewriteRule:

RewriteRule ^rss.aspx$ http://www.copyandwaste.com/feed/ [R=301,L]

And that’s it! (Hopefully)

If I were to do this again, I would probably just create my own custom string for permalinks, which would cut about have my mod_rewrite use.  Unfortunately, creating my own custom string for permalinks wouldn’t fix the periods in the URI problem.

I started out in my early formative years submersed in UNIX and Linux environments and I found that my focus has shifted to using Microsoft Products in the last couple of years.  My positions in the technology industry have ranged from network security to system administration to development.  My new found interest is data transforming/BI using ETL tools such as SSIS and writing web services that fall into the web 3.0 category.

I’m fairly new to C# (my first app was written about a year ago) and I find that community driven sites such as CodeProject are a great asset in learning.  That being said you will find a lot of code here that leverage’s other people’s contributions to the open source community.

That’s all… I’ll be posting this subtext skin soon, as well as a UnCompress SSIS Control Flow task shortly.

Cheers,
-a