I’m setting up Raspberry Pi’s using the Edimax EW-7811Us wifi module available on Amazon for a mere $11. Following the Debian WiFi wiki page initially didn’t work. The EW-7811Us uses an RTL8188CUS chipset which requires the rtl8192 kernel driver. There’s no firmware-realtek package on Raspbian, and the best answer I found was to download some dude’s hacked kernel module. No thanks. Instead, install the rpi-update package then run rpi-update. The firmware will be updated in a way officially supported by raspbian (if there is such a thing).

I’ve been working a lot with CFEngine newbies. CFEngine has been described as flour, eggs, milk and butter. All the ingredients needed to make a cake. Getting the new CFEngine user to recognize, then become excited about the possibilities that CFEngine provides they are now faced with the question of “What next?” Indeed, anybody can throw some flour, eggs, milk and butter into a bowl, mix and bake it. But will it taste good?

System administration is not something that monkeys can do. While places like ITT Tech or Coleman University do teach the basics of using a computer they don’t teach how to be a truly great system administrator. Learn why things work on a starship In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn during the first encounter between Kirk and Kahn, Kahn has crippled the Enterprise and is demanding Kirk’s surrender. Kirk buys time promising surrender and uses that time to hack into the opposing ship’s computer system and lower its shields, thereby leaving Kahn defenseless for Kirk’s counter strike.

I’ve been running Cacti at home to keep track of a number of things. It’s wonderful, and I highly recommend it if you understand the phrase “turn on SNMP”. But ever since upgrading to Solaris 11 Express, Cacti graph rendering has been extremely slow. The PHP renders fine, but the graphs would take several seconds per graph and with some pages having upwards of 20 graphs it was becoming quite aggravating to me.

I loved it. From start to finish I loved it. The visuals were spectacular. Light cycles and other vehicles were exciting and very fun. The mythos fits nicely with the established Tron mythos. It was of course not exactly the same feel as Tron. It was different where it needed to be. Where Tron tried to give as much homage to computer vernacular of the day, Tron: Legacy does very little of that, which follows since the grid in Tron: Legacy is an entirely new computer system which has operated independantly for the past 25 years, all on its lonesome away from the rest of the world that was converging on the Internet.