Category: Technology

Well everyone, I’ve taken the twitter plunge. I have joined twitter. So if anyone wants to follow me, follow kylew01.  Update:  Check out the new twitter feed on the right.  Be sure to scroll down to read more.

Sorry about the downtime everyone.  Yesterday was the last day of school, and today I moved back home.  My webpage is running on my Ubuntu server running in VMWare Fusion on my MacPro.  Soon as I get enough money I’ll move it to it’s own little Mac Mini that won’t travel with me. 

I was curios how well OS X can say number magnitudes, and while doing so found out something very interesting. If you go to the terminal and type “say 1000000000000000000000000000000000000” (which is one undecillion), you get a buss error. If you go to textedit, enter that number, and tell it to speak it (under the Edit > Speech menu), it will crash. If you do one number less or one number more it will work–just doesn’t like that number. Note: adding any number of zeros at the end and it will continue to crash–but mix zero with any number and it will work.

Looks like it is that time of year again!  Another great update from our friends at Ubuntu.  Version 8.04 is going to be out very soon, and since Ubuntu has been doing such a great job of running my website (and for free i might add!) I thought I’d take the opportunity to give it a plug.  Check it out.

Google often provides us with a little touch of entertainment in our lives. Although this works with web browsers, the simplified response on cell phones makes it a little more enjoyable.

1. On your cell phone, create a new text message. The number for the message is 466-453. For the body of the message do (without quotes) “Define google”. Send.

2. After you have read the response, do another message to the same number, but this time do “Define yahoo”. Send.

Hopefully this will give you a bit of a laugh as it did for me.

While setting up my linux server running Ubuntu in VMWare Fusion to perform automated backups, I found no matter what I could not get it to log onto my macs side with key-based SSH authentication.  So after an archive and install and a few hours on the phone / over iChat with Jesse, we found the problem was something very simple–the permissions on my keys folder was 777 instead of 755.  A few quick commands in the terminal and it was back in business…  Computers are that way though–a problem that can last all day to solve takes about three seconds to fix.

This October is going to be a very exciting month. There will be two great major operating system releases. Mac OS X 10.5 (also known as Leopard) and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). So for all you windows users out there dissatisfied with Microsofts latest offerings, I would urge you all to take a look and see if one of these alternatives would be better for you.

Sorry for the site being down for a few days.  I went home for the weekend (to work and for General Conference) and while I was gone Rexburg received a lot of snow.  The power went out a few times and my computer did not seem to come up properly.  My room mates both went to Utah so they were not able to reset it either.  It is up and happy now and will hopefully be more reliable till I move it over to a dedicated server.  My little VMWare Fusion server has been chugging along pretty nicely though.  I’m actually surprised at how well it is working (well, till I got to Rexburg and got a crappy connection).