Getting ‘yum-protectbase’ to work in RHEL5
While initially setting up a kickstart installation on CentOS I needed to add additional repositories without having to worry about them overwriting base packages. Thankfully there are two options priorities and protectbase. Since I was only adding one extra repository that would conflict with anything (rpmforge) I used protectbase. It is really easy to setup all you need to do is add protect = 1 to the yum repositories that you want to protect located in /etc/yum.repos.d. Now everything works great and I don’t have to worry about a 3rd party RPMs effecting the stability of the base OS. I always assumed the process would be the same for RHEL too but this was a bad assumption.
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An “Outlet” for Geeks
Back in the day (when I was a slave…) no real gamer would ever brag about buying a pre-built PC. Especially from a company like Gateway, HP or Dell. Unless the machine you purchased came from companies like Falcon Northwest or Alienware, you would be the laughing stock of the (LAN) party.
Now though, because of the current rise in popularity of gaming, and to some extent, globalization, companies like Gateway, HP and Dell are focusing on building bleeding-edge machines at a reduced cost. Each company has its own “Elite” offering; Gateway has its FX lineup, HP has its excellent BlackBird PC’S, and Dell…well, they went one step further and actually purchased Alienware, who builds their XPS machines.
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Cast Off Your Shackles — Break MySpace! [FIXED-READ UPDATE]
Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.
Here I am, with yet another lame MySpace trick. This one however is absolutely not useful and the result is the following: you will not be able to navigate any MySpace page having to do with you, friends on your list will not be able to view the “status updates” page, friends who use the new layout will not be able to access their MySpace home pages until you’re cycled from their update window (the more friends/more often they update the quicker they will be able to access it). Lastly, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FIX THIS. Though I despise MySpace, I e-mailed them about fixing this problem and they have not, so you will be at their mercy if you decide to do this. I take no responsibility for you doing this either.
2 commentsRedOctane X-plorer on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy)
In my current state of addiction I’ve been rocking out with my plastic guitar with the 5 brightly colored buttons. Guitar Hero 3 has been causing me to procrastinate a lot more over the last month than usual. It wasn’t until about a week ago that I found out about Frets on Fire. It is a guitar hero like game that you play using your keyboard (created in Python). You can create your own songs to play and even import the songs from the first three Guitar Hero games. After playing it for a while I wanted to use my GH3 guitar but I wasn’t sure if I could even do that. It turns out that yes, you can use the guitar under Linux and even Windows.
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Warbook Alliance Manager
Warbook is a Facebook Application focused on war. There are several different character classes to choose from when playing. Jordan (the other person that write on this site from time to time) was a mogul and he is the one who invited me to play. I must say at first glance the game wasn’t fun at very low levels. You would get chain attacked a lot and there wasn’t much you could do. Lucky for me it was easy to get money and move up. I focused on defense at first but read that it was pointless at higher levels to defend your self. BLAH BLAH BLAH LONG boring story.
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Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) Ubiquity Migration Assistant Errors
Recently I’ve bought another PC which I’ve started using in place of my laptop while I am at home. I’ve decided to switch my laptop back to a machine for testing. I like trying other Linux distributions and I don’t care for testing them out using virtualization. Once I get a feel for it on a actual machine it is a lot easier to test and revert to a previous state using VMware Server or VirtualBox. Since I’m using it for testing again I decided to put several distributions back on it. At one time many months ago I had installed Windows XP (with Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit which is now called Windows SteadyState), Windows Vista, FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Slackware and Ubuntu. That didn’t last long because I was actually using that computer and I didn’t want to make major changes to it when newer versions of the distributions came out.
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XKCD Embedding NP-Complete Problems In Restaurant Orders
There is very popular web comic called XKCD. The site seems to have been around since January of 2006 and I’m sure that anyone that reads Digg or Reddit will be familiar with them. I visit there from time to time and even have a couple of their comics taped to my desk at work.
A few weeks ago Jordan brought up one in particular because of a job listing for a “consulting and software development firm”. The comic is a bit old and is from earlier this year in July. In the job listing they had a programming exercise referring to that comic and wanted it to work on multiple data sets read from a file. The problem in the comic is np-complete. If you aren’t familiar with that term than you might want to read up. Quoting the article on nist.gov below.
Note: A trivial example of NP, but (presumably) not NP-complete is finding the bitwise AND of two strings of N boolean bits. The problem is NP, since one can quickly (in time ?(N)) verify that the answer is correct, but knowing how to AND two bit strings doesn’t help one quickly find, say, a Hamiltonian cycle or tour of a graph. So bitwise AND is not NP-complete (as far as we know).
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10 Minute Review Of The Everex Green gPC TC2502
Yesterday I received my Everex TC2502 Green gPC. I paid a whopping $200 for the PC which included a mouse, keyboard and a small pair of speakers. Windows doesn’t come on this PC there is a fairly new Linux distribution called gOS that comes preinstalled. Sadly I missed the UPS man and I had to wait until he came back today. After it arrived I quickly opened it and started setting it up. The first thing I noticed was the fact that the PC is very light in comparison to my Sony Vaio. The next thing I noticed is that my mouse didn’t have a ball 
Further inspection reviled that the small plastic cover broke. Specifically the two tiny pieces that once twisted into place actually hold it together. I ended up using a few pieces of Scotch Tape to hold it together.
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MASSIVE Fluff Friends List On Facebook
There are quite a few applications on Facebook one of the more popular ones is (fluff)Friends. Mike Sego is the creator and I guess he works at Google (must be nice). Fluff Friends has about 340,000 daily active users. So what is the purpose of this game? It is kind of like a virtual pet that you feed, pet and race. You can buy it different foods and backgrounds. The various foods increase the speed of your Fluff. I have a cowe (not a cow but a cowe, it is the same animal, I want to make a baseball glove out of mine) that is saying not very cleverly “I’M RICH BITCH!”. Well because in Fluff terms I’m pretty damn rich (57480 Munny). I wanted to get even more than before mentioning the fact that I had a ton of money but I’ve lost interest mainly to Warbook. It is also very pointless since all I care about is MUNNY. I liek Munny…you like Munny too? No way. We should totally hang out. Ok moving on…
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Where Have We Been?
Well it has been a long time without an update. Have we ran out of things to write about? Not in the least. Last month was rather busy. I played more video games than I have in the longest time. Halo 3 came out and then there was Portal (Orange Box). I also moved and decided to switch hosting companies. My thoughts were very positive until a few minutes ago when I finally decided to do some work and got a CPU quota warning. Now the whole reason I left Dreamhost was because of the sometimes ridiculous load averages. Overall it was sluggish for a large amount of time. I didn’t mind all the time but I wanted to find something better.
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