Musings of a technophile

Previously I had posted on how to repair your Dell XPS M170. While this will solve many poeple’s problems, for some, it may not be the permanent fix you would be hoping for. In my laptop, One of the resistors fell off when I put it in the oven. I had soldered it back on, and the video card had worked, but after a few months it broke again. I… Continue reading

After doing really bad at the beginning of L.A. Noire, I finally figured out a pattern towards ensuring that you get all the questions correct. First off, a few pointers:

1. After asking the question, always wait a couple seconds and look at them. Most of the time the person will continue to make some movements or the like.
2. If you are unsure if it’s a doubt or a lie, feel free

ASP.NET tries to make relative paths easy as your can insert “~” into any server control and it will add the application path to the link so that the

“~/images/header.png”

will become

“/myblog/images/header.png”

This is important because if you have somethine like a master page which is used in multiple directories, using the “~” can be very helpful as it will dynamically path your images… Continue reading

For Ethan’s birthday we bought him the Fisher-Price SmartCycle. This is a great compromise since he is so into video games but we would prefer he exercise his whole body instead of just his fingers. A little background – this “toy” basically is a child’s exercise bike with a built-in video game system that is probably like a 8-bit Nintendo given the graphics. While it is an awesome idea, there… Continue reading

For several reasons (the most notable of which was that I had differing versions of VMWare ESXi server at my company and vSphere Client 4.1 doesn’t play too nice with ESXi 4.0) I decided to update our VMWare ESXi 4.0 server to ESXi 4.1U1. Unfortunately this isn’t as easy as it looks if you are reading the VMWare documentation to do this. That being said, I was able… Continue reading

We rarely let the boys play video games (don’t want them turning out like me) so they only get to play it occasionally, even if they do just dwell over it until the next time. That being said, I was outside, and the boys are making this fort looking thing with the pillows of the patio chairs.

Then I hear Logan go “qua quak” and then he throws a… Continue reading

In order to monitor the servers at my work we use Opsview and Nagios. They are pretty complex yet good free monitoring solutions. The problem I had with it is that it runs on linux, and I wanted to be able to do SQL queries for various checks or event handlers. On various other machines I wanted to write shell scripts to integrate things with my SQL 2005 servers, but… Continue reading

OnLive is a new gaming service which will basically let you play PC games, even if you don’t have a beefed up gaming PC. How it does this is simple: The game runs through cloud servers (basically multiple servers working as one), and the outputted video is streamed to your PC. As you play the game, the input is sent back to the server in order to control your… Continue reading

I’m not “industry insider” or anything, but if I have any qualities it’s that I can find problems in things very easy. On one hand that makes me a good problem solver, on the other hand it makes me seem like a very pessimistic person. In any case, Throughout the last weeks I’ve noticed some problems that have occurred regarding Apple’s iPhone 4. I’m sure there are thousands of posts… Continue reading

First, you need to install the nagios-nrpe-server. There is a nagios-nrpe-plugin but that’s not what you need because that is just the plugin and you need this daemon (Linux equivalent of a Windows Service for all you Windows guys).

sudo apt-get install nagios-nrpe-server

next, we should check and make sure that the service is actually running. We can do this two ways
sudo ps -Al | grep nrpe… Continue reading