I finely got around to redesigning http://faulk.me, it is a complete change from what it was before. This was the first time that I’ve used the 960.gs grid system and it was very useful and made for a quicker design process — I highly recommend using it.
After almost a week of using Google Drive I have found a limitation that is a show stopper for me. If you add a file to you Google Drive folder that already exists online it doesn’t check to see if the file is the same as the one online it just re-uploads it, as you can imagine this can be rather irritating if you have 70GB, as I do, of data that is already on two systems that you would like to keep in sync.
Other limitations that are bothering me:
- It doesn’t tell you what file/folder it is currently syncing.
- If it errors out it doesn’t give you much info, so if it hung on uploading a file you have to enable debugging and dig through the log file to track it down.
- Memory usage is way to high, for me average running usage is around 300MB and I’ve see it get up to 1GB.
Google Drive (http://drive.google.com) has been long anticipated and finely here. I’ve been using it for the last three days and I put it through some tests and it has passed almost every one. One problem did arise, it got stuck with an error “Unable to sync” with no other information, to resolve the “Unable to sync” error I did the fallowing:
- Restart Google Drive.
- Enable diagnostic mode.
- Hold Shift and right click on the Google Drive icon.
- A new option “Enable diagnostic mode” will be in the list, select it.
- A new windows will show up, change the option “Log level” to “Debug”.
- Click the “Start logging” button.
- After Google Drive gives you the Error “Unable to sync” open the debug file (Win7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Drive\sync_log.log)
- Look through the log file for an error about some file/s not being able to sync.
- Once you find the file/s remove them from their Google Drive folder/s on your system.
- Restart Google Drive.
- If after a restart Google Drive it is able to sync without any errors then you can manually upload the file/s that you had issues with through the Google Drive web interface (http://drive.google.com).
I have uploaded over 70GB of files and I have only had a problem with one file that happened to be one PSD file out of about 70 PSD files.
For about a year or two I’ve owned a Gerber Applegate-Fairbairn that I have found to be a very nice knife for under $100. It holds a good edge, its light, and it’s not to small nor to big.
About a month ago I was messing with it to see if I could adjust the location of the belt clip and somehow stripped out the belt clip screws. I talked with Gerber and they sent me a set of new screws and through-in a new belt clip as well. I tried putting the new screws in and came to the realization that the screw holes were stripped out as well, so I contacted Gerber again and they told me to send the knife in.
Well today, about a week and a half after I sent the knife in, I received a package from them and in it was a brand new knife.
Thank you Gerber!
Today I ran across a post talking about using Amazon’s EC2 service as a VPN to secure your wireless connection when on a public wi-fi.
I read through the how-to and figured I’d write up my much easier and quicker way of doing basically the same thing, plus I think it maybe a bit cheaper.
1. Create a EC2 instance, you don’t need anything fancy just the very basic. I choose “Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI 1.0″
2. After you’ve created to EC2 instance and downloaded your key pairs setup your ssh tunnel on your system
Using PuTTY(http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)
1. Download the PuTTYGen tool and convert the amazon EC2 key pair you downloaded to a ppk file.
2. Download and open PuTTY
3. Under the Sessions section put “ec2-user@” fallowed by the EC2 instance URL in the “Host Name” section. exp. ec2-user@ec2-75-101-174-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com
4. Click and expand the “SSH” section and click on the “Auth” section
5. Under the “Auth” section click the “Browse…” button under the “Authentication parameters” and find the key pair that you converted to a ppk file using PuTTYGen.
6. Under the “SSH” section click on the “Tunnels” section.
7. Under the “Source port” input a random port like 7070.
8. Choose the “Dynamic” radio button and leave the “Auto” radio button selected.
9. Click back on the “Session” section and under the “Saved Sessions” give your session a name and click the “Save” button.
10. Now click the “Open” button at the bottom of the window and you should now have a SSH tunnel to your Amazon EC2 instance.
Using the command line SSH:
1. Open the tunnel by using a command like this –> ssh -C2qTnN -D [Random Port] ec2-user@[EC2 Instance URL]
exp. ssh -C2qTnN -D 7070 ec2-user@ec2-75-101-174-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Now that you have the tunnel running ether using PuTTY or the ssh command all you have to do is point your browser/software to use the SOCKS proxy 127.0.0.1:[Random Port You Selected]. exp. 127.0.0.1:7070
Today I decided to test out a number of the anti-virus scanners that are floating around the internet. I didn’t do a very in-depth test, just gathered a archive of 3765 viruses and tested each anti-virus scanner to see how many of the viruses it found and how many files it scanned.
Note: Some of the viruses had files archived in side of them so the scanned number will sometimes be higher then the number of files I listed above.
Microsoft Security Essentials (Scanned: 3799, Found: 3668)
* Quick scan.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 (Scanned: 3851, Found:3680)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Slow scan.
Sophos Anti-Virus (Small Business) (Scanned: 3772, Found: 3631)
* Is designed for a management environment (10+ systems) and not a SOHO environment.
* Bad scan reports.
Sunbelt Vipre (Scanned: 190, Found: 13)
Don’t know what happened with this but it wouldn’t scan more then 190 files.
* Quick install.
* Requires reboot after install.
* By default it doesn’t scan inside archives.
* Can’t scan archives inside other archives.
F-Secure Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3757, Found: 3698)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Minimal interface
* If system has low memory it disables email scanning and other advanced process monitoring by default.
Avast Pro (Scanned: 3796, Found: 3644)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Quick install.
* Really quick scan.
Panda Cloud Anti-Virus
I stopped the scan after letting it run for about 10 min. and it had only scanned 233 files and only found 150 infections.
* Quick install
* High CPU usage.
* Requires network connection
* Very very slow scan.
ESET NOD32 (Scanned: 3739, Found: 3622)
* Quick virus database update.
* Very fast scan.
ClamAV for Windows (Doesn’t support scanning one file or directory)
* Easy install
* Can’t scan individual files or directory’s
Avira AntiVir (Scanned: 3773, Found: 3716)
* Quick scan.
* Bit high on system resources
AVG Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3774, Found: 3702)
* Somewhat slow install.
* Low system foot-print.
Today as most will note is April First aka. April Fools Day and to celebrate the internet goes insane.
A site that I frequent called DeviantART changed all the identity icons to one of a few icons, I was given the “TEAM EDWARD” icon and for the records I hate the books and movies. Naturally I went to the settings to change the icon back to my old one and in place of what normally would be an easy change was the flashing text “TEAM EDWARD!!! WOOOOO!!!!!!!11″.
We’ve been looking to buy a new house over the last few months and I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how it’s better to rent then to buy so I sat down and ran the numbers and this is what I cam up with.
If you buy the a house at $350,000 with no down with a 30 year loan at 5.25% interest, you will pay $345,776 in interest bringing the total to $695,776. Now lets add property tax, witch in my area is 1.1% so you would do 0.011 times 350,000 witch comes to $3,550 per year over 30 years equals $115,500. That bringing are total to $811,276. Okay, now with repairs I’m going to shoot high and say over 30 years you will have $50,000 in repairs, that bringing the total to $861,276. So owning a $350,000 house for 30 years will coast you $861,276 if you don’t make any extra payments.
If you rent a house that would coast about $350,000 in my area it would cast you, on the low end, about $1,400 per month at 30 years that comes to $504,000, that’s assuming that rent doesn’t go up over 30 years.
So on the surface it looks like your saving $357,276 but lets say you want to sell the house and lets assume the house is worth the same as what you paid for it ($350,000), that means over renting you brought the coast benefit down to almost zero. That’s assuming you don’t stay in the house for another 10 or more years. If you do live in the house for more then the loans 30 years then all you have to pay is property tax.
The nice things about owning your own house is you can do what ever you want to it, also you wont have a land lord you have to deal with. Now if you plan on moving a lot in the next 30 years then buying is definitely not for you.
NOTE: I didn’t add house insurance into this because I was assuming two things, you would have renters insurance, and you would have your car insurance under the same police as your house insurance witch almost always saves you money bring the coast difference between the house insurance and renters insurance to zero.
[EDIT] Changed property tax in my area from 1.08% to 1.1%
I find it interesting when people are surprised by Google’s actions when it comes to privacy. The latest uproar has to do with Google’s new social networking service Buzz that is integrated into its email service GMail. A number of people feel that Google made a poor choice in opting everyone into the Buzz service instead of offering it as a opt-in service and leaving it up to the individual to decide if they want to enable the service or not.
What people seem to forget is that Google offers all of its services for one if not both of the fallowing reasons, to harvest information about its users and to use that information to display advertising that targets your needs and wants. Buzz is just one more way for them to get information about you.
If you don’t like the idea of Google collecting data about you then you should seriously consider your online life. Do you use facebook, myspace, amazon or some other online site? They all collect information about what you do, what you look at, who you talk to. They collect it, analyze it and target ads, applications, sales, and more to what you seem to like based on the information that they have collected on you.
You ever wonder about what information the FBI or the government has about you? I would worry more about what information some of the online sites have about you.
I updated FlickrMyG so that it now allows you to add an exclude list to the getUserSets function.
Function reference: http://wiki.faulk.me/index.php?n=FlickrMyG.GetUserSets
Download newest version: http://svn.faulk.me/listing.php?repname=FlickrMyG&