http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com Technical notes and societal musings Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:20:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A truly illustrative but terrifying comic... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2008/08/20/voting-machine-security/ multiple numbers, no roaming... sounds like it just needs some growth, early adopters, and polish.  Slick idea. http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/11/30/cool-phone-service-for-travelers/ Wow, I was putting together my MythTV machine and it was OK until I had to get my remote front-end working. Because of the WAF, I selected a small machine - the Hauppage MediaMVP. What I didn't recognize was that the documentation for getting it running... umm... stinks. ... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/28/holy-mvpmc-moly/ so I tried putting together a media server earlier in the year (late last year?) and never quite got it going.  Now, it's up and running.  I fragged the previous build and installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and all the issues I had previously run into pretty much were just ... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/27/mythtv-begins/ I wanted to have my server with X installed but not starting, and found a handy tool rcconf from a discussion about how to keep X from running automatically.  It handles the startup alterations for you, kind of like chkconfig in redhat.Technorati Tags: ubuntu, xwindows, rcconf http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/24/ubuntu-server-without-starting-x/ A friend of mine, Bill, found out that his password had been mailed to him in plaintext from his 'shiny, new 401k' and he wrote about the disconcerting experience of a financial services company being careless with security. Having worked in a financial services company, I can only say ... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/17/wishful-security-thinking/ More quick reference links to apache goodness: mod-rewrite and virtual hosts overview. Next step, hooking up the rewrite so my old-format links with multiple blogs point to the new-format post URLs. sigh. Wordpress is simple, but it still isn't psychic. And I also found that Redhat has a nice overview of ... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/14/apache-magic/ I finally got the MU installation working the way I desire, though it ended up requiring some code hacking. Why? For some reason, the wpmu-settings file strips out "www." before evaluating the blog... and when it did that and redirected, it found my Apache redirect... which sent it ... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/14/one-more-muddle-to-sort/ ...thank goodness. OK, on to the next challenges... how to adapt the theme(s) to the new 2.x code, and then to run the theme security scanner... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/13/mu-themes-and-quotes-now-working/ used Stray Quotes since it appears to be more maintained. Now I just have to actually get updated themes and then add it in again... Also, I got closer to the everything-running-multidomain (though not with multiple URLs to the same blog, and I may fall back on apache redirects) thanks ... http://mps.blog.webplumbers.com/2007/10/13/more-migrating-fun/