Converting a disk to an iso image is easier to do in Linux than in other operating system.
dd bs=2k if=/dev/cdrom of=~/disk_image.iso
Both the factory hard drive and 500 GB Western Digital hard drive seem to be failing. I ran the extended Apple hardware diagnostic test and the core hard ware passed the test (hd not tested).
Lesson learned here … Thank god for backups.
New Primary laptop
May 3
It’s been over a week since I purchased my new 13 in MacBook Pro, and I finally managed to fully transfer all of my files from my old white plastic MacBook. Even though I bought the Core 2 Duo instead of the 15 in i5 MacBook Pro, this laptop is by and the the best machine I’ve ever owned. The only problem is the stock 2 GB that the laptop come with. It is very noticeable when I have VirtualBox running in the background. So I’m planning on upgrading the RAM to 4 GB within a month so.
Hacker humor
May 1
While reading the regex portion of Apress’s Beginning Perl Second Edition by James Lee, the following sample code totally made my day.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$_ = "There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX";
s/(\w+)\s+(\w+)/$2 $1/;
$_ = ucfirst($_);
print $_, "?\n";
3 years and counting
Apr 22
It’s been three years since this blog came into existence and it doesn’t look like I’ll be posting any meaningful or relevant content to it anytime soon.
Apr 4
Though I’m late to the whole Twitter thing, I’m finally going to start posting tweets of random crap. I’m sure glad that the account I registered more than 3 years ago was still active 
Total quality
Feb 27
SCALE 8x
Feb 22
Being my first Linux conference, overall I had a really good time. Seeing and talking to a lot of famous Open Source figures was pretty kool.
I only managed to see four different talks.
My favorite talk was Jono Bacon’s talk on the evolution of the Free Software/Open Source movement to what now will be fun and rapid development using a new development approach. Essentially, Cononical has developed a Python software development framework called Quickly (reminds me of Ruby on Rails, though I haven’t hacked much on it to even compare its similarities) That makes it real easy to package (.deb only) and publish.
BSD for Linux users:
This talk was mainly focused on the difference and advantages of using the BSD’ s (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) compared to Linux. Now more then I ever, I’m thinking of delaying a DNS BIND server on my local network running on OpenBSD.
Basic Introduction to KDE:
As the name implies, it was definitely, an introduction to KDE 4. Although I prefer using Gnome, the
Python for non programmers:
Also, as the name implies, this was a definite introduction to Python. Although I’m not big on Python, I definitely felt like an advance Python hacker by being on this talk.
Even though I only attended the Saturday event, I really enjoyed SCALE. It definitely felt like a community conference and it didn’t felt corporate what so ever.
mod_ruby and eRuby
Feb 16
I finally had some time to install mod_ruby and eRuby on my server.
Prerequisites:
httpd-devel ruby ruby-devel eruby
yum install httpd-devel ruby ruby-devel eruby
Installing mod_ruby was pretty confusing, as module default compilation is intended for Apache 1.3 (not why this is the case)
If you’re running Apache 2.0 or higher, I managed to successfully compiled mod_ruby as the following:
./configure.rb –with-apr-includes=/usr/include/apr-1
make
make install
After the install, then its a matter of just adding the custom ruby http conf file to httpd conf.d directory.
SAMPLE:
AddType text/html .rhtml
LoadModule ruby_module modules/mod_ruby.so
RubyRequire apache/ruby-run
#RubyRequire apache/ruby-debug
RubyRequire apache/eruby-run
#RubyRequire apache/eruby-debug
# Execute *.rbx files as Ruby scripts
Options ExecCGI
SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::RubyRun.instance
#RubyHandler Apache::RubyDebug.instance
# Handle *.rhtml files as eRuby files
SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::ERubyRun.instance
RubyHandler Apache::ERubyDebug.instance
Now I can embed Ruby code on standard html pages serving and running natively using Apache and eRuby.
Hence, perlninja.pl
References:
http://www.modruby.net/en/
http://www.ptwit.ac.th/seksan/blog/?p=59
WordPress Upgrade
Feb 15
WordPress upgrade went real smooth. At a glance, WordPress 1.4 and 2.9 seem to be worlds apart.