Ever wanted to put together a VMware virtual machine host without using windows, but were too intimidated? If you�re like me, you like the idea of using a low overhead OS on your host boxes to maximize the resources available for your virtual machines.
Unfortunately, up until now any *nix system install had a bit of a learning curve that required hours of using the Google.
Having spent the day yesterday trying to minimize time spent loading host machines so I could get to work with my virtual machines, I put together this how to / tutorial so that others could benefit from the ease of which this system is setup.

Read on to see how easy it really is!
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While researching something at work this afternoon with the Google, I happened to pull of a list of my recent searches and was quite amused.

The technical searches aren’t that odd to me, but “bg’s reunite”, “haters”, all the food searches, and “vermont ‘red state’” look funny to me in that list.

Oh and trogdor.
What the heck was I thinking that day??

I think this pretty much describes how I like my work days to go to a “T”.

1. Let them work when they want
   Geeks work almost every moment they are awake. They are online before they go to the office. They are home working after the office closes. They work weekends. They are even sometimes working in their dreams. Employers should understand this and more importantly appreciate it. Don’t force geeks to work 8 – 5 if there is no real need other than “company morale.” Meetings are one thing, so is socializing with coworkers, but a relaxed office schedule will do wonders for the contentment levels of your employed geeks.
2. Let them work where they want
   Geeks prefer to have a couch around to nap on if they are tired. Some like no windows, others want to stare out into a city or landscape. At home, geek’s offices are usually more lived in, more comfortable and enjoyable than anywhere else in the world. This is because they love what they do, and they do it so much of the time they need to be comfortable where they do it.
3. Let them control their lighting
   There is nothing more annoying than working in bright crappy fluorescent lighting if you prefer to work in the dark, or vice versa. Geeks usually have sensitive eyes from staring at CRT monitors for too long. The last thing you want is your geeks to have headaches. Most geeks aren’t very pleasant to work with when they have headaches.
4. Let them wear headphones
   Geeks are experts in the arts of “focus.” Focusing takes removing all unnecessary distractions from your environment and creating a state where nothing else is going on but what they are working on. The harder the problem they are trying to solve or the more creative they have to be, the more they need to focus. Headphones, or simply a lack of ringing phones and talking sales people allow geeks to focus much easier.
5. Do not expect them to wear a suit
   Geeks find arbitrary activities that lack real and meaningful purpose, a waste of time and energy. This includes attire. Most companies today are aware of this and even practice casual dress so as to make everyone more comfortable, but geeks are a special case. “Suits” (the kind of person) usually represent a business man who lacks most things other than a nice smile and great negotiation skills.
6. Do not make them participate in company events (unless you are sure it is geek-friendly)
   Most geeks will not be jumping up and down with joy to attend a company party to celebrate the local football team, unless of course there is beer, and they can hang around and talk to each other about geeky things. Keep this in mind when planning company events. Geeks like to have fun, just not the same kind of fun as your typical non-geek.
7. Do not hold a lot of arbitrary meetings that could have otherwise been handled through email or IM
   This one is important. Like I said, geeks need to focus to be happy and able to focus. Nothing is more of an interruption than someone walking into their space unexpectedly and saying “hey do you have a minute?” The answer is usually going to be a disgruntled “Sure.” The truth is geeks are fine with attending planned meetings (and will happily be there if the meeting is really a necessary one for them to attend in person), but are usually most happy communicating through email and IM. These forms of communication are most appealing to geeks because they do not interrupt you, and polite geeks will even respond with a quick “hold on a sec, I’m in the middle of something.” Email and IM are recorded, searchable records of conversations. They are efficient and to the point. This also makes geeks happy. Geeks can discuss anything through email and IM and will usually be more willing and thorough with their response. Face to face meetings are important, geeks know that, but I would guess that 90% of conversations and meetings held face to face, would be more efficient and end with happier people, if they were held in a recordable, written, virtual space.
8. Do not make them do anything other than work
   This one isn’t completely accurate all the time. Geeks are team players, but they are also easily insulted by being given a task below their level of expertise or outside of the scope of their position. They’ll do it, but they won’t be totally happy. This includes: answering phones, taking out trash, going shopping for company supplies, and “filling in” for a sales person.

_{Original Article posted courtesy Nomadishere.}

Good thing I run this on all of my machines as well. See Christa, marrying a geek has it’s benefits…

SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers’ home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project… that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife’s stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, ‘I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.’

Full story here.

Occasionally I come across something tech related that I’m working on which is hard to find documented, so I document it here for myself & for google to index to possibly help others…

I wrote a simple web page hit counter for my website years ago using php & mysql. This worked fine until last year when I had to move my site from a machine I managed to a hosting provider. One issue surfaced where randomly, a string with ?PHPSESSID= would appear in the URLs while users were browsing my site, like http://defunkt.net/?PHPSESSID=1ba1f201361fa4ae2fef8122bec3.

Having the PHPSESSID in the URL is not only ugly, but it’s a security risk as well. If you visit a page that has PHPSESSID in the URL, a malicious admin on the site you click to could gain your privileges on the site you came from.

The Solution

If you are using a hosting provider like I am now, you probably don’t have root level access to the machine serving your pages. The solution in this case is rather simple; if your provider is running Apache (most do) use a .htaccess file.
.htaccess is the default filename of Apache’s directory-level configuration file. It provides the ability to customize configurations defined in the main configuration file.
In this case, all you need to do is create a .htaccess file in your www root, and include the following 2 lines:

php_value session.use_only_cookies 1
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0

That’s it! Apache will apply your configuration change even though is defined differently by your hosting company.

I had to reload my machine this past weekend. I was very proud of the fact that it was going on 2.5 years and Windows XP SP2 was still as solid as a rock. You can imagine my disappointment Sunday morning when I discovered my machine hopelessly infected with some kind of combination popupware/virus. Being the IT dork that I am I spent a good hour trying to clean it up, but the damage was done & all I could do was admit it would be safer just to reload.

The first step was to backup what I need & do a quick list of what I had installed. While I do keep all of my very important data on a separate RAID drive, I did have several gigs worth of stuff on my desktop (including some Jazz selections Christa and I spent hours selecting with our friend Ryan for the wedding) that while I could get away with losing, would just just be a pain to recompile. Things started to get really complicated at this point and required another cup of coffee to mull over… The virus piece started producing automatic shutdowns every 1 minute, and if I aborted that would render the machine hopelessly useless by killing off all kinds of services requires to make anything happen in windows. Safe mode should offer me a method to get in and move the gigs of files I need to a backup external firewire drive, right? BZZZT!! Safe mode by definition only loads up the minimal subset of drivers needed for Windows to operate. So how the crap was I supposed to back my stuff up? Luckily being an IT dork pays off here as I knew I could run a windows repair without having my desktop deleted, and hopefully fix stuff enough to get in & throw everything on my firewire drive.

By now I’ve managed to fight with Windows for almost 2 hours and have only gotten to the point that I could finally reload the machine. Fast forward another uneventful 2 hours of watching Windows XP install configure and prepare to run, having to track down drivers, update to SP2, and then install the remaining 62 critical security updates. So for 4 hours into this little project and all I’ve got to show for it is a fresh reload of Windows. Super! Add another few hours to reinstall the rest of the required set of apps, all my assorted XP tweaks, and other miscellaneous tricks, and you’ve got a full day of doing not much else but waiting for things to happen on my computer.

So it’s now Wednesday morning, and after tinkering around a bit more last night, I’m pretty confidant that I have everything set the way I want it, and the machine is running spectacular. I just hate that I had to forfeit a few days of use to get it that way…

I had to reload my machine yesterday (story here). It was not fun. In the process of installing applications I came across a peculiar issue with Microsoft’s .Net Framework which didn’t appear to have much documentation, so I’m documenting it to save others with this problem time & effort.

In reloading my machine there were a few applications that required the .Net Framework 2.0 from Microsoft. I then attempted to install Sony’s Sound Forge v8 to find that it will only run using the 1.1 version of the framework. So there’s a problem: different applications requiring different versions of the .Net framework. I already had 2.0 installed, could I install 1.1 and be able to run all the apps I need? The answer was suprisingly simple: YES!

Microsoft in a fit of surprising sanity & intelligence designed the .Net framework such that

• applications requiring 1.1 will only call 1.1, while applications requiring 2.0 will only call 2.0
• each successive version is standalone as to avoid DLL hell

It blows my mind that for once Microsoft did something right! Now if they could just apply this to Vista or Office 2007 the world would be a better place…

Not many people know it, but there are a lot of open source/3rd party firmware projects available for those popular Linksys router/switch/wireless access point/place to plug in wires many people own. To most, it’s just another box with flashing lights you need to occasionally unplug and plug back in when your ISP says to do so or you have internet problems. To us geeks, its a playground!

I’m not a n00b at hacking my hardware with new firmware as I have run DD-WRT (another 3rd party firmware) for over a year without too many problems. Unfortunately after a recent service pack however, my router had gotten very unstable. So when Adam let me know about Tomato, I was excited to try something new. This firmware package stressed speed, a small footprint, and promised QoS management & a bunch of powerful real-time AJAX powered applets & graphs. I was not disappointed!
With very little effort I was flashed and upgraded from one 3rd party to another, and after refreshing the browser after the upgrade I was up and running. The only conversion issue I was was that I needed to reset the wireless settings; no big deal.

The customizable QoS pies have allowed me to fix some pesky problems when running torrents, and overall my little network is running a million times more smoothly; most importantly the semi-weekly router reboot and/or service drop seems to be resolved! Best of all, I now have some seriously dorky stats/graphing capabilities!!

I would definitely recommend this firmware to anyone who might be interesting in tweaking their network that has one of the Linksys WRT routers. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for future versions…