Choosing between Kindle and Nook
This is my first post from an iPhone. I didn’t think I’d ever do this type of blogging but what the heck. Malleable is good. Availability maybe not so much.
Do I want a Kindle or do I want a Nook? Barnes and Noble seems to be making a great entry into the field of e-readers. The Kindle has been around longer. The Nook looks like it takes all the best the Kindle has to offer and improves it slightly. The libraries of books available to both devices are huge. Prices of the books are similar. Both devices can download periodicals and other third party content. Neither of these devices really goes too far beyond being a good reader while stuck in an aluminium tube in the sky but they are worth getting to know. Chances are we’ll soon be using them to blog, twit, text and prepare keynote addresses. I wonder how many years it will be before I can dump all my devices in exchange for just one device – a connected everywhere all-in-one portable phone, entertainment, reading and storage device. Probably not that many.
A painful learning process with Ubuntu, virtual servers and the inner workings of WordPress
I have been keeping this blog since 2004. I’ve written well over 1,000 entries including a year of blogging from Baghdad, Iraq. This blog has become a combination diary, political screed and memory lane for me. Needless to say, I’ve been extremely irritated that the blog crashes every other day. I’ve switched hosting providers three times now trying to get the issue corrected. Finally, I decided enough was enough.
After countless hours of troubleshooting my conclusion was that CPanel on CentOS is what has been causing my WordPress blog crashes.
I bit the bullet and created an Ubuntu virtual server using the LAMP stack at my hosting provider VPS.net. After two weeks of trial and error learning, I’ve migrated my entire blog from a CPanel managed environment to one where I am controlling everything using FTP (Filezilla) and SSH (putty).
I’ve had numerous problems with Apache mod_rewrite, setting up an FTP server from a command line and so on. For others who might be trying to setup and install their own WordPress instance or migrate an existing WordPress blog at the most basic levels, here are some links I think you may find useful.
Useful links for setting up or migrating WordPress to an Ubuntu server
HOWTO : Create a FTP server with user access (proftpd) – Ubuntu Forums
How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system
Migrate WordPress to a new server or directory | Richard Castera
Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex
Editing wp-config.php « WordPress Codex
WordPress SuperCache-Plus plugin | The Murmatrons
Cultural change and the U.S. Army are compatible after all
One of my biggest frustrations with military life is that old standby answer I always get when I ask why we are doing something I think is dumb – “We’ve always done it that way. Shut up and do it.” Welcome to new paradigms.
“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”
In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.
Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone along the chain of command to contribute.
Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.
As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors.
Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.
“We’ve gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white,” he said, “ ‘The best thing since sliced bread’ to ‘the craziest idea I have ever heard.’ ”
The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums, he would be tapping the kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.
“Our motto is, ‘If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me write doctrine, now is your chance,’ ” he said.
Technology inevitably changes everything. Hopefully, in the Army, that will mean we think on our feet more effectively and value our soldiers more for their minds than we have in the past. Warfighting has never been more of a mental game than it currently is and that trend will only continue.
Upgrading Windows 7 release candidate to Windows 7 RTM
If you are like me, you’ve been using Windows 7 release candidate for months now in your production environment.It was stable, it beat the pants off Windows Vista. The key question for me – how do I upgrade from a release candidate to a release to manufacturer build of the operating system? Microsoft has never officially made such an upgrade possible. However, there is a fairly simple way to step outside the permitted boundaries and upgrade Windows 7 from a beta or RC build to the RTM build of the OS. I got this information from Lockergnome and can report that it has worked like a charm on several different machines.
Here’s what you can do to bypass the check for pre-release upgrade IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO:
- Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
- Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
- Browse to the sources directory.
- Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
- Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
- Save the file in place with the same name.
Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.These same steps will be required as we transition from the RC milestone to the RTM milestone.
Again, we know many people (including tens of thousands at Microsoft) are relying on the pre-release builds of Windows 7 for mission critical and daily work, making this step less than convenient. We’re working hard to provide the highest quality release we can and so we’d like to make sure for this final phase of testing we’re supporting the most real world scenarios possible, which incremental build to build upgrades are not. At the same time everyone on the beta has been so great we wanted to make sure we at least offered an opportunity to make your own expert and informed choice about how to handle the upgrade.
We’re always humbled by the excitement around the releases and by the support and enthusiasm from those that choose to run our pre-releases. We’re incredibly appreciative of the time and effort you put into doing so. In return we hope we are providing you with a great release to work with at each stage of the evolution of the product. Our next stop is the RC…see you there!
THANK YOU!
–Windows 7 Team
Bear in mind that this process is not going to be supported if you run into any issues. Microsoft will not help you fix problems that you might encounter. I am not responsible for them either. If you are using a Windows 7 beta or the RC and decide to follow these steps to upgrade your existing environment you should back up any critical data first.
Military bans on social networking are counterproductive
When the Marine Corps doesn’t like something the tendency is to try and kill it. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps fails to understand that information wants to be free.
“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads aMarine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. “The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,” a Stratcom source told Danger Room.
This kind of approach just makes the people inside an organization expend inordinate amounts of energy finding new networks that avoid the silly rules and bans. It also discourages the younger crowd from sticking around. Can you say mission failure? Meanwhile, the public gets the idea that the U.S. military has something to hide.
“OPSEC is paramount. We will have procedures in place to deal with that,” Price Floyd, the Pentagon’s newly-appointed social media czar, told Danger Room. “What we can’t do is let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business… We need to be everywhere men and women in uniform are and the public is. If that’s MySpace and YouTube, that’s where we need to be, too.”
Can anyone tell me of a single battle that has been lost due to social networking? How about a single life lost directly due to “information leakage” related to Facebook, MySpace or Twitter? Certainly
I have no idea what a social media czar is but I’m thinking that the Federal Government needs a new annual convention – it can be called Flock of Czars. It will give all the Web 2.0 pundits something new to make fun of. The sad thing is that people who have decided on a military career are stuck with this sort of foolishness until there is a sea change in the level of blind authoritarianism. These arbitrary social networking bans and information non-distribution policies can cripple information operations related to winning the proverbial hearts and minds. Modern war, we’re told, is based on winning hearts and minds. I guess we’re losing.
