1. Create a file on D: called “burn”.
2. Open up a command prompt and CD to “%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows”.
3. Delete the “Burn” folder found there: “RMDIR /S Burn”
4. Issue this command: “MKLINK /D Burn D:\burn”

This re-creates the Burn folder as a symbolic link over to the real folder on your secondary drive. Problem solved.

Looking on my hosting provider’s php error log showed that the “wp-scripts/class-IXR.php” file was triggering a memory limit error. My host has the php memory limit parameter locked, so I couldn’t change it. The only fix was to modify the class-IXR.php to limit this memory hog section.

Here’s the section (around line 97) to change:

  case 'array':
    $return = '<array><data>'."\n";
    $idave=0;  //change
    foreach ($this->data as $item) {
        $return .= '  <value>'.$item->getXml()."</value>\n";
        if (++$idave == 8) break;  //change
    }
    $return .= '</data></array>';
    return $return;
    break;

This change will only list the last 8 posts in the app, but that’s fine for my needs. Adjust as necessary to fit your host’s memory limit.

• Download current Binary
• Download current Source

The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.

Law enforcement is not saying a lot about its social surveillance, but examples keep coming to light. The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of a man suspected of helping coordinate protests at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh by sending out messages over Twitter.

In some cases, the government appears to be engaged in deception. The Boston Globe recently quoted a Massachusetts district attorney as saying that some police officers were going undercover on Facebook as part of their investigations.

–NY Times, Editorial

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

–Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

This is coming from the company that used to have as it’s mantra: “Do no evil.” What exactly they mean by evil has been up for debate for quite a while now. At least now we know at least one thing they think is evil. Privacy. It seems that when your business is knowing other people’s business it must be hard to keep your corporate philosophy straight. Schmidt is the worst type of “big business loves big government” corporate fascist. I guess it was inevitable. He certainly wielded the hammer of big government to squash Microsoft back when he was the CEO of Novell.

1. Shop with a credit card, not a debit card. The procedures for dealing with fraudulent credit card activities are much more entrenched(and easier to deal with) since credit cards have been around for years. Debit cards are still a relatively new thing, and since they are tied to your actual checking account can be a mess to sort out if checks have bounced or payments have been missed. Credit cards still offer a layer of protection that debit cards don’t.

2. Use Firefox. This could have been number one on the list. I suggest all home users use Firefox at all times, instead of Internet Explorer. And, with online shopping, it’s even more important. The fact is, Internet Explorer remains the single biggest target for viruses and spyware in existence. To get Firefox just go to http://www.mozilla.org and download it.

3. Look for the padlock symbol. The presence of this symbol: in your browser’s address bar means that the purchase you are about to make is encrypted as it travels across the internet.

4. Avoid prices that are way out of line. What I mean is, if the price seems to be way higher or lower than market price then move on. What you will find is that most of the time these low prices are accompanied by ridiculously high shipping rates to compensate. Extremely low prices are a sign that all is not right with this vendor.

5. Don’t rush. Take your time when making a purchase from an online vendor that you’ve never dealt with before. Step through each page and read all the fine print during checkout.

6. Use different passwords. If you are making a purchase from a new vendor and they require “registration” or that you set up an account with them, don’t use a common password. Use a different password for each account. I know it’s a pain, but you can write them down and keep them in a desk drawer or something to make it easier. Having the same password on all of your website accounts is a major security risk for you.

7. Use one-time use e-credit cards if you can. I use these all the time through paypal. Basically, you can generate credit card numbers that are tied to your paypal account. These numbers are only valid for one transaction. That way, if someone hacks your account at that particular site all they will get is a useless card number. Paypal offers these numbers as do many banks.

8. Check seller ratings. If you are dealing with a vendor that you’ve never heard of before, consider looking them up on a rating service such as bizrate.com or pricegrabber.com.

Hope these help. Shop safe and keep your radar up. If something seems fishy just close your browser and don’t go back to the site.

He’s making a very important free market argument here. The cathedral style of programming is very kin to a central planning scenario. The effectiveness and efficiency of any service, budget, product, etc. will always be only as good as the intelligence, creativity and desire of the few central planners that are assigned to the task. Converse this with the free market where thousands upon thousands of people have the chance to apply their skills and creativity to each problem in each industry. Distributed knowledge is impossible to replicate in a centrally planned model. But, more than that, it’s also impossible to replicate distributed creativity and even distributed “luck.” Raymond knows very well that so many times a computer problem is solved simply by pure luck. The right person being in the right place at the right time to catch that fleeting glimpse of what truly caused a given software bug. And that person is irreplaceable as a market participant.

This is just as true in the broader economy as it is in the software market. How many of our most essential products began as derivatives of another’s work and were perfected by the creativity of one guy in the right place at the right time? How many were discovered simply by accident? Many. Raymond understands this and is willing to take the heat for defending it. He’s been one of the few technologists who haven’t demonized capitalism, with such infamous quotes as “love doesn’t scale,” where he’s making the point that if we depend on getting critical goods and services from others simply on the basis of benevolence instead of a profit motive, we’re going to be up the creek. Love stops when the other guy can’t pay his bills any more. He’s also been critical of some moves within the open source community to police it’s own:

This is a perfect example of a good theory proving consistent down to a level of practice. He’s taking what he knows to be true in principle and putting feet to it in the real world. But, there aren’t a lot of his type in the open source community as a whole, which is strange. Most are an odd mix of some kind of government mandated “freedom.” Doc Searls is an example of this type of thinking. Searls generally agrees with Eric Raymond’s software development model on the whole. If he didn’t, he would hardly be the editor in cheif of Linux Journal magazine. His application of those ideas to a free and open market are disturbingly mingled with calls for government regulation, control and spending. He has called for government rollout of broadband services to citizens as an effort to create his idea of a consumer controlled economy:

But Doc misses the obvious in that you don’t own what we create. When a government uses the collective capital of it’s people to create a certain service or product, that product is the property of no-one in particular. The asset created is now the property of the collective whole, since the capital used was from the collective. This might sound utopian and wonderful, but in the real world it produces nothing but problems. The problems created by a property that has no invested owner are obvious. We love to praise the interstate highway system, but we conveniently leave out the horrible shape it devolves into before being fixed. We overlook the miles and miles of ghost construction that never seems to finish because no “owner” has a profit motive for completing it. Indeed, we can’t “begin to calculate what it would cost us today not to have it.” But that isn’t because the interstate system was such a wonderful idea. It’s because we don’t know for sure what would have taken it’s place. We might have something much, much better today if central planners hadn’t wasted all that confiscated capital on the limited vision of a few central planners. Futurama-style people tubes anyone?

The difference between Raymond and Searls is the dialectic. The one side respecting the connection between capital and private property, and seeing the unhampered expression of those as producing the sought after results by logical necessity. The other side is trying to force an open ideal through the heavy hand of government – producing a bazaar that is carefully constructed and regulated by a staff from the biggest “cathedral” of all. You might call them the “priests” of capital and risk. I’ve been glad to see Jeff Tucker and other’s from the Mises Institute so interested in open source and the idea of anti-intellectual property. It will be libertarian free-market types that will ultimately swing this argument in the open source community to the right conclusion. The conclusion that government meddling in capital markets produces not more openness, freedom and competition, but more fascism and corporate rigidity. And that is a detriment to all markets. Especially open source.

Critical listening on this subject:

Against Intellectual Monopoly: Michele Boldrin Interview:


Download

But, just wanted to give kudos to him for his work: Nearband Networks Blog.

On a side note, this also shows how easy it is in the IT field to inadvertently duplicate someone’s work and never even know it. This is especially true with software development. Copyrights should be for products, not processes. The classic example: Carmack’s Reverse.

Network booting has been around for a long time. When I was first getting into network administration, around 1997, network cards came with a socket on board. This socket was so that you could plug in a boot rom chip that you had to buy extra. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone use them, but I’m sure a lot of people used it to boot thin clients for IBM dumb terminal type scenarios. Now days the PXE standard is pretty much universal in PC’s. It’s a great spec that makes the whole process easy. It also helps that PC’s have tons of RAM to be able to handle large boot images. But, enough history though. What exactly happens during the PXE boot process? I’ll quote this from the SpinRite post:

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. You can think of it the same way as booting from a CDROM or floppy disk, except that the binary being booted is coming from a TFTP(Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server on your network. PXE knows what TFTP server to contact and what boot image to download because you will specify them in every DHCP response packet by configuring your DHCP server to do so. The process really couldn’t be simpler. So, armed with this info, let’s see what you need to get started:

That’s pretty much it. Once you’ve grabbed all the packages, you can now start assembling the pieces. I’m going to use the standard folder locations, but you can put them anywhere you like. Just remember to change my commands to fit your changes. Also, this will all be shown using Ubuntu, so you’ll have to sort out what packages to get on your own if you use another distro. Or just download and compile them from source. It’s easy with a few Google searches. Now then, the first thing to do is make sure your TFTP server is set up right. It can be run standalone, but most people run it from the INETD wrapper daemon. Create a file in “/etc/xinetd.d/” called tftp. Open it and edit as such:

service tftp
{
        disable                 = no
        socket_type             = dgram
        protocol                = udp
        wait                    = yes
        user                    = root
        server                  = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
        server_args             = -s /var/lib/tftpboot
        per_source              = 11
        cps                     = 100 2
        flags                   = IPv4
}

Now, let’s make the TFTP root directory structure and copy the needed files in like this:

dave@localhost$> sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
dave@localhost$> sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /var/lib/tftpboot
dave@localhost$> sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /var/lib/tftpboot
dave@localhost$> sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/vesamenu.c32 /var/lib/tftpboot

At this point your TFTP server and folder structure is ready to go, except for the default configuration file. PXELINUX will look for it’s configuration file in a certain order. It looks for a file in the “pxelinux.cfg” directory named after the mac address of the booting machine first, and then downward in descending order using the hex encoded IP address of the machine minus 1 character, until it falls back finally to a file called default. This allows for grouping of machines based on address. Since we don’t group machines, we’ll put everything in the default file. So create a file in “/var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg” called default and put this in it:

DEFAULT vesamenu.c32
PROMPT 0
MENU TITLE Network Boot Menu

TIMEOUT 50

LABEL local
  menu label ^Windows
  localboot 0

LABEL memtest
  menu label ^Memory Scanner
  kernel memtest.x86

LABEL spinrite
  menu label ^Disk Scanner
  kernel memdisk
  append initrd=spinrite.x86

This syntax feels very much like LILO syntax if you are familiar with that. DEFAULT is the file it will download and execute. In our case we are using the graphical menu executable generated by vesamenu.c32. It looks very nice. “PROMPT 0″ tells it to skip the command line type LILO style stuff and go straight to our graphical menu. TIMEOUT is the menu timeout in tenth’s of a second. So 50, here, means 5 seconds. The rest of it is pretty self explanatory. Arrowing down and hitting Enter on the “Memory Scanner” option will cause PXE to download and pass execution to the memtest.x86 executable file. In SpinRite’s case, memdisk is a sort of stub that you can append a boot image to in order to get a mini-environment that some software needs.

Now for phase two. None of this TFTP stuff will do you any good if your DHCP server isn’t handing out the proper information. So let’s edit your DHCP setup. Open the file called “/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf” and find your subnet section. Then add these two directives:

  next-server        pxe.foo.com;
  bootfile           "pxelinux.0";

Now, bounce the DHCPD daemon and the XINETD server to get them active with their new configurations:

dave@localhost$> sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart
dave@localhost$> sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

And voila! You now have a functional PXE server. When you boot your desktop computer, go into the BIOS and set the boot priority to make “Network” or “PXE” first in the list. Now restart the machine and you’ll see your beautiful new PXE boot menu. If you’d rather not set PXE as the default boot device, you can usually still boot it at will by hitting a function key during the POST. It’s usually F9 or F12 to bring up a boot menu and select “Network”. And just to finish this off, here is a video of the finished product: