Graphic Design Studio created a beautiful and functional new website for the non-profit Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center.
Maui Custom Software worked with Graphic Design Studio to migrate the Huinoeau.com domain, website, and email to a virtual private Linux hosting environment.
Hui No’eau is recognized as one of the premier organizations on Maui dedicated to the arts. Their new website was designed to reflect their artistic aesthetics and be easily customizable and upgradeable.
Well that was simple. Upgrading from WordPress 2.9.x to 3.0 was not such a big hassle, as long as your hosting provider allows simple cpanel DB access and rsync over SSH.
Painless! But if you’re stuck with old-skool FTP, and you need to recursively copy your web filesystem…well, good luck with that!
Here’s a link from Slashdot about Nvidia hindering and obstructing development of an open source driver for their graphics cards.
This is a really bad move on the part of Nvidia. They are a hardware company, they should focus on creating and selling really great hardware. Make the hardware an open platform so the community can develop and maintain and (most importantly) fix the software drivers.
This is why Linux is so much more stable than Windows, because the openness of the Linux platform allows for a distributed community of experts to fix any little quirks that arise.
At least you can buy other graphics cards that are Linux-friendly: http://free3d.org/
There’s an interesting article on BetaNews about man-in-the-middle attacks against SSL.
Security researchers make the accusation that rogue individuals within government agencies my be strong-arming certificate companies to give them the keys to your encrypted connections. So is using SSL now pointless? I don’t think so; it’s still useful for securing the online shopping experience from other eavesdroppers, but you should always check your monthly credit card statement!
So my iBook that used to have a working screen no longer does. In fact it doesn’t seem to want to boot. Period. So being the cheap-ass bastard that I am, I wasn’t about to go out and buy a new laptop, much less a Mac. All I need is a portable with a working screen that I can use to access teh Intarweb when I’m on the go.
Turns out I have this old Dell Latitude C600 (Pentium III !) with a “Designed for Microsoft | Windows 2000 Professional | Widows NT Workstation 4.0 | Windows 98″ label. It even had a working copy of Win98 on it! And it’s in good condition: no noticeable keyboard plaque issues, no scratches on the case, and has a working screen! RAM is kinda sparse at 128MB.
Unfortunately it doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive and it also didn’t want to boot any USB devices. So my only options seemed to be 1: floppy install (huge PITA), 2: bootstrapping from within Win98, or my choice: trying to netboot install.
The latest Linux distros seemed like they’d be a little too heavyweight for this little beast, so I opted to go with FreeBSD. (Once-upon-a-time in another life I managed FreeBSD servers, so I am somewhat familiar with eking out performance on them). I initially tried to install FreeBSD 8.0 but that didn’t seem to like the Enterasys PCMCIA wireless card I had. This of course was a showstopper for its destined role as coffee-shop Internet laptop. So instead I went with FBSD 7.2.
This note is mostly for me to remember how to do this again, since the tftpboot + NFS install was a royal PITA. What follows is seriously g33ky, you have been forewarned!
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