Is Facebook worth really this much?
Personally I don’t think so. Unless there is some secret revenue making channel that I can’t see.
Is this a good move for Microsoft? The key is not how small the percentage of the FB stake that MS gets, it’s the stake of the FB ad netowrk. And the victory of blocking out Google in the deal. Comparing with the other ad network deals happened earlier this year, it is possibly good move from MS side.
I have a few computers (desktop, laptops) at home and each one of them accumulate data and media files over the years. I used to copy them to CDs for backup purpose but this method has become too tedious. I do have a portal hard drive but carry it to each computer and copy the files is just too much work for lazy me. Lately I started to explore the options like a network drive and after some research this Bufflo Link Station network drive seems to be the best one on the market.
I made the purchase from buy.com and setup was very easy. Here are some points I want to share:
I plugged the drive into the network and power it up, and almost immediately I found it from my router’s admin console. So this is pretty much all the initial setup needed.
I went to the Link Station’s web admin console using the ip address that my router assigned to it. I went to the network menu and change the DHCP to static IP address, and changed the gateway and DNS server to the ip of my router. In this way, the LinkStation drive has a static ip.
From each computer, I mapped the network drive to the ip of the LinkStation. And there I had it, the network backup that I have been longing for.
I didn’t install the Memeo backup software that comes with the LinkStation since I use this one for my backups.
Overall this is a great drive.
I have an old Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop. It is slow (with XP), noisy, but it has the best keyboards in all my current or previous 4 laptops. I installed Ubuntu on it this weekend.
Actually it was Xubuntu, Ubuntu’s little brother. Since it uses Xfce desktop, it uses less resource and is more suitable for machines with less horse power.
Installation is quick and simple. Just boot the computer from CD (burned with Xubuntu image) and you will have a Linux desktop. Run the installation and it was quickly done.
Ubuntu claims “just works”.
This is largely true. I have a Logitech wireless mouse, and it was recognized immediately started working immediately. The network card worked fine too.
The problem was with the wireless. I have a Dell wireless adaptor card and it just wouldn’t work. There are quite a few disussions and intructions on the internet about how to setup or configure this type of card but none of them worked for me. It appears this kind of card was made by “Broadcom” and it is notoriously lack of Linux driver support.
Frustrated I took my Belkin USB wirelsee adaptor and plugged it in the Ubuntu machine, and Woohoo my wireless is ON. Not knowing how many hours I have to spend to get the other adaptor to work I decided to put my personal ego down for now and stick with the USB wireless.
Besides the issue with wireless I really like the Xubuntu user interface. It is clean, simple and elegant. I have been using Linux for years and I like this distro immediately.
I just purchased a Dell Vostro 200 desktop. Since I have been used to have dual monitor (laptop + extended monitor) I decided to have the same setting. But it didn’t turn out to be easy. Since I had to spend a lot of hours learning and researching, I want to write this post so you can save some time if you are in the same boat.
First of all, getting dual monitors for your desktop is easy in most cases. There are several ways that you can do it, and the most common ways are:
1. Get ONE video card with multiple ports (VGA, DVI). For those of you who don’t know the term, VGA is blue and DVI is white. You can connect an analog monitor to a VGA port, and digital monitor to DVI port. An adaptor is needed if you decide to connect an analog monitor to DVI.
2. Install 2 video cards.
However, in some cases (like mine), it is harder. Since I ordered a slim tower desktop, it is not easy to find a video card to fit my computer case. As a matter of fact, the video cards sold in the computer stores are not likely to fit. I tried both MicroCenter and Fry’s store and they don’t even carry this type of video cards. And I had a hard time to even explain my case.
Let’s ask my friend Google. One thing about searching these days is that you really need to know your keyword to search Google. For example, I tried searching “small video card”, or “video card for slim tower case”, and only got endless pages or generic online store results. After some research, I finally found their official name: “half height video card”.
However the search on “half height video card” didn’t yield much result. Apparently they are just rare.
Because the size restriction (half height, go figure), a half height card can only have one DVI/VGA port, and one s-video port at most, so the previous option No. 1 is out of the picture. But there is an alternative: use a video card that has DMS-59 port. With the DMS-59 port, you can use a Y-cable to split the signal with dual monitors. Here is an example of the Y-cable: http://www.amazon.com/Molex-DVI-cable-DMS-59-DVI-I/dp/B000BFGXOQ
Besides the option above you can always add a new video card to the system. But just make sure it is”half height” and “low profile” so it can fit the case.
One additional point is that choosing the correct card for your PCI slot. There may be different kind of PCI slots on your motherboard, for example mine has 2 regular PCIs, 1 PCI x1, 1 PIC x16. So getting the right card to fit the right unoccupied slot is another thing to watch for.
A couple of pictures.
I really should get an Apple some day.
Sometimes after making some (incorrect) network related changes I found myself locked out of the Linux server that I am trying to configure. A couple of examples are SSH configuration and iptables rules changes.
If the server is remote, say hosted by someone I’ll have to contact the support to have the change reversed and it could be time consuming and quite embarassing 
as well.
One way to undo the mistake is to schedule a change reversion just before the change and let it run a few minutes after. In this way, whatever change has been made will be changed back if the change was not successful. Of course if the change is good, I can cancel the job.
For the ssh config change, I can schedule this job before I restarted ssh service:
at now + 3 minutes <<< ‘cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config.backup /etc/ssh/sshd_config; service sshd restart’
A copy of sshd_config needs to exist of course.
For the iptables change, a similar job can be scheduled as below:
at now + 3 minutes <<< ‘iptables -F’
If you don’t like keep your system wide open you can always run this:
at now + 3 minutes <<< ‘/path/to/iptables_firewall_orig.sh’
Assuming the iptables_firewall_orig.sh exists somewhere (which is highly recommended).
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