Posted on: June 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I got a comment about if I was going to touch on this at all, so I might as well. 

Thriller, and a few other of his songs that I can’t name were really good songs.  I guess I do like the pop genre the best out of all the genres out there.  Other than what I’ve heard from his court trial a few years ago, I didn’t really pay much attention to him.

Last night I learned of his death while watching the Fox news Glenn Beck program. 

Shortly after hearing about his confirmed death, my father suggested we list some of our dolls on ebay of Michael Jackson.  About 5 minutes after listing a set of the Superstar of the 80′s series dolls (4 of them) in the original unopened boxes, someone hit the buy it now for $650.  Its quite amazing to me how people will pay this, but now we are that much richer   I think my father said he paid 10 bucks for the set in the 80s is a really great turnaround compared to the bank.  Anyways, since I have listed several other memorabilia, and it was going hot for the first 3 hours and now the excitement is gone and the market is flooded, so I guess I won’t be getting outrageous profits anymore from his stuff, but I’m still quite happy.  Looking back on this, I have learned that most buyers buy collectables on adrenline caused by death of the doll’s character.

Anyways, thats all I have to say on this topic   I’m trying to decide on what my next blog topic will be.  I’m guessing it is going to be something on ubuntu xen administration since that is my next major project

Tags: adrenline, collect, collection, doll, ebay, glenn beck, michael jackson, superstar of the 80's
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: June 21st, 2009 by Famous Phil

Lets introduce this post with a tiny experience.  I am a system administrator for my own network and my own computers.  After installing Exchange, naturally I wanted to setup outlook 2007 to connect to my exchange server.  Unfortunately, I had no clue what the correct settings were at the time and I kept getting an error that my settings were incorrect and contact my administrator for assistance.  Unfortunately, I AM THE ADMINISTRATOR. What is even more sad, I am not only the administrator to my own computer, but I am also the administrator of my Exchange Server.  Therefore, Microsoft Windows suggests that I should look at myself for help

I’ve debated how I can help myself as the computer kindly suggests to me.  I suppose I could keep doing stuff like most admins do until it works, but I didn’t really feel like ruining my computer.  Therefore, I googled the problem and eventually found some documentation that solved the problem.  As always, when I come up with a solution, I always post it on AdminReference.  Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: administrator, adminreference.com, application, exchange, support, tech support, technical
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here!  I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere.  The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share

Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft.  Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make.  I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of  my hosting business up until now has ran off from.  Man, I never thought that I would say that

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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Posted on: June 11th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First, I would like to offer my condolences to the family of K T Ligesh, the owner of HyperVM and LxLabs.  It is a tragedy to see such a brilliant coder take his own life.  You may read the entire story here

LxLabs develops the best control panel for OpenVZ/Xen which is a virtualization platform for hosting many servers on one physical server.  HyperVM allows clients to control their server by enabling power control, operating system reinstallations, and charts for server status.

A major users of HyperVM is cheapvps.co.uk (a2b2, vaserv, fsckvps) which I would estimate hosts at least 5000 vps clients at the very least and I’m underestimating.  They provide very cheap hosting and I did host with them for quite some time as a backup solution.  I then found space on a friends server and didn’t need them any longer (I’d say about 2 months ago).    To get back to vaserv, Their company took a big hit when a vulnerability was released (and as I understand it) was not fixed until 2 weeks after LxLabs was notified.  Anyways, their entire service was hacked and most of their data was lost.  I feel sorry for those who didn’t backup their vps regularly.

Back in the day when I was using LxLabs software: hypervm and lxadmin (which is like cpanel), the owner was very nice to help me with every problem I had.  Eventually I made the move to cpanel because there was always some kind of problem popping up and I needed something much more stable and proven at the time.  Cpanel did fix all of my woes.

Anyways, I bet there was a lot of pressure on the owner from everyone.  VAserv still isn’t back up fully and it has been 4 days now.  I really feel sorry for their staff.  They must be losing a lot of money because of this 1 tiny hack.  I can sort of see why the owner would kill himself over this, but because of his death, the programming community has lost a brilliant programmer.  In addition, the VPS industry has lost a source of cheap, powerful software, so vps prices will likely rise in the near future if the legacy of hypervm isn’t carried on.

One final note on this, as a result of this, I hope the programming community realizes that updates are extremely important both for the developer and the client.  I also cannot stress enough that proper backups should be made often and verified for redundancy!  I will be verifying my backups later today

So you may be wondering, how did I find out?  I have been looking at a vps server to host exchange 2003 or a similar email solution for mobile sync (to get away from the heavy ajax interface of mailxchange at 1and1 plus have control over my backups).  I went to cheapvps and they were down, then I checked vaserv and found out that way.  Because they have been down and I needed a server yesterday, I went with another provider who I might be reviewing in a couple of weeks or months

Tags: a2b2, cheapvps, CPanel, exchange 2003, fsckvps, hypervm, Ligesh, lxadmin, lxlabs, mailxchange, openvz, owner, suicide, vaserv, vps, Xen
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming
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Posted on: June 8th, 2009 by Famous Phil

In this post I’m going to detail my first week with the MagicJack. This device converts a USB port into a Phone Jack that is compatible with any landline phone that you might have around the house.  I will touch on clarity and ease of use.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: call, clearity, evdo, landline, magicjack, skype, university at buffalo, voip, yahoo
Posted in Mobile Technology, Technology
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Posted on: June 7th, 2009 by Famous Phil

This is part 3/3 of my evdo quest for fast internet.  In this post I hope to explain the shortcomings of all of my available options for internet access and which one turns out to be the best.  I will be providing several screenshots of different internet connection methods to prove a point including actual ping trials.  I actually had to borrow a dialup account to do this and was sort of unsuccessful at obtaining a speedtest (so I had to borrow one).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: allowance, bandwidth, broadband, comparison, dialup, evdo, fast, hughesnet, latency, ping, reliability, rev 0, rev a, satellite, signal, speed, speedtest, stability, strength, wildblue
Posted in Mobile Technology, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: June 4th, 2009 by Famous Phil

This is part 2/3 of my EVDO quest.  This is where I’m going to post pictures and detail my setup. I will also mention a few technical details of the different types of mobile internet and what is what.  This will focus mostly on the Verizon network.  My next blog will compare dial up, satellite, and evdo with in depth technical analysis.  Lets get into the details shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 3g, at&t, cband, cel, cell, evdo, phone, rev 0, rev a, speed, tower, verizon, wi-ex, yx500, zboost
Posted in Mobile Technology, Technology
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Posted on: June 2nd, 2009 by tiffanymdavis82

There was a time when people were thankful that the computer had shrunk considerably and they could carry them around more conveniently. And with the advent of the Internet, WiFi and mobile data plans, it was easy to stay connected. But then, the march of the Smartphones’ brigade commenced and you could now use your phone to do anything your computer could, and more as well.

It’s no wonder that these phones are extremely popular and that every single mobile phone manufacturer has introduced one or two models to get a piece of this well-paying pie. Some phones are costlier than most computers, but there is no dearth of takers for these gadgets in spite of their steep prices.

Although many people are quick to get their hands on the latest Smartphones as soon they hit the market, they usually have no idea of how to utilize them to their full potential. They’re finally relegated to being just phones, chic and sleek no doubt, but only phones all the same.

Some people load their phone with too many third party software and applications that are available as free downloads on the Internet. While this allows your cool phone to do even cooler things, it clogs up the memory and makes your phone more sluggish and slow. You may also see your phone hanging and crashing more often.

The key to using your phone more efficiently is to manage its memory. While some gadgets like the iPhone come with huge internal memories, others have limited on-phone memory capacities and are dependent on external storage cards to expand their holding capacity. Most users are not tech-savvy enough to change default settings that are on the phone and that store your Internet browsing history, temporary files and cookies in your main memory. Of course, you are asked where you want to save programs, so you can choose to do so on the memory card.

But if you use your phone to surf the Internet excessively, your internal memory gets really full and your phone starts to act up and become slower by the day. If you know your way around your phone, you could use the tips found here to shift your browsing history, cache, and cookies to your memory card and also enable future files to be stored on the card. The process involves creating file folders with the same names on your card and then deleting the ones that exist on your main memory.

If you’re not sure about your navigation skills (the problem with Smartphones is that they’re sometimes too smart to be understood fully), get someone who is not technologically challenged to help you out rather than risk ruining your phone.

A Smartphone becomes more interesting and intriguing the more you use it, so learn your way around it by taking some time to get acquainted with it as soon as you bring it home with you.

This post was contributed by Tiffany Davis, who writes about accredited online universities. She welcomes your feedback at TiffanyMDavis82 at gmail.com

Tags: online universities, smartphone
Posted in Mobile Technology
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