All Sides Of The Issue

This idea has been brewing for awhile, but this article finally gave it some shape. Bob Lutz (big car guy formerly of GM, Chrysler, Ford, and BMW) insists that climate change is a bunch of garbage and Neil deGrasse Tyson (famous science communicator) tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

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Author's profile picture Ben on life

Extreme Hardware Convergence

The Motorola Atrix Laptop Dock orginally debuted at a price of $500 a little less than a year ago.  Disappointing sales figures led to discounts and today you can now get them on AT&T’s site for 1/10 of that price. It is my opinion that this is a spectacular idea that simply failed in execution.  This is the future of computing.  One device to rule them all.  

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Author's profile picture Ben on tech

We The People

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

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Author's profile picture Ben on life

You Are Not Mr. Ali’s Next of Kin

And neither am I. I don’t get mail like this on my Gmail account, but every once someone like Mr. Patrick K. Chan, Chief Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of the Hang Seng Ltd. Bank in Honk Kong makes it past my Hotmail spam filter.

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Author's profile picture Ben on tech

Howto: Secure VNC through SSH Tunneling

My web server sits in the baby’s room at my house and the only thing plugged into it is power and network. This is fine for just about everything that I do, but every once in awhile, I have a problem that requires a user interface. VNC to the rescue. Ubuntu comes with Vino, a little VNC Server, pre-installed. You can go to System > Preferences > Remote Desktop to set a password, turn off local user verification, and turn on desktop sharing (as opposed to just viewing).

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Author's profile picture Ben on tech

Howto: Start Subversion at Boot on Ubuntu

Update: This post was written more than 13 years ago, but for some reason it is still getting a decent amount of views. At this point, you should all stop using Subversion and move to Git.

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Author's profile picture Ben on tech

Howto: Remote Root Access to MySql

Update: This post has garnered a lot of attention.  So I’d like to clarify up front: this article is not about hacking into other databases.  This is about configuring a server you own so that you can access it from a remote machine on the same network.  It is completely insecure and should never be used for production deployments.

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Author's profile picture Ben on tech

Why is There a Minimum Ethernet Framesize?

An ethernet frame has a minimum size of 64 bytes and a maximum size of 1500 bytes. Anything shorter than the 64 byte minimum is interpreted by receiving stations as a collision.

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Author's profile picture Ben on tech