Test draft post

This should be posted Sunday around 8:30

test 2

this should be posted at 8:00

Scribefire test

This is a test using scribefire

Preview looks pretty good
No short cut for bold and others = though there probably is...

This will be saved

save me

Test from Ecto

Trying out Ecto using a blogspot blog.

Here is a photo I dragged in from iphoto:

Here is some text underneath the picture. Does it go to the side or below?

Looks like you can resize the images.

Here's another, this one is from iMedia browser:

I set it to float left....

Two carriage returns above

Switch to Wordpress

Due to organization issues, I am moving permantly over to wordpress.
Find my blog at: vlandham.wordpress.com

Blogera: I'll switch your RSS feed. remind me.

Favorites Added

Check out my new favorites section on the wordpress blog.

It comes with my own kickin' icons, and a free frogurt (that's good).

I'll probably end up switching over to wordpress completely, and then maybe host my own blog, if / when I get the hardware to do it.

For now, check out the wordpress blog, and any comments / critiques are most welcome.

Rate my Clothes

Today we visited the local clothing resale shop, the Arizona Trading Company, for some hip new threads. We also tried the trade-in option for the first time with some clothes that were going to the thrift-store anyways.

It was kind of an odd feeling as we waited for the woman behind the counter to decide what the store would accept and what we would have to lug back home. All the clothing I had brought in I don’t wear anymore because of sizing errors on my part when I purchased them from the thrift store (its easy to get button-downs that are too big and not really realize it when you’re doing it).

But I would wear them if they fit me. I thought most of it was pretty cool stuff. But while she pawed through our sacks, refolding those items unfit for the ATC, it felt as if my entire wardrobe was being judged by the hippest-of-hip townies. I got nervous while she worked.

Not that I try really hard to get only cool clothes, but I have been making more of an effort recently to dress a little like the groovy kids.

That’s why I felt a little let down when I saw the “not-accepted” pile and realized that she chose almost nothing to keep. It felt like a rejection letter from the townies informing me of my non-coolness.

I guess that’s ok, I don’t really want to be a townie anyways.

Fun Site: Symbols.com

For my wife's birthday, she wanted to redo our spice rack with glass bottles and spices that she might actually use (I guess Bed Bath & Beyond isn't up on the necessary spices for cool hip twenty-somethings).  I got the idea that it would be cool if each spice was labelled with a recognizable symbol for easy retrieval from the rack without having to squint at the names of each one.

Enter symbols.com . This is an amazing online database of around 2,500 symbols and their origins and meanings.  What is cool is that you can search in a multitude of ways, my favorite being the "graphic index" search in which you describe the structure of the symbol you want and it comes back with a listing of the most probable matches.

I didn't use the search too much though, just browsing through the symbols was cool enough.  It was hard choosing the right 16 for the spice rack, but I think I did a decent job. 

We will find out in a few days when the labels finally come in.  Stupid Office Depot only carries a small circular label -- and I needed a medium!

The Symbol above is the one I choose to represent "sage".  I think it matches up pretty well.  Read about it Here.

VMware: my new co-worker

A couple of days ago I got to try the recently-made-free VMware Player on my work computer.  This software allows you to play virtual machines on your system, and with a little hackery from digg, you can create your own VMware systems. 

Basically this allows you to run any operating system on top of Windows XP, as if it were on a separate computer.

I used the instructions from the hackery site to get Ubuntu Linux running in around 20 minutes.  They also have a bunch of ready-mades on their website that should work instantly.

You can install a complete operating system, everything from formatting the "drive" to changing the IP address, without affecting the actual system it is running on. I don't know all the details about how this works, only that the player uses a file that acts like the hard-disk and the rest of the system.

The really cool thing about this software is that it creates virtual network cards for your virtual machines, so it should be possible to create a little virtual network of "computers" that could all communicate with each other and could be used for learning and testing how a network is set up.  I set up an Apache web server on my virtual machine and was able to access it from the real computer it was running on.  Pretty fun.

I've read a lot about network systems, but haven't gotten a chance to really implement anything on a larger scale, but this program might allow me to do just that.

One issue though is that your real machine has to be pretty kickin to handle multiple virtual machines.  I almost crashed my work computer, which is the fastest system I've used, with two virtual pc's, itunes, and our ticket management program open.  But you can control how much RAM each virtual machine you create uses,  which I didn't really mess around with yet.

If you have a XP machine that is wasting most of its clock cycles just idling, try some of the ready-mades out.  Next work day, I am going to try to get a few virtual machines networked together and then finally start implementing a firewall with ipcop, or perhaps openbsd.

You could also install an unpatched version of XP or 98 as a virtural machine and see how long it takes to get infected with the Mblaster worm.  Or try out that new Sasser worm that was emailed to you out, just to see what it does to your system.  I won't hurt your real set-up one bit, and clean up is as easy as clicking "delete".