As the gift giver in this blog post, I would like to clarify a couple of things…

“An air soft pellet gun has the capability to shoot someones eye out.” - I have never heard of this happening. If anyone has, please let me know. I’ve heard many stories of children poking eyes out with sticks.

“After making plans to get together for a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians,’…” - As I recall, I said, “Let’s go out and shoot them some time.”

“…it is a weapon…” - Um, no. It’s a toy. It’s not a toy for all ages. We haven’t decided at what age we will let our daughters handle such a toy, but since my oldest is only 3 we have at least a few years to think about it.

Here are a few reasons why it is considered a toy:
1 - It’s made of almost all plastic (except for some springs) and shoots out little plastic balls. Plastic == toy.
2 - My wife shot me with mine (at my request) and it did not break skin == toy.
3 - My mother-in-law has one and loves to play with it. Play thing == toy. (as a side note, she gave me a great tip: a box, like a FedEx box is great for shooting, since the BBs go through only one layer of cardboard and end up inside the box.)

I just don’t understand some people’s irrational fear of toys. They shouldn’t let their hoplophobia be extended to include suction-cup guns, airsoft guns, cap guns or other similar toys. What is going to be the response when your child picks up a stick and starts pretending it’s a gun or a sword. (I guarantee that any son of Andrew will do this!)

I know this will put most to sleep, but here’s a quick comparison of the actual energy of such projectiles. For the record I have no good feel for what a Joule of energy is (other than it’s equal to one newton-meter) This is just an easy way to compare the amount of energy each projectile has.

airsoft
275 feet per second (which is the fastest pistol I could find when purchasing said gift)
6 mm diameter
0.12 grams
= 0.8 joules (not even enough to puncture a soda can)

bb/pellet
1000 feet per second
4.5 mm diameter
8.2 grams
= 31.9 joules

.22 long
1,750 feet per second
3.9 grams
= 1110 joules

I often have people ask me if I know of any good deals on computers and it seems like they change so frequently that I rarely have an answer.

Today I have an answer:
Save $250! Get the VOSTRO™ 200 MINI TOWER for $399!

I recommend bumping up to at least a 160GB hard drive and getting a DVD burner (16X DVD+/-RW Drive) so the real total would be $459. Not too bad for a computer with a 19″ flat panel screen.

You probably can’t get it in time for Christmas, but it might make a good New Year’s gift for your family.

I just released another Ubuntu public AMI for Amazon EC2. This one is nearly identical to the first one I released except it can be used with large and extra large instances.

Here are the current tech specs and costs for the different instance sizes:

Small Instance (Default) - $0.10/hr
1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
Large Instance - $0.40/hr
7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
Extra Large Instance - $0.80/hr
15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

I’ve been using iFolder for a few years now and am now in the process of switching my desktop from SuSE 10.1 to Kubuntu Gutsy. I was a little saddened that I couldn’t find a native ifolder package for ubuntu, so I had to compile it myself.

I found these instructions and my own are almost identical. I found a few things that I had to do differently.

1. Install dependencies - These are the dependencies I found were required.
   sudo apt-get install libmono-dev mono-xsp mono-gmcs libflaim-dev libflaim4.1 liblog4net1.2-cil build-essential automake libxml2 libxml2-dev libtool gtk-sharp2 gnome-sharp2 arch-buildpackage gtk-sharp libeel2-2 subversion gettext libstdc++5 libgtk2.0-dev
2. Make a directory for all the source code (I used ifolder-src in my home dir.)
3. Download the source code - from within your new directory, run:
   svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/ifolder/branches/ifolder_3_4_sled10sp1/ifolder
svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/simias/branches/ifolder_3_4_sled10sp1/simias
4. Build Simias - I like the idea of putting all this custom compiled stuff into one location (to make cleanup easier if necessary.)
   cd simias
./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/ifolder
make
sudo make install
5. Prep to build iFolder - There are a few things you need to do to get ready
   cd ../ifolder
   edit src/LinuxClient/application/iFolderApplication.cs and change “TrayIcon” to “Egg.TrayIcon” on (or near) lines 68 and 144.
   add a symlink for the arch command
   sudo ln -s /usr/bin/setarch /bin/arch
cp /usr/share/gettext/config.rpath .
6. Build and install iFolder
./autogen.sh –prefix=/opt/ifolder
make
sudo make install

Done!
iFolder can now be run with this command /opt/ifolder/bin/ifolder
If you want to make pretty link to the application on your desktop, you can use the iFolder image found here: /opt/ifolder/share/ifolder3/images/ifolder128.png

I was getting this error on one of my ubuntu linux installation (running apache2 with libapache2-mod-auth-pam installed)
PAM: user ‘username’ - not authenticated: Authentication failure

It took some digging around but I was able to fix it by making one change…
edit /etc/group and add www-data to the shadow group.
There are security implications to this. Beware! It gives the www-data user read access to the shadow password file (which contains password hashes.)

My apache config has these lines in it:

AuthPAM_Enabled on
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Authentication name here”
Require valid-user


Yay! it works. It’s a temporary fix until I get a central LDAP server setup to handle all authentication.