18 December 2009, 4:29 pm
It’s nice to have DNS records for all of your computers. It’s a giant pain in the ass to remember IP addresses, especially if you’re on something like a cable connection, where the IP address is dynamic (but only changes every month or two). Now, you could go ahead and use DynDNS or No-IP or something. But those are lame. You have to use a subdomain of one of their domains, and you have to use their software to update. You might be wondering if there’s a better way. Well, there is. Standard DNS supports updating, it turns out. In BIND, this is managed through the allow-update parameter. I had some free time this week after I finished finals, so I went ahead and set it up, along with the other trimmings required for Wide-Area Bonjour. It’s cool, so I thought I’d post a bit.
The most important resource for all of this stuff is dns-sd.org. Aside from a couple of minor errors that I corrected and an update for OS X 10.5+, this Tip will be based off of the guides from that site. So credit to them.
Continue reading ‘*nix Tip of the Day: Dynamic DNS’ »
6 December 2009, 8:00 am
I’m about to finish my second-to-last semester of college. That in and of itself is perhaps a somewhat stunning thing to think about. Equally important, of course, is the question of what I’ll do once I leave. I’ve been interviewing with a half-dozen companies, and just got back the other day from a trip up to the Bay Area to do in-person interviews with Yelp and NVIDIA. I’d forgotten how nice the Bay Area was. I stayed in downtown San Francisco, at The Mosser Hotel, and it was, well, really nice. Caltrain is also an awesome commuter rail system.
The interviews were the usual, intimidating technical interviews. Six hours with a series of engineers and managers. Programming problems on the board (none of them terribly difficult, but all of them rather harder to solve when you’re under a time constraint and being watched). I think I did okay, though. Hopefully they liked me. *crosses fingers*
I should start hearing back from them (and hopefully the other companies I’ve been talking to) in the next week or two, which is very exciting. I’ll be sure to post and update when I have some idea what I’m going to be doing in the real world. Until then, ciao.
5 December 2009, 3:05 pm
I picked up a new computer
last week. A virtual one, that is. I ran into this site called prgmr which offers very low-cost, bare virtual private servers. So far, so good. Got Debian set up all the way I like it. Now just to find something fun to do with it. 
29 November 2009, 5:01 pm
Okay, so this is maybe a little unusual, but today’s “*nix Tip of the Day” isn’t about Unix/Linux/etc. at all. Instead, it is about their antiquated archenemy: VMS. First, a little bit of history:
<History>
Way back in 1970, the PDP-11 was hot stuff. Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan, and others at Bell Labs were writing what would become Unix for the PDP-11 (well, for the PDP-7 at first, but nobody talks about that). Unix was a huge improvement over what DEC shipped with the PDP-11, DOS-11 and RT-11. This couldn’t stand, so Dave Cutler at DEC designed VMS. It was a new operating system, with lots of fancy features, like networking and, uh, lots of upper-case letters.
VMS and Unix sort of battled on. Or so some people would have you think. Really, Unix won early on and VMS stumbled along with corporate financing and an obnoxiously difficult-to-use interface. It passed from DEC to Compaq to HP, from the PDP-11 to the Alpha to the Itanium. And it still lives on, churning away in scary back-rooms here and there.
</History>
So, why do I bring this up? Well, as some of you may know, Harvey Mudd College has a few VMS machines around. The most well-known of these (to students) is thuban, which is a 667MHz DEC Alpha running OpenVMS 7.3-2. Today, I had the, uh, interesting experience of using it, and thought I’d share my impressions with my readers. You can see the proof of my VMS skills at my VMS homepage. That’s right, I’m on the Internet. And on DECnet.
Read on for more VMS-y goodness
4 October 2009, 10:59 pm
Hello gentle readers… You may be surprised to notice that this website has had a redesign. I was on earlier and noticed that Srini’s Fluid-Blue WordPress theme had been updated to F2, which is newer and shinier. So, of course, I had to install the new one and redo my customizations of colors and such. And once I’d done that, it was really worth my time to do some additional customization, like adding a Google Custom Search box. Ayuh.
You also might have noticed the new logo. Yes, I know, it’s not very good. Oh well. If you didn’t notice it, it looks like the following (click for a nice SVG version that I wanted to put on the site proper, but didn’t out of sympathy for old browser users):
It’s just the letters “RL” (for RogueLazer, not for any silly clothing manufacturer) in GTS. I don’t really play Vendetta Online much any more, but I do appreciate that it’s an awesome game and I support the devs. Plus, I was on the team of players that deciphered GTS back in, um, 2003? So I feel that it is useful for a logo.
Anyhow, feel free to let me know what you think. Or not, if you prefer. The redesign was definitely a better way to spend an afternoon than doing homework, no matter whether it’s any good or not…
