Change your password in Fedora

To change your user account password within Fedora Linux, open a terminal window and enter "passwd" and follow the steps.

[Me@fedora ~]$ passwd
Changing password for user Me.
Changing password for Me
(current) UNIX password:
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[Me@fedora ~]$

Adding users to sudoers file

Run a terminal session with your "root" account and execute the following:

echo 'loginname ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Where 'loginname' is your user account.
Use 'ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' if you don't want to be prompted a password.
If you are prompted for a password with 'sudo' it is the user password, not root.

Praise to Time Capsule

Last week, I dropped my MacBook in our living room. The net result? A failed hard drive. After a quick trip to Best Buy, I picked up a new drive and later that night had it plugged in.

I suspect why you would find that so amazing...well, it's not. The amazing part is my Super Drive worked with the original Tiger install disks but not Leopard. What the? Dropped in a The Matrix, and it worked. Now I'm really perplexed. I've heard so many good things about Apple support, so I give them a call. After a few troubleshooting steps, still could not resolve the issue and they created an appointment for me at my local Apple store, for the same day none-the-less!

I promptly arrive for my 5:45pm appointment and after some additional troubleshooting, the customer service rep declared something was wrong with my Super Drive. He gave me 2 options for getting it fixed, and needless to say both were the 1/4 the original price of the laptop. A third option he offered was to not fix it and pick up an external drive (this is what I'll do, seeing how that will only set me back about $125). The tech then offered to install Leopard for me from an external drive, which I did.

Thirty minutes later, I walked out with Leopard installed. But, what's so cool, while it was installing, we were chatting and came up with the hypothesis that the issue with my Super Drive was that it could no longer read dual layer DVDs. After all, I was able to install Tiger (single layer DVD) and not Leopard (dual layer DVD). Either way, I was very satisfied.

Now for the cool part. Thanks to my Time Capsule and Time Machine, I only lost 3 days of work, which I really didn't loose as I hadn't done any work in the three days.

So, kudos to Time Capsule + Time Machine, there is another satisfied Apple customer in me.

Un-install MySQL from Mac OS X Leopard

This weekend, mucking around with Ruby on Rails and MySQL, I wanted to uninstall previous versions of MySQL that I had installed on my Mac. Quick Google search, and viola:

sudo rm /usr/local/mysql
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/My*
edit /etc/hostconfig and remove the line MYSQLCOM=-YES-
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*

And you think your system handles a high transactional volume?

My buddies at work always start chuckling when we look at some performance stats on our middle tier system. We proudly proclaim how we are pushing 5 transactions / second with a quarter second response time on average. This is all somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as we are very aware that this is child's play.

So, when I was reading the Amazon Web Services Blog about how they peaked out 70,000 transactions / second, I could help but laugh harder. Damn, I wish I had the opportunity to work on that type of system.

"Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second."

.

Goes to show just how small of a fish I really am in this big ocean.

Meet the newest member of our family

Meet the newest member of our family
Originally uploaded by K3bert