Daily Cup of Tech

A couple of days ago, I started to notice that there was nothing but gibberish on the homepage of Daily Cup of Tech. I quickly dug into the problem to determine what could be causing the issue. The problem was with compression in the (wonderful) WP-Super-Cache Wordpress plug-in.

Here is how I fixed the problem.

1. I accessed the WP-Super-Cache admin page directly from its URL:
   <blog base URL>/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php
2. I disabled the Super Cache Compression and then updated the settings.

This seems to have resolved the issue but I would really like to run compression as it is a nice feature. Anyone out there had any luck fixing the compression problem?

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/08/19/wordpress-cache-gibberish/trackback/

The DNS cache on your local computer is a list of the most recently accessed DNS entries. If you suspect that some one has just breached your corporate Internet policy by accessing inappropriate web content and they have run a cleaning program that wipes out the Internet cache, you may be able to get a list of the websites from the DNS cache.

Simply type from a command prompt:

ipconfig /displaydns

to display the contents of the DNS cache.

You can then look through to see if there are any domains that should not be there.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/08/18/catch-internet-policy-breakers-with-dns-cache/trackback/

I have been racking my brains for some time now trying to figure out a better way for people to interact with the information overload that is constantly coming at them. One of the ways that I have discovered is through augmented reality. And now, there are even tools that are available for free that can help with this.

Microsoft has released some technology that, when combined with heads up displays and GPS tracking could provide a very useful and informative way of seeing the world. When you combine the mapping capabilities of Virtual Earth with trueSpace, a 3D development environment, you can modify the way you see the virtual world.

Now, take this modified virtual world and add a heads up display in the form of glasses which interacts with very precise GPS systems, you have a very good start at something amazing!

Here is a demo that has been put together to show what a trueSpace building looks like in Virtual Earth:

The implications of something like this are astronomical! Some potential uses include:

• Tourist attractions to historical areas showing where building once existed
• Military real-time monitoring of a remote mission
• Real estate agents showing future expansion and growth of a neighborhood
• Architectural businesses performing a virtual walk-through of future building

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/08/12/reality-20-like-the-real-world-only-better/trackback/

A few weeks ago, I ran across a couple of articles about a university in Holland that was having difficulty getting all of their Microsoft patches out to all of their systems. What did they decide to do?

Buy more servers? Nope!

Increase bandwidth? Nope!

Use a program that has been essentially outlawed in North American universities? Yep!

The university decided, on the advice of their IT consultant, that they would use bittorrent to deploy the patches.

This really got me thinking about how I would go about creating my own U.Holl server (as I like to call it). These are some of the thoughts that I have come up with.

The Server

Just to add a really strong sense of irony, I would probably build the U.Holl server on Linux, most likely Ubuntu with a typical LAMP installation. Then, for ease of management, I would install a tracker such as phpMyBittorrent or something similar.

In the tracker software, I would create several different categories based on the target systems that I would use. For example, there would be Windows XP, Windows Vista, Office 2007, etc. categories. Each category would have its own RSS feed.

The Clients

Each workstation or server that was to receive updates using bittorrent would have a copy of uTorrent running in the background. This would be critical. You would also need to tweak uTorrent so that it automatically ran an installation script r program each time it finished downloading a new patch. This script would also schedule a reboot at 3:00 AM (or whatever time you wanted) since it seems almost every hotfix from Microsoft needs to reboot the system.

A potential install script might look like this:

The trick to automatically downloading files is to subscribe each uTorrent client to the proper RSS feeds given out by the server. This way, each system only gets the patches it needs.

Potential

I think that this type of a delivery system has great potential. You could even use it across slow bandwidth links or to deploy other software, not just patches.

This is a project that I am hoping to spend some time on over the next while but I am looking for your input/suggestions now so that I can hopefully avoid some pitfalls later. Any input would be greatly appreciated!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/06/12/diy-bittorrent-patch-server/trackback/