ianneubert.com

Miss the Total Eclipse today? Yeah, me too. But I found a nice video from the Exploratorium on scene from China. The actual eclipse is right around 37 minutes on the video.

One thing that I would have wanted to see is what things look like around on the ground when the eclipse happens. I don’t think you could really take it all in, unless you were there though. Hopefully some time I’ll get to see that for myself

Checkout this NASA site for more info on Solar Eclipses, and when the next one will be!

I just thought I’d post this quick tidbit on how to change the timezone on a Ubuntu server after is has been installed. Simply rerun the timezone configuration:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Just felt the biggest earthquake I’ve felt in awhile. 5.4 out of Chino.

I’ve just published my PHP backup script to github.com. If you are looking for an easy to use, PHP based backup script to send things to S3, check it out.

Download the source at github.

It’s been in production for over a year at various sites. Works fine for me.

Here is the feature list:

• Simple to use
• Backups all databases on a MySQL server
• Backups and compresses (using bzip2) directories and files
• Uses URL type storage keys, so it’s easy to browse the backup bucket
• (optionally) Removes old backups according to a grandfather-father-son based schedule

For the last decade my favorite band has been Garbage. But, after hearing my new favorite song, I think it’s finally time to change the rankings. So without further wait, my new favorite band is:

Metric

They’ve now released three albums, and I love them all. Check out the song that finally tipped the charts, “Grow Up”. For more info check out the band’s All Music Guide entry or their Facebook site.

I’ve been reading several reports that Microsoft will be bringing Netflix streaming to the Xbox 360 sometime this year. What a great value-add feature for the Xbox 360. I’m actually surprised that Microsoft pulled it off, and isn’t even charging anyone extra to use it, besides the Xbox Live Gold subscription. I had been considering getting rid of my subscription, but I think I’ll keep it for now and see how it goes.

Rock on! Now Netflix, just needs some worthwhile streaming movies.

Also, no word on if any of those movies will be in HD. I highly doubt it, at least for now, as Netflix doesn’t stream HD anywhere yet.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to disable time/clock synchronization in a VMware Fusion guest for the past few months, and I finally stumbled upon the answer! This will prevent the VMware Fusion guest from getting the correct time from the host OS on boot or restore.

The following lines need to be added to the .vmx file inside the virtual machine package:

time.synchronize.continue = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.restore = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.resume.disk = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.shrink = "FALSE"
tools.syncTime = "FALSE"

The body of this car is built with and aluminum frame connected to hydraulic and electric motors, and all wrapped in a fabric skin. It allows the car to change shape at will. Pretty amazing! This car is headed for the BMW Museum in Munich, and won’t see actual production.

[ From Wired Autopia ]

Apple announced the 3G iPhone today. It’s a pretty small feature enhancement, only three new things:

• 3g Network
• GPS built in
• $200 for 8gb, $300 for 16gb

I think the best upgrade is the price. I was hoping for a lot more I guess, because that just doesn’t seem all that exciting. There are still a bunch of holes:

• No MMS support
• No stereo Bluetooth
• No video recording support

They basically just changed the chipset inside and called it a day. Whoopie.

UPDATE: The price is not cheaper in the long run, it’s a lot more expensive. The new iPhone 3G plan will cost me $75/mo, compared to $60/mo for the original. That means I would end up spending $160 more for the new iPhone over 2 years, versus the original.

After noticing some trouble with the twitter feed on ianneubert.com, I checked the site: istwitterdown.com and guess what it said?

I’m really tired of twitter being down all the time. I probably won’t be using it much longer.