No April Fools from me, but I thought it was kind of funny people freaking out over this virus, so I made this video. Enjoy 
Archive - Insanity Category
Conficker Virus
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Does Google Own the Internet?
Thursday, March 5th, 2009I have been thinking, so much is done through Google, what would happen if Google suddenly disappeared. Google owns YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, FeedBurner, and all the other assorted Google apps.
It’s pretty obvious that Google owns a good chunk of the internet. If, suddenly it disappeared, would Yahoo take over again? Or would it be a struggle between Yahoo and MSN? Millions of people wouldn’t have their e-mail anymore. Some might not even know how to find another search engine Where would everyone go that’s currently on YouTube? How about Blogger?
Sure, there’s other places they could go, but would they be able to keep up with the massive new influx of traffic?
I’ve been thinking to myself, is Google a monopoly of sorts? If it is, that can’t be good. A monopoly is never a “good” thing for the users, even if they are free services. Google makes massive amounts through advertisers paying them. There’s very little competition, even from Yahoo and MSN. Everyone uses Google. I’m willing to bet even people that use MSN and Yahoo go to Google occasionally.
Google is everywhere, is it the big brother of the Internet? Google has so much power over anything and everything you see on the Internet, it does become at least somewhat scary.
Here’s a cool video on the subject I found through YouTube (AKA Google)
The GA-P35-DS3L has FAILED
Monday, January 26th, 2009Wow, I thought my memory was going to be the first to fail, after all the horror stories I’ve heard about Ballistix. Apparently not.
All of a sudden, while I’m browsing the net with FireFox, my computer reboots. Then it says it’s trying to copy the bios from the hard drive or something. Then nothing. Nada. Won’t boot. I cleared the CMOS, I removed all unnecessary components, seated each ram stick separately. It’s dead. So I guess I”m in the market for a new motherboard 
Stuff has been dying on me lately like my flash drive shows 0mb for some reason so it’s dead as well. Also all the stuff off my desktop had disappeared not long ago. Did I have a virus? I don’t know, I haven’t heard of any virus being able to destroy the bios completely in a long time. I’m really getting tired of it. Guess I”ll deal with this soon, because I can’t be without my main PC. The laptop is alright, but I really can’t do drops on it or a lot of other things
Before I totally give up on it though I’m going to *try* something I read online about putting the bios on a flash drive and boot it. If it doesn’t work, then I’m just going to buy a new one. Not a real big deal more along the lines of annoying, and I could have spent the money on something else.
Apparently I’m not the only one this has happened to, so it’s not really unheard of. This board must just get unstable for some odd reason. Going to pick up some new ram while I’m at it, I just don’t trust Crucial Ballistix.
The best explanation I can come up with is that I had my FSB running kind of high to make my memory run at 1000MHz and this caused an instability that didn’t rear its head till now, even though I ran prime95 for 24hrs a long time ago.
UPDATE
I’ve purchasesd the following components from NewEgg, the only thing that’s related to the failure is the $60 mobo, however.
MSI P45 Neo3-FR – $60 open box – Bad reviews on Newegg, good reviews elsewhere, go figure. Most seem to be related to Bios 1.3 or they don’t know what they’re doing. So long as it doesn’t break I don’t care 
LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner – Does dual layer as well. Didn’t really research this one, don’t really care so long as it works.
Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 – Good ram from reviews.
SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ – Good review on Anandtech.
That’s about it.. Really just some other upgrades I wanted. I also bought an OCZ Keyboard because I want something better to type with, but I’m still keeping my current one for FPS games.
I suppose you could say I’m pretty rough on computer hardware, which is why I try to buy “enthusiast” grade equipment but that fails as well.
Welcome to the final VPS article.. I think.. :)
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
Yep.
You’ll find that with me, I often take things to an extreme level and I’m not satisfied with people doing things for me. Before I launched this website, I had no previous knowledge of how servers worked. I get curious, and I do things, kind of like a kid. I wanted to know what it was like to manage my own server, without having to pay the high costs associated with dedicated servers.
What have I been doing? I’ve been playing with VPS technology for quite some time now. Now that I have finally set everything up, and learned quite a bit, I would not recommend an unmanaged, no control panel VPS to the average user. Why? Well it’s really not that easy to setup if you don’t know what you’re doing. Especially if you have no Linux knowledge, it might seem downright impossible. I did have past Linux experience, but this did not excuse me from screwing up.
Still, I did not do everything manually. ISPConfig is helping me out with the Bind9 configuration files, FTP, website statistics, e-mail, SSL, etc. ISPConfig isn’t easy to setup in the first place if you’re not familiar with all of the programs it comes with, there is quite a bit of manual configuration that needs to be done *before* you compile ISPConfig. Also, try to not install other control panels before ISPConfig as this WILL cause you problems. Other control panels play with configuration files on all the host essential programs. What’s that mean? Well, when you go in and install ISPConfig after having a previous control panel, some configuration files are messed up, and the program will not work with ISPConfig. My e-mail was screwed up because of this.
Yesterday the site was basically down. Why?
Apache and MySQL seem to think you have unlimited resources, they allocate way more than what you actually need. This caused MySQL to crash, thus causing the database error you may or may not have seen.
If you have a low memory VPS, or any VPS for that matter, you probably need to go in and edit the apache2.conf. It’s not hard to find the values that need to be modified, google it. Next, you’ll want to configure MySQL as well to allocate less resources, it really doesn’t need that much. Again, just google this as well, there are plenty of articles about this. If you’re lazy and don’t know how to use google, here’s an article that basically shows what you need to modify for MySQL and Apache.
These modifications made my server go from crashing constantly, to having plenty of free memory. I don’t know what the default values are for, perhaps sites that are getting an unlimited amount of unique hits per day. I think this is possibly why people complain about VPS performance being worse than shared – they have yet to properly configure everything.
There you have it. I own my host, I have full control to install whatever software I wish. Something I did not have on my shared host. I have a dedicated IP, I have my own name server. I have my own mail server. All of this for only about $60/year. Amazing, huh?
Of course for regular people I believe shared hosting is the best option Either that or get a managed VPS with a control panel.