Nick Bonadies's Barbarian Blog

Red Ring of Death Rant

Nick Bonadies — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:34:46 -0400

So I’ve been hit with the RRoD for a third time, and for a second time right before the holiday game rush when all my favorites are releasing their newest titles. Each time I’ve gotten a new/refurb box, and yet it keeps happening. Its not even that big a deal to get the box replaced, its that I have to get the box replaced in the first place. for a third time in three years.

If you haven’t yet, check out this article about the history of the RRoD. Its definitely an interesting read, and boggles the mind that Microsoft would piddle away so much money on something that is fixable. Which makes me think that in a year I’ll probably be buying the Xbox 720, or maybe I will get one of those ps3 things…

FFF: Formal Friday Fail

Nick Bonadies — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:25:25 -0400

Opera Study concludes 4.13% of web standards compliant

Nick Bonadies — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:58:36 -0400

Interesting read over at Ars

Opera also ran the pages indexed by MAMA through the W3C’s validation tools to see how many conform with standards. The results show that only 4.13 percent are valid. A more startling conclusion that Opera derived from its MAMA data is that only 50 percent of sites that display a badge touting validation are actually valid. This could indicate that many sites which are initially designed with valid HTML later cease to be valid as changes are made and new content is added.

And I’ll just add in here that http://barbariangroup.com does pass validation. What is interesting is that our blog page fails validation due to embed code that we grab from other sites to embed content in blog posts, which totally reflects the findings of that study. Too bad because I know Kenji worked hard on that markup!

Getting Vlad the Deployer to Play Nice With Ubuntu Server 8.04

Nick Bonadies — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:53:43 -0400

It’s actually an easy fix! Vlad is hard coded to look for “Password:” as the sudo password prompt in stdout. Ubuntu server decided to be special and change this default prompt to something else.

The fix is to over-ride the Ubuntu server defaults so that it actually prints “Password:” to stdout. To do this, first become root

su root

Then edit your sudoers file by running

visudo

That’ll safely open your sudoers file in vi (side note! if you’re using a barebones install of Ubuntu server, you may want to install vim instead of straight up vi, but its a preference thing). When you’re into your sudoers file, you’ll wanna look for the Defaults section and add this: passprompt=”Password:” So your sudoers file will end up looking something like:

# sudoers file.
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the sudoers man page for the details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
# Defaults specification
Defaults env_reset,passprompt="Password:"

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL

After you’ve done that, write the file and quit using regular vi commands and you’re done! Now Vlad will play nice with your Ubuntu server install.

Advertising creates another bomb scare

Nick Bonadies — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:43:40 -0400

this time in philly not boston!

Hours before the Phillies-Atlanta Braves’ game on Wednesday night, a film crew shot a commercial of the mascot shooting heavily wrapped hot dogs from a launcher. But someone inadvertently left three of the duct taped hot dogs outside the ballpark, sparking security fears. Stadium employees were evacuated and the bomb squad was called in.

link