Recently the power went off in my house. When it came back on, all my computers happily started up again except my webserver. It is a VM. The host OS started just fine but there was a problem with my virtual machine hard drive the housed all my website content. I had a snapshot but it was 8 months old.

I went ahead and restored to the snapshot and took an inventory of what I was mising, which turned out to be alot. Thankfully I have a automated backup solution, Jungledisk, and it had just backed up the website the night before, as it does every night. I launched their app, picked restore, and let it transfer down the 7 gigs of missing content. It worked like a charm.

I am extremely happy with jungledisk and the fact that the backup and restore ae so effortless. I am sure my backups would have been far more out of date had I actually had to manually backup the files.

My webserver is a linux based virtual machine running under VirtualBox. When I first created it, I still had a Windows based webserver running on actual hardware. So when I created the CentOS VM, I created it with a tiny hard drive because I was just playing around. Then my Windows based webserver died. I quickly put my CentOS VM into service as the actual webserver.

The problem was that it still had a tiny hard drive, 8 gb to be precise. I created separate virtual disks for webroot and ftproot so initially 8 gb was not an issue at all. After a year or so I was down to only 500 mb free. This meant I didnt have enough free space to install the CentOS security updates.

There was no built in VM utility for expanding the size of the virtual disk. You have to treat it just like a normal disk. Gparted would be perfect for expanding the size of the disk without dataloss but Gparted does not support LVM (logical volume management), the format used by the CentOS installer.

I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 10.04 to 10.10. I was surprised to find that the optical output on my soundcard was no longer functioning. In truth, years ago I was surprised I could get it to work in Linux at all but it did, and I had grown used to it. The default music mixer application in KDE no longer shows S/PDIF output settings. It basically just gives you a single volume slider. A quick search on the internet confirmed my suspicion, its not possible to control the advanced sound card features using the now default KDE mixer. I reverted to using AlsaMixer. This is run from the command line and allows me to turn on and off all the outputs on my soundcard (as well as a bunch that I have no idea what they do). In just a few clicks it was working again. Thanks AlsaMixer.

Today I finally got around to cleaning out the cubicle next to mine at work. I needed the space for a new addition to my team. The cubicle had belonged to a co-worker on my program who has since moved on to another program. This cubicle was full of stuff. Lots of stuff. It had continued to accumulate stuff even after my co-workers departure. It took me about 45 minutes just to separate the CDs into groups -thrown away, keep, and destroy. It took me even longer to get through all the papers. I had to look over every piece to see if it was still relevant or if it should be shredded. As I looked over the paperwork I was reminded of all the programs and efforts he and I worked on over the years. I found myself reminiscing. So many programs, so many memories.

I found myself shocked by the dates on the paperwork. Some went back to 2004, the year I started working here. To my mind that was just yesterday. In reality, that was 6 years ago. Then it occurred to me, I had been putti...

I started using a webcam back in Kubuntu 8.10. At the time I purchased a Logitech webcam that was specifically listed as compatible with linux. I plugged it in and viola, everything worked. It was extremely easy. Then 9.04 came out. As soon as I upgraded my webcam stopped working. The video continued to work but the mic stopped working.

I had another web cam that could be used on a Windows Vista laptop so I didn’t spend any time troubleshooting the problem. It was not until I was running 10.04 for a couple months that I finally decided to get to the bottom of the broken mic.

Unfortunately by the time 10.04 came around I had another issue, the video still worked but skin tone colors were blue. More on that later.

The mic problem turned out to be easily fixable by adjusting the settings in KMix, the KDE audio mixer. Even though I had set my USB Device to capture audio, I still needed to set my on-board sound card to capture the mic input as well. That doe...

Its been a while since my last blog post. The latest one wasn’t even written by me :) Well there are a couple things at work here.

First, I have been putting in lots of time into work recently... you know, the day job. It has turned into a day, night, and weekend job. I am not complaining. It is rewarding but extremely challenging and time consuming.

Second is the wedding. By the time I get home from work I am exhausted. All I want to do is eat a quick dinner and go to bed. But wait, there is still a wedding to plan that is coming up in the not to distant future. Luckily my fiancée and our families have been very understanding. Usually Nikki gets all the questions boiled to a yes / no question that I can answer... even in my exhausted state.

The last thing to note is that the website is my way of sharing what I am currently involved in outside of work. For example, I post ...

Hello,

i like the website facelift.  way to do work knez.

When I first created knez.org it was a means to an end. My goal was to learn PHP, a server side scripting language, and also get some experience with system administration. I started out hosting the site in Linux using Apache but quickly got fed up with always having to deal with .conf files and what felt like endless levels of weird problems and incompatibilities.

I switched to running the website under Windows XP and IIS. It was relatively painless to setup and administer. Very rarely did I ever need to login to the webserver to do anything. I just left automatic updates on and let it rip. I even setup an FTP and Email server in addition to the website.

Over time though the limitations of IIS under Windows XP Professional started to annoy me. For starters, it was not at all straight forward to host multiple websites on one computer. Secondaly, it was limited to 20 concurrent connections. Initially this was not a problem but recently web browsers ha...

Last month our electric bill was off the charts.I was secretly hoping someone was playing a pratical joke on us. Once the full amount sunk in I decided I to do something about it. I decided to buy a tool that would let me see exactly how much electricity was used by various devices.

I logged on to Newegg and bought a Kill-a-watt.

With this little device and I see exactly how many energy anything plugged into it is using. It provides information on voltage, amps, etc. I only care about instaneous watts and long term watts numbers.

I set out to document how much electricity various devices around my house use. I didnt bother testing devices like my refrigerator- devices that I would leave on regardless of the results. I only looked at devices that I might power off if they were using too...

Nikki and I started dating back on December 6th of 2002. We were both from the same home town but never met each other until we were living in different states attending college. Nikki and I met through common friends back in our home town but it was not until junior year of college that we finally got to know each other well.

Once we finally started dating we had a long 4 hour drive long distance relationship. Which quickly shrunk to 1 hour when Nikki transferred to Eastern Illinois University, only about 70 miles from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

The long distance relationship continued once I graduated in ’04 and moved to Maryland. Nikki still had one more year of school to finish up before she was done. But, as soon as she graduated in ’05 she moved out to Maryland with me - which marked...

Last week Nikki and I had Verizon Fios installed in our house. She was looking foward to the TV package and DVR. I was looking forward to 20 megabit upload speeds! That beats the pants off Comcast 1.5 mega bit uploads, especially considering that I almost never got that rate with Comcast. Instead I was typically getting 70 kilobytes up at best (560 kilobits, 0.5 megabit).

Putting the speed aside for a second, Verizon dropped the ball and missed our first installation appointment. Of course they promise to be there somewhere between 8AM and midnight (slightly exaggerated), and they dont do installations on the weekends so you have to take the entire work day off. I was very disappointed when no one showed up the first time. -1 cool points Verizon.

They did make the second appointment and got everything installed without too much hassle. I immediately ran a series of bandwidth speed tests. I consistently got 20 mega bit download speeds exactly as advertised. My upload ...

Well the 4.5 OS finally came out for the Blackberry Curve. I have been waiting for this to come out for about 6 months now. It really upgrades the funtionality of the device. Some of the major upgrades are:

• Video Recording capability
• Ability to read html formatted email
• Streaming Audio/Video
• Voice Recorder

I have played with youtube and it seems to work fairly well. The streaming videos on mobile youtube are pretty downgraded in quality. This is to be expected I guess since youtube has to cater to all mobile devices. Since the resolutions on their videos arent as big as my screen the videos wont go truely full screen. They seem to be the perfect size for the Blackberry Pearl though. I have not yet found a site to stream audio from. I am praying that I can somehow finess this thing to hook into di.fm. I’ll let yall know when I get this working.

The...

I created this blog with the intention of recording out my every thought. After spending a few days writing all the code for the blog I created a flurry of posts but quickly have subsided to 1 post every couple months. I have a couple of ideas why this might be the case.

Most people blog about family, friends, or hobbies. I already have the photos section of the website to essentially ’blog’ about experiences I shared with friends and family. I also have a sections for all my hobbies; computers, cars, and our house.

Whats left for the blog then? Not much. Every once and a while I will rant here rather than creating a new webpage on the website, but only when the rant is not about something already featured on the website.

If you want to see what I am doing on a weekly basis, check out these other sections of the website:

• Photos - see where I have been and what I had to say about it
• *More*

It was a year ago today I complained about lots of stuff breaking simultaneously. I always thought this phenomenon was cyclical but now I am sure. It seems to happen once a year.

This time more things broke but over a longer duration. For starters, the Bronco’s front left brake pad completely worn down without any indication. This is strange after just 20k miles. Normally you hear some screeching when the pad is getting low. All I heard was the grinding of the pad backing on the rotor. I replaced the rotor, both sets of front pads, and both front calipers. After all is said and done it still clicks when driving thanks to a troublesome ABS tone ring not fully seating on the wheel hub.

Next was the XS1100. All of a sudden one day the engine sounded like it was going to blow up when it hit 4k RPM. I replaced the cam chain but no luck, the wicket vibration was still there. I have since replaced the exhaust gaskets hoping that will take care of it. As soon as it sto...

Hello there,

Thanks a ton for having the coolest website possibly made by any Jonathan that i know.  I played super nerd this evening, and I ended up here.  This was my fun evening of joyous entertaining activities of usefulness.

Alan bought an air conditioner from craigs list for $40.  Awesome.  I could not take a hot bedroom any longer.  Once i hooked up my AC, i realized it was possible to be in my bedroom.  I yoinked my original television that i bought in the summer between 8th grade and freshman year from my little brother, and got it in my room.  Since my television took over the place that my speaker was located, my poor speaker got placed on the ground.  That aint cool.  Soooo, i needed a speaker stand, but luckily i had a second metal electronics rack at the shop.  I vacuumed it out, and brought it home with a 300 disc sony cd player i got at the electronics junkyard, and a dolly plate.  I installed any...

Its easy to get caught up in the day to day grind. When I am not at work I am working on the house or working one of my fleet of vehicles. Its easy for me to get lost in all the things I need to get done.

Today I took a break from all that and took a motorcycle ride with a friend from work. We headed into northwest Maryland. It was by no means a long ride but it was incredibly refreshing. The weather was beautiful, the grass was green, the sky blue, and the air just smelled like summer. I had missed all this until I got out of the traffic in Baltimore and made my way into the country on my bike.

On a motorcycle you are closer to your surroundings. You can smell the fresh cut grass, you can feel the air temperature drop as you ride through shadows, you can see everything with an unobstructed view.

I got the impression of expansiveness I looked upon the distant landscape from the road as it peaked on a hill. It really puts things in perspective. Life is not abo...

Thats no typo. I recently got over 300 mpg with my Saab. Well, actually it got infinite mpg as it was being towed behind the Bronco :)

A few days ago I went to leave work only to realize my car wouldn’t start. This was not the, "oops I left my lights on" kind of wont start. Everything seemed to be working, it would turn over, show me how much fuel was left, show the RPMs, etc. It just would not actually start.

After checking the obvious stuff like fuses and fuel lines I decided it would take more work than I was willing to do in my work parking lot. I came back the next day armed with the Bronco and a car trailer. I got the car loaded up and back at the house in no time.

I must say I am constantly impressed with the Bronco. I always does all the work I ask of it. It had no problems whatsoever in pulling the saab + trailer behind it. The suspension was not even that loaded which surprised me. I guess thats the payoff to having rough ride...

About 4 months ago the Bronco Car Computer hard drive died. My theory is that it died due to the extreme cold from the ambient temperature followed by the heat from running the computer.

In any event, I finally got a replacement hard drive. The hard drive is significantly smaller than my old one since it is from a computer someone gave me for free. As soon as I got the new hard drive I got an OS on it, installed a bluetooth adapter, and got internet access in my car using my Mogul cell phone.

I love it. The connection speed is more than enough for streaming internet radio. All in all it works very well and is very reliable once the connection has been established. The only problem is that every time I want to share the internet from my Mogul to the computer, I have to start a program on the phone then separately start a program on the PC. This is kind of a pain but I am sure a quick search on the internet will yield some software that does all this automatically.

Yesterday I tried to open my fiancial file and couldn’t; it looked like the file was corrupted. I thought I was going to throw up. I am the sort of person that never uses cash and painstakingly enters every penny I spend so I can track my spending habbits and monitor my budget. It took me a long time to get my financial program setup so my buget and bills perfectly reflected my life, not to mention I recently started doing Nikki’s bills also.

Thankfully it turned out to be user error, the financial file was fine and no data was lost. The experience was not without a purpose though, I finally got off my butt and started looking around for a decent scheduled backup program. Being a software engineer I understand the importance of keeping backups of anything critical. Despite that I never do a good job of making backups at regular intervals. Instead I make a backup here and there every 6 months when I have some free time.

Not anymore. After only about 5 minutes...

Not too long ago I accidently deleted (really deleted, not just recycle bin deleted) my entire website, all 12 gigs of content. Luckily I had a 6 month old backup and, for the most part, I was able to restore all the lost content that was new in the last 6 months. All in all I wasted about 4 hours getting the website back up and running and I will waste many more hours rewriting php code for pages I was not able to fully restore.

Recently someone heard this bad news and took pity on me. Thanks to the Tom and Sue I now have an external hard drive dedicated to backing up my website. This is much more convenient than zipping my website up and backing it up on multiple DVD’s. Now I can just copy it to the hard-drive which should keep me motivated to backup more frequently.

As a bonus I can keep the hard drive in my garage or at work so that if something happens to my computer in ...

The state I live in has determined that all cars must undergo an inspection just after purchase. For new cars this really is not a big deal... I am not known to buy new cars. The silly thing is that once your car passes inspection, it never needs to be reinspected until the next owner buys it. I fail to see the point of a state inspection unless it is periodic. I might get my car past the inspection meaning its safe on the road only to never replace the brakes for 12 years.

Most of my vehicles have been high milage so needless to say I am used to failing the inspection. The Saab was no exception. The final list of items to be repaired:

1. Reverse lights dont work
2. Tag light burned out
3. Rear view mirror glazed
4. Both front axles need replacement
5. Complete exhaust system needed
6. Front and rear pads and rotors needed

I cant say that the list suprised me too much. Even though the Saab is a dream to drive they have to find some...

I have been wanting a car for a while now. The Bronco gets the job done but I miss driving a compact sedan with a manual. After doing months of research I determined that I like way to many types of cars. There is typically a car from every manufacturer that I thought was sweet. To help narrow the list I came up with the following requirements. The car has to:

• Have a manual transmission
• Be quick, perferrably 0-60 in less than 8 seconds
• Be fun to drive
• Be in my price range (about $4k)
• Get better gas mileage than the Bronco.

That last requirements eliminated the Sherman tank I was thinking about getting but left almost every vehicle in the running. As I started looking at cars more closely I started to focus on the Volkswagen Corrado VR6, Ford Mustang GT 94-98, and the Chevrolet Corvette C3 74-81. I know the corrado was fun to drive but hard to find and parts would be an issue. The Mustang on the other hand was easy to find and p...

My first car computer was a thing of beauty (see it here). Unfortunatly, that system is long gone. About a month after getting the Bronco I started putting together car computer #2, AKA BronCo-pilot. Yeah, the name is kind of catchty but mostly lame.

I didnt put much thought into the name. The same could be said about how the car computer #2 has been installed in the bronco for the last 1-1/2. It was pretty much just laying in pieces on the floor, everything worked but nothing was convenient and certainly nothing looked good. 

As a matter of fact, I cant even find any pictures of complete initial installation. That says something when even I, the one who takes pictures of all my little hobbies, would not take pictures of this one.

As you may remember my 7" touchscreen LCD recently broke. I was able to fix it but its much to fragile to just have rolling aro...

For my birthday my brother got me a newegg gift certificate. Its easier for me to spend money on newegg then to it is to breath or keep my heart beating.

I picked up a bunch of stuff and just before checking out thought I would check out the universal remotes, especially now that the home theater was done.

Thats when I saw this little beauty. I was skeptical it could truely do everything I wanted it too given the $35 price tag. I have been pleasently suprised by this remote.

Full SIze Photos

To start with, it can learn learn the siganls of other remotes. Thats pretty standard. It has macro capabilities to allow you to do multiple actions with one button press. Ok thats a little more rare at this level. The best part, it connects to a computer for programming. Now we are talking!

I have to say the p...

A while back the picture quality on my 7" touch screen used in the car computer dropped off dramatically. It was well out of warranty so I took it apart to get a closer look inside. It turns out one of the contacts had melted as well as the corresponding line in the computer to screen wire. I contacted the manufacturer and they wanted a chunk of change to fix it, enough change that I could get a competitors brand new touchscreen, ouch.

I did some research online and found a vendor that sold the particular connector I needed, a female 20 pin DFP connector with 90 degree PCB mount. This actually took me a rediculously long time. $2.50 later I had the connector and was ready to go to work on fixing the screen.

What followed can only be described as the slow methodical murder of my screen. I had to remove 19 tiny connectors bef...

I have determined that my life is cyclical. About every 1.5 years lots of my stuff breaks. This is getting more and more annoying as I am getting more and more stuff.

Most recently within a 1 month period I had the following things break:

1. Work laptop battery suddenly wont work
2. XS1100 motorcycle started running rough
3. Bronco check engine light came on
4. 7 inch touchsceen for car computer started having really crappy picture

Thats it for now. Hopefully that its because that enough to deal with for a while. At least this time things have been realatively quick to fix. Work can take care of the broken work laptop. The XS1100 had poor fuel air mixture due to an air leak at the carb. Thats fixed now. The bronco has a throttle position sensor that isnt putting out enough voltage. I have the parts but have not installed them yet.

I have to look on the bright side, I am getting better at fixing things and at least none of my home theate...

Casey, Alan, and Brian made the trek out to Baltimore to visit me and to check out a pretty amazing concert. Let me start by saying that having my hometown friends out in Baltimore was amazing and weird at the same time. It was weird because I have no frame of reference for my home town friends in baltimore. Previously if I went to DC I would not think of my hometown friends b/c I had never been to DC with them. Hopefully you get the idea.

That said it was a blast having them out here. As typical is typical with these guys we kept planning to a minimum, but things always seem to turn out best that way.

After picking them up at the airport we drove back to the house and showed them around here. I then proceeded to lose to Casey in Soul Calibur multiple times. The day when we switched to Micro Machines. I think after a couple of rounds of that game Brian was about to walk back to Illinois. We then tried Fight Night and that was the only game we played for the rest of the l...

Its no secret Nikki and I have been working on finishing our basement for along time now, probably for about 1 year now. Today marks the first day that we started moving stuff from upstairs into its permanent home in the basement. This is a great feeling to finally be using the rooms we worked so hard to finish.

We bought a couple of desks at Ikea and spent some time today assembling them. Once they were ready we moved the computers from our makeshift office in the 2nd bedroom upstairs down to the real office in the basement. Its great!. The room is well air conditioned, has numerous electrical outlets, and network connections everywhere we need them. This is in stark contrast to our office upstairs where we both shared a crappy fold out desk, ran off of a single wall outlet and network jack, and were in a room that was always hot.

Thats not all we moved down stairs though. I hung a piece of drywall on the wall to act as my screen. I primed it twice and started applying ...

Our hot tub starting leaking. I took off all 4 body panels trying to find the leak. It turned out that water would spew from one of the motors when running. I found a replacement motor and pump assembly on the internet but I was hesitant to buy it. Was that really all that needed to be replaced? How long is it going to take me do the swap?

At this point I am tired of learning new things (at least for a little while) so I actually considered just calling a service guy to do the work. Thats when my primary traight kicked on, one that can never be supressed as it comes from my most basic brain functions. Thats when I remember I am too cheap to have someone else come do it!

I got the motor off the internet. I had it installed in about 1 hour and the hot tub is good as new. No more leaks, no more scary motor sounds, and plenty of pressure coming out of all the jets. Thank you cheap personality trait. You saved me big moula again.

See the all the photos ...

Nikki and I have been working like mad trying to get the basement of our house finished. Recently we picked up new motivation; get it done before Rockford friends come out for the Virgin Fest rock concert.

For a while now we have been working on the basement to the exclusion of all other tasks, barring basic maintenance like mowing the yard. Well the upstairs bathroom finally got to Nikki. First let me start out with what was not so great about the bathroom:

1. Its small
2. Its laid out in a strange manner, that emphasises its smallness
3. Blue wallpaper (by itself not bad, but its not in our color palet)
4. Mildew, lots of it
5. Loose 70’s medicine cabinet
6. Gold sparkle sink, also very small
7. Crappy vanity
8. No airflow so mirors fog up like crazy and mildew runs rampent

When we first bought the house we had grand plans to completly reorganize the bathroom. The tub would be moved from all on wall as you walk in...

As a kid I remember my parents telling me to go out and rake the yard. At that moment it always seemed like we had 10 acres of oak tree forest. I despided raking leaves, putting mulch down, or any other yard work for that mater.

Yesterday I mowed my yard. While I was out there I decided to trim some overgrown bushes. Before you know it I was on a ladder cutting down low branches on my huge tree (maybe maple? Boy Scouts was a long time ago). Although it was about 90 degrees and I could have easily sunk 4 hours into something else, I didnt mind doing it. This was probably due to the fact that I had a choice. It was more like volunteer work and less like slave labor. This makes me wonder if my parents hated doing yard work on their parents yards.... hmm.

And although I generated 3 wheelbarrow loads full of trimmings and weeds and about 6 bundles of tree branches, there is still plenty more yard work for left over for the next time I get motivated, although that might not b...