My wife, Jamie, is an avid equestrian who competes in the sport of dressage.  It is all about the connection of horse and rider and she trains horses up through the levels.  Her last horse competed at Prix St. Georges and her baby, Aden (6 yrs), is getting ready to start competing this year.

Jamie on her horse, Aden.  Picture taken with LG flip phone at JMG Stables in Clinton, Montana.

We have a linux server running that hosts our internal systems like CRM.  We noticed significant slowdown of the system and failure to run batches on email.  In logging into the control panel for the server I was shocked to see 58GB of 73GB used for the disk.  Given only 9 domains and neither reported exceeding their allocated space, we didn’t know what used up all the space on the server.

I found two great resources that helped me isolate the issue.  First was identifying a series of commands that would display the largest files/directories on the server to start investigating:

# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

Thanks to: nixCraft

I ran this command and found that /var and /var/logs and /var/logs/audit.d/  directories had 50GB of file system used up.  I found in /var/logs/audit.d/ that there were save.1, save.2 … files all over 2MB each and hundreds of them.  In searching online I learned that these audit logs were not crucial and followed instructions to remove them and turn the audit service off (given internal systems anyway).

See this post from: Frank Mash - thanks Frank!

After performing these two steps, the CRM system is running fine and faster than ever.  Our control panel reports only 5GB used of 73GB on disk and I can breathe easy for a little while.    Hope this helps somebody else out there.

Since last year my friend has been raving over Redbox, $1 DVD rentals, in our local Albertsons grocery stores. Given I usually buy all my DVDs (avid collector), I didn’t try the service. Tonight I tried for the first time. You can either choose from the onscreen menu on the machine or order online in advance. I chose the latter. It was very cool because I ordered two movies, showed up at Albertsons, swiped my credit card and out popped my 2 DVDs within less than a minute.

I’d recommend Redbox.  No subscriptions, no waiting for the mail, $1 rentals, no lines and no hassles.

I was surfing Facebook as I had some friend posts and requests left unanswered.  Some random browsing to a friend’s page and some other buddies must’ve posted some questionable material.  I thought this notice was kind of funny and definitely a “hip” way to deal w/ censored content.

I finally decided to “attack the mac” and get the environment working again after my Leopard upgrade.  In my prior post, I noted how the Leopard install turned off the web server and PHP (simple fix) but the major issue was killing my ability to run Castor and XML-based applications.

I scoured the forums and first deleted all copies of xalan.jar, xercesImpl.jar and xml-apis.jar.  I found the latest xalan-j package online, unzipped it and it contained the various jars including serializer.jar, resolver.jar, etc.

It took adding the -verbose:class flag to catalina.sh (extending $JAVA_OPTS variable) and various trial/error to finally get it right.  The solution was to place ALL xml-based jars in the /tomcat_home/common/endorsed/ directory.  I had them split between /common/lib/ and the endorsed directories and when I consolidated them all, everything started working.

If you use Spring Web Services (WS) then you may see the error on “could not create Envelope” and this was what we were seeing.  After placing all JARs in the common/endorsed directory and restarting Tomcat, everything worked.  I hope this helps someone from countless days of headaches.

See below the proper jars in proper directories (mine may vary based on usage):

ALL xml-based jars in the endorsed directory solved xerces and xalan errors after upgrading to Mac OSX Leopard.

I recently upgraded my OS on my Macbook Pro to Leopard.  I must say it was as painless as possible but there are a few hiccups given I have a web server and a few other development-oriented programs running on my notebook.  Apache and PHP were not working and I have an issue with the Fire multi-chat IM client, plus some classpath issues in Eclipse IDE.

To get Apache and PHP working again:

- Preferences: Sharing: Web Sharing [turn on]

- Leopard installs PHP 5 and Apache 2.2 and I learned that it creates an entirely new config directory for apache.  I racked my brain over this one as it used to be /etc/httpd/ …  all the configs looked correct until I learned that Apache was now running from /etc/apache2/ so I edited the httpd.conf file and turned on the php5 module and restarted Apache and it worked.

- sudo vi httpd.conf  and uncomment the line w/ the PHP5 module

- sudo apachectl restart

I am still working on the Eclipse issue to get that working again and will likely use a different multi-chat client (unless Fire has an upgrade).

My friend, Garren Du, recently launched a new sports site in time for Super Bowl Madness.  Football Squares and Fan Site

Why use Rival Central for your Super Bowl Squares league?

• Create as many leagues as you want online and manage them from a single account.
• Invite league members to sign up and join your league by providing them with a League ID and League Password.
• Get your squares filled quickly, all through the internet.
• League members can log in, select and view all of their squares immediately and online.
• League Commissioners can lock the squares, assign squares to players that may not have internet access, and kick out deadbeat players.
• And the best part is - IT’S COMPLETELY FREE!

Rival Central will be your premier online sports gaming management tool. Expect player leagues to be ready in time for NCAA March Madness. More sports-related competitions will follow for popular college and professional sports. Rival Central is a competition oriented community Website. Services provided by Rival Central are for private amusement and entertainment purposes only.

Rival Central Online Sports Gaming Management

I just received this update from TWICE (This Week in Consumer Electronics) and thought I’d share - thankfully I don’t have any iPod accessories but sorry for those that may face this issue:

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Given everyone was off on New Years Day, Jamie and I decided to continue to be productive so in the morning we took a dip in the hot tub, had some lunch, and then proceeded to remove the old 70’s paneling that adorns most of the walls in the basement.

One of our goals was to knock down the wall between the family room and one of the bedrooms to make a larger living space area but I wasn’t sure whether I’d have to hire an engineer to help us design a beam to support the load.  Much to my pleasant surprise, I learned that the “make-shift” bedroom was not a load bearing wall and the original floorplan called for 2 2×10 headers with a beam between them that rests on top of the foundation wall.  I saw the beam after removing the paneling and then tested by removing the closet, then removing some studs and the entire wall was free standing!  See demo pics below:

Wood paneling and spare bedroom.  See removed panel exposed beam the covers the span.

We demoed the closet that was in the bedroom, and then I got the fun job of punching and kicking out the particle board.  Jamie got in on the “fun” to and man-handled the remaining sheet into submission.

Dust still settling as I knocked out the remaining studs for the wall.  The two rooms are now opened up.

As soon as I decide where to re-rout the electrical switch, I’ll knock out those remaining two studs on the right.  Now we just have to find a place to haul all the scrap material - I’ll be re-using some of the studs to build an in-wall entertainment unit at the far end.  I’m also installing the electrical components into the wall to the right so there will be access from under the stairs for wiring, etc.  Enjoy!

I had a couple days off and so did everyone else. Well that didn’t stop me from jailbreaking my iPod Touch, installing new apps and on the non-geeky side, ripping down paneling and knocking out a wall in my basement to make a large family room. We’ll ignore the latter project for now and I thought I’d share my discovery for opening up your iPod Touch to install at a minimum, the same apps that are included on the iPhone.

Screen Snaps of my iPod Touch (now multiple pages of apps):

Read below to find out how to install additional applications on your iPod Touch. No tech support offered but it does work, all the steps are included and some additional snapshots at the bottom of this post. I hope this helps!

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A friend of mine is a seasoned Venture Capitalist based in Austin Texas and was kind enough to share his former fund’s due-diligence checklist with me. This helped me prepare for our own fundraising and ensure we had everything in order ahead of time. I was allowed to share this list and thought it might be helpful to others - it’s great for any company, whether fundraising or not, in that it forces you to actually have a plan and your documentation, strategy and financial/legal documents in order. ENJOY!

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From Spring Framework 2.5 Tutorial. Given AspectJ pointcut expressions can seem somewhat cryptic, I thought sharing these examples might be useful.

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I was using Bluetooth and tried to use the OBEX commands to send a file to my LG VX8350 phone but the phone was locked down for that file type. It refused the file. I then chose the browse option, navigated to the MyPictures folder, and transferred the file successfully. This may be a helpful workaround for anyone trying to test pictures, etc. on cell phones. (hint)

See the error you may have faced and then see my solution below (for Mac OSX):

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Does this look familiar? If so, I may have your answer - read on…
I recently had to view an application being built by one of my company’s partners and it uses Shockwave to render images/media. Upon trying to view the application, the “missing plugin” icon was displaying and could not find a suitable plug-in to play the application.

Given I am on an Intel-based Mac, I learned that for Shockwave to run, you have to exit out of your browser, configure the Application (Firefox) to run in Rosetta Emulation Mode, then download Shockwave, install and you’re good to go. Come on Adobe! Let’s get Shockwave running in Universal Binary - after all, it’s Universal right?

Instructions From Adobe

Upon launching our new website, we wanted to enable a keyword availability checker so people can check the availability of keywords before ordering. To make it more convenient, I wanted the keyword they were checking to automatically populate the “Desired Keyword” field on the order form. Given the keyword checker was running on a different server and pulled in using IFRAME, due to security restrictions on browsers, it could not trigger events on the parent page.

SOLUTION: URL Hash (#)

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At long last, my “wish list” of things I wanted in our company website have been delivered. The beauty is in its simplicity. The snapshot below shows our new Flash demo movie, illustrating how Goomzee Text Marketing For Real Estate works. We also launched an affiliate program. Approved applicants can earn commission for every visitor they refer to Goomzee.com who places an order. Check it out!

As we roll on towards Thanksgiving holiday, we are looking to update the holiday graphic for goomzee.com and found this funny turkey photo.  We won’t be using it but I thought it was still worth sharing.

Perhaps there is a domain name you want to find the owner, or perhaps just check the nameservers, status, domain expiration date or other information about a domain name.  You can look in a variety of places but my favorite is the following:

http://www.whois.sc

Click the link above and enter your website address.  You may learn more than you knew about your site, including similar sites, Alexa search ranking, SEO plain text, etc.

It happens to us all.  Your website is not accessible and you need to know if it’s just your computer, your ISP or if it’s a serious problem.  Usually this is a DNS issue with your ISP or internal network but there is a tool you can use to view the responsiveness of your domain from servers around the world.

http://internetsupervision.com

Click the link above and on the right-hand side, enter the website address in question.  You can leave the email field blank.  Click the submit button and wait for the results.