02.28.09
Posted in Technology at 4:38 pm
Today I’m pleased to congratulate my good friends at Attigo in launching Pay4Bugs.com.
Pay4Bugs is a site with two personalities and was designed for two different kinds of people: 1. Software engineers, program managers, and web/application developers who want low-cost, high-quality, on-demand beta testing and bug-finding; and 2. Self-motivated people who want to play with new technologies and get paid for spotting problems.
choose the price that their bugs are worth. Pay4Bugs’ software testing pricing scheme even allows developers to try to get their applications tested for free with a $0.00 bug-finding assignment. I love this because as more and more developers join the site, there will be worldwide competition, and bug-testing prices will reach a market equilibrium — capitalism at its finest! — something this country no longer seems to understand.
On the other end, people can make money from home by testing software. As there are more testers out there, software developers will get to lower their bug-testing prices and the competition will get their testing done faster and more thoroughly!
I have both a developer and a tester account on Pay4Bugs and they’re both very well-designed, clean, and easy to use. In fact, if you already have a Google, AIM, Yahoo, or OpenID account, you can already sign in using OpenID! I’ll be posting some side-projects and have people look for typos on this website as well, so see you over at Pay4Bugs.com!
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01.20.09
Posted in Technology at 7:58 am
This took me a bit too long to figure out. Using Ubuntu 8.10 on a server, I wanted to use phpmyadmin to graphically manage my MySQL databases, but disallow root logins for security reasons.
There are two things you must do in the phpmyadmin config file – typically found at /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php:
- Change the ‘auth_type’ to ‘cookie’. This will be under the /* Authentication type */ comment. The line should read as
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘cookie’;
Make sure it is uncommented by removing the “//” before it, and then change the parameter to ‘cookie’ if that’s not already set.
- Add a new line below this, that says
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowRoot'] = FALSE;
That’s it! Very easy but was tough to find in the forums.
Happy administrating!
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07.25.08
Posted in Music Reviews, Technology at 7:11 pm
One of my biggest complaints about the Internet has been the disturbing lack of quality images of the cover of Hammers of Misfortune’s album, The August Engine
. The August Engine claw is by far one of my favorite logos, and is probably my favorite t-shirt too.
To see what this eclectic, bizarro metal band is all about, go to the Hammers of Misfortune Myspace Page and listen to the second track, A Room and a Riddle, which is off of the August Engine album.
If this band sounds familiar, it’s because their latest album, The Locust Years, scored #6 on my Top 15 Albums of 2006. I like The August Engine even better.
Hammers of Misfortune will always hold a sweet spot in my heart. During my Ohio State college days, I drove up to Cleveland to meet up with Brian and see them play at the Grog Shop in 2004. To our dismay, only 7 people were in attendance (this type of thing happens when a west coast metal band plays in a punk venue and there is absolutely no promotion). And you know what happened? They played their asses off in what was one of the best concerts I’ve seen to this day. I love this band and can’t wait for the new album.
ANYWAY, I decided to solve this problem today. Right here, right now.
The best bet I had was to take a picture of my t-shirt and clean it up a bit. The pic at the top is a JPG of my shirt after it’s been cleaned up. You can see the white part of the claw is whiter than the words. Go ahead and clean those up if you want.
To the left is a vectorized PNG image of the claw with a nice circle around it. Since it’s vectorized, it’s not based off of a geometric formula and can be stretched to your desire. I also have EPS, SVG, and PDFs of it if you like – just contact me.
Finally, here’s a link to the original unmodified August Engine Claw picture from my t-shirt. And here’s a non-vectorized JPG image with the black circle claw.
Why did I do this? Why spend all that time vectorizing it (vectormagic.com RULES, btw) so that I can stretch it out? That’s a secret for later…
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09.18.07
Posted in Technology at 11:40 pm
After over a year of being dissatisfied with my previous web host, I have moved mikeroberto.com to Lunarpages.com. It has only been a week, but I am very impressed with them so far.
Finding a good web host is a very difficult thing, even for experienced webmasters. Googling for the best web hosts is like throwing yourselves to the wolves while wearing steak underpants. All of those “Top 10″ lists are simply paid-for lists, and all are equally shady.
The best way to find a good host is to first know what you want, and then go and look at the lists that allow the users to rate everything. The best site I found for this is www.webhostingjury.com. There are many user reviews and ratings. Currently, Lunarpages is #4.
I then went through the top hosts, and determined that Lunarpages gave me the most bang for my needs, which include multiple domains, unlimited databases, 350GB space (which I’ll never use), a good upgrade path for when my sites get popular, and some other stuff. I also did some research on www.myipneighbors.com to ensure that I’m not sharing a server with 650 other sites (like my last host, which is one reason why bertopics.com is so painfully slow).
Soon bertopics.com will be migrated, but that migration is going to be a pain.
Now that I have a host I can trust, I’ve also changed my official e-mail address. It is now [myfirstname]@mikeroberto.com — where [myfirstname] is mike. Still powered by gmail, but now with a better domain!
So if you need a web host, click on my new sidebar link or the image above, and check out Lunarpages. If you order, please use me as a referral!
Happy Hosting,
berto
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05.03.07
Posted in Life, The Universe, and Everything, Technology at 12:09 am
This is part 1 of 3 of the new computer series, and part 1 of 3 of the new funeral series here on MikeRoberto.com
On December 31, 2006, I was setting up my new bedroom, which also serves as my office, design studio, surfboard storage, hamper, and, of course, seduction palace. I turned on my computer, which was so creatively named “berto”, and noticed the power supply fan struggling to do its job.
Like any other idiot electrical engineer from Ohio State would have done, I decided to test if the fan was spinning by inserting a metal screwdriver into the power supply, thereby electrocuting myself with 120V and creating a small explosion.
And that was it. Berto had died. And this post is dedicated to the death of that 7 year old[1] dear friend of mine.
You are now attending berto’s funeral, and I am begrudgingly giving you his eulogy right now.
Berto was born on December 27, 1999. Hours of preparation went into his creation. This was my first computer being built from scratch, and would be used to forge my new life in college, as well as help me accomplish work for the beloved but now-defunct APK Net (sold to Expedient).
Berto was paid for in half by myself, and half by my parents. He cost $2600 total.
He came with an AMD Athlon 550MHz, 256mb ram, 40GB hard drive, Asus K7M motherboard, Teac 4X CD-R, Tekram 390F SCSI card, Klipsch THX Sound System, SoundBlaster Live! Value Audio Card, Sony CPD-400 Monitor, NVidia 3d video card, and Netgear network interface card. For software, I began with a dual-boot Mandrake Linux (7.1 I believe) and Windows 98 system. It eventually became a dedicated Linux box.
Over the course of time, I upgraded the memory to a whopping 396MB, and got a new hard drive that took me to the maximum supported 80GB, got a new power supply, and melted quite a few video cards due to poor cooling and dusty dorms.
I learned a lot about that purchase over time. Some quick lessons are:
- Find the right price point break when shopping for a processor. I did good with this, the damned thing lasted forever
- Don’t get a $300 video card if you don’t play many games
- Get awesome speakers and monitor, they devalue slowly. I did this and it was great, despite that monitor weighing 500 pounds and costing just as much, it lasted the entire time. I still have Klipsch in my room, and they are just as crystal clear as ever
- Don’t buy cheap cooling or power supplies or expect them to last forever, or they’ll just electrocute you in the end
- Do your research and find good deals with sites such as shopper.com
berto and I had some great memories. They began during construction, and ended with destruction. In between, there were those LAN parties at Larz’s house, CFabe’s house (don’t forget about jello shots with TGould and CFabe!), Arstein’s house, and TGould’s house. Yes, we were dorks, and it was fun.
Bertocam, pictured above, was around for a while, hosted using berto’s Apache server. I have a ton of silly pictures from freshman year, back before digital cameras were hot.
In college, berto became more popular than I did for quite a while. You see, berto somehow managed to collect a massive amount of digital pornographic videos, and his administrator decided to share them on the campus network. Despite being warned by a friend to turn on password protection, my ethernet connection was constantly pegged at 10MBits. Interesting story with that:
I’m home studying on a Thursday night, but the roommates are out partying with some friends of KiRBY’s in the south campus dorms. One such friend, Scott, is there:
Scott: Dude, you guys gotta check out this dude on the network! His name is “Ber-To”.Jon and Jeremy: Oh cool
Scott: yeah dude he’s got all this porn. But one day he turned on his password. So I yelled down the hallway, “Hey, what’s BER-TO’S new password?”
Jon and Jeremy (thinking to themselves): This is starting to sound familiar…
Scott: And my buddy down the hall yells back “the password is JONISGAY in all lower case!!!”
Jeremy: HAHAHHAAHHAA! Dude that’s our fucking roommate! That’s BERTO, not Ber-TOE!
Jon: And I’M Jon! I’m the gay one! (but I’m not gay…)
And hilarity ensues. Scott had been wanking off to a computer that was kept feet within the two guys who he was now drinking delicious Natural Light with.
berto was a trooper. Pegged network connections. Silly websites. Traveled all over northeast Ohio. Put up with numerous drunken kernel panics and botched experiments. He lived in 6 different locations with me, and nearly survived the 7th. That’s impressive.
berto saved the day numerous times with remote desktop capabilities in Linux. His usage as a webserver for the early renditions of bertopics.com and beroline, as well as that of a MySQL and file server were monumental. I even used him to install backorifice on my roommate Jon’s computer and do funky things to his desktop while I was in class.
berto took care of me, and I took care of him. He was constantly playing me music, checking emails, and surfing the web. I was constantly keeping him alive and hooking him up to weird things, such as a remote control for my mp3 player, which I would now be miserable without. He has seen some great changes in technology, and even greater changes in his owner.
And now, he’s gone forever, off to the PC heavens, where he will reign supreme over those who he lasted thrice the length.
I love and miss you, berto, and I will hold you near and dear to my heart forever.
However, it is time to move on. In part two of the new computer series, we will discuss the birth of ‘destroyal’, the latest and greatest in MikeRoberto.com technology.
[1] This is 105+ years old in computer years.
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Billy said,
01.20.09 at 10:06 am
I was wondering how to do this a couple of weeks ago. Thanks.
Uncle A said,
01.22.09 at 3:48 am
Thanks, just what every senior citizen needs to know.
Now I can play Solitary feeling secure.
Omar said,
11.24.09 at 1:22 am
I’m trying to figure out which file this is under
Omar said,
11.24.09 at 4:36 am
Never mind, I found it. Thank you.
/etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php