Zac Garrett

I never understood the reason behind so many geeks being obsessed with cameras before I actually started taking pictures. That was because I never really understood how to take a good picture. It is very technical.

First, you have to understand the various settings on the camera. You can go out and use auto mode, but you might as well just have a point in shoot camera. To get the most out of a camera you should really learn it inside and out. This is like any other technical project. Understand the hardware so its just second nature. Continue Reading »

In my attempt to keep up on podcasts I finally gave up with Miro and found a great shell script called BashPodder. This is a very simple script that keeps all of your podcasts up to date with very little effort. It was missing a few features that I wanted, so I updated the script and am now releasing it to the general public under the GPL. Continue Reading »

Leopard seems to have a problem when you have more than two DNS servers set. As soon as I added a third DNS server to the list all connections nearly dropped out. It would take over five seconds to load any page.

The fix to this problem is to use only two DNS servers. I choose OpenDNS as their servers are reliable. I don’t like the ads they put on the pages when you type a domain wrong, but the benefits are good enough to look over this issue.

Matthew Helmke recently posted and article entitled What is the coolest thing you can do using Linux that you can’t do with Windows or on a Mac? This is chalked full of fallacies that are quite common in the Linux advocacy world. I am going to take a look at each one of these items and explain what I think about them. Continue Reading »

As I have talked about in the past, the URL/location bar in firefox 3 is just plain annoying. The latest beta build have had the option to disable the functionality by tweaking the about:config its not pretty, but it got the job done. Continue Reading »

When dealing with clean URLs it usually means some complex regex for each and every single type of content. When using lighttpd and wordpress there is a much simplifier solution, 404 rewrites. All you need to do is add an error handler to your lighttpd.conf and a single line of php  to your theme.

The first step is to add the following to lighttpd.conf for the domain:

server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php?error=404″

The next step is to make sure your actual 404 page gives the 404 error. In your templates 404.php you need to add the following to the top of the file:

 <?php header(”HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found”); ?>

Once you get these two settings in place you will be able to set the custom permalinks to whatever you would like.

After a year of using Serendipity it is time to go with something else. I’ve converted the site to Wordpress and created a WP theme out of my old s9y template. For the most part you should not notice too much different. Since I did start from near scratch with this theme it should be fairly lightweight. I might be missing some WP specific styles, but I’ve got it looking fairly good.

Links to posts are going to change quite a bit from the old version. At the moment I’ve not taken the time to use lighttpd rewrites as of the moment. I would suggest not bookmarking anything for the next few days as they will likely break.

For RSS subscribers nothing should change. I’ve been running feedburer for a long time and it should continue to work. You might want to verify that your feed is pointing to http://feeds.zacgarrett.com/tech-geek.

If you notice any massive problems please feel free to contact me.

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr is a new book about how the IT department does not matter. What the book really represents is hunk of wasted paper chalked full of inaccuracies without any real backing. To be honest I’ve only read the first chapter and cannot read any further.

The book starts out with a story in the prologue about how the author met with some people in Boston who showed him that IT could be a utility. It asserted that this was his idea from some previous book he wrote. The story itself was boring and meaningless. It didn’t grab my attention nor was there any good information to keep me reading. Continue Reading »

After a year of running OS X as my primary OS at home it was time to give Linux a go again. I felt that I was missing the customization of Linux and the massive amounts of free software. After getting bored quickly with Microsoft Server 2008 it was quickly time to move on to Ubuntu.

The reason for going with Ubuntu was that it is the most popular Linux distro today. Normally I would go with something a little more customizable such as debian or gentoo. This time I wanted to take a look at exactly what everyone says is the easiest Linux distro ever. Okay, that is really up for debate, but most people are talking about Ubuntu today. Continue Reading »

Playing around with Server 2008 beta in the screenshot above. Installing two copies of 2k8, Vista, and XP in Hyper-V as well as downloading Ubuntu and Fedora. Continue Reading »