Verizon LTE

For comparison, I went back and tested my iPhone again, now with a new 4G icon. The last time I did this, just about two years ago, I was about half a mile away from where I’m at now. Two years, and half a mile closer to Seattle, and I get this.

AT&T 4G

This is much better, but I’m in so close to Downtown Seattle that I was looking at Pike Place Market from the window of my office. For those not familiar, this is about as close to the heart of Seattle as you can be.

Now that the iPad has the same connectivity as I do at home, it’s a true take anywhere device. As an IT guy, I’m glad to be able to work anywhere (even though the iPad isn’t officially supported.)  I don’t think AT&T is quite there yet, but I expect my new Verizon LTE iPhone 5 will be.

The authenticity of host 'myfirsthost.work.cainmanor.com (10.256.33.106)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is fc:40:7c:de:b8:ac:a2:f5:d4:11:d0:0e:b2:77:8a:63.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes

To stop this prompt, we need to edit your ~/.ssh/config file. Add these two lines

StrictHostKeyChecking no
UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null

Setting your UserKnownHostsFile should only be a temporary fix. After you’ve pushed your keys, you should comment out both of those settings.

Your password is the next problem. We can solve that with sshpass. sshpass takes your password and passes it on when ssh ask for it. There are three ways to do it, all of them insecure. Read the man page and decide which of those you want to use. For my purposes I just put it on the command line – I’m on my personal machine with no other users, and only I know the passwords to the box. Don’t do this on a shared server.

Here is an example of how to push your public key one. Try it on a new server to make sure you get the results you expect.

sshpass -p 'MY_PASSWORD' ssh-copy-id gregc@new_host_with_no_keys

Now that we’ve got the prompts turned off, we’ll wrap a script around this. How you get the list of appropriate hostnames or IP’s is your business.

for X in `cat my_host_that_need_keys`
do
sshpass -p 'MY_PASSWORD' ssh-copy-id gregc@${X}
done

Happy Computing!!

In a nutshell, here is how I was able to do it:

cd /tmp
yum install pcre-devel
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.1.9.tgz
tar -xvf APC-3.1.9.tgz
cd APC-3.1.9
phpize
whereis php-config
./configure –enable-apc –enable-apc-mmap –with-apxs –with-php config=/path/to/php-config
make
make install
echo "extension=apc.so" >> /etc/php.d/apc.ini
echo "apc.slam_defense=0" >> /etc/php.d/apc.ini
echo "apc.write_lock=1" >> /etc/php.d/apc.ini
service httpd restart

I also make these changes to my httpd.conf file

Timeout 40
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 200
KeepAliveTimeout 2

Having seen the entire series, I’m going to give the nod to The Sopranos as the better series. Here are my reasons (Spoiler alerts galore)…

- I found the situations more plausible in Sopranos. In the Wire there were two instances where the body count went through the roof. The first was when the Far Eastern immigrants were found dead, and the other was when Marlo started piling up the bodies. I lost count of the number of bodies they found when they started going house to house (~20? ~30), but I imagine that there would be more of an uproar. Granted, I’m a liberal living in Seattle, so maybe I’m wrong on that, but I stand by it. Also, when the Fat Cop (Landsman?) let Bubbles go, saying he’d suffered enough – that seemed highly unlikely. That guy was a jerk to everybody he came across, and that was the only instance he showed any humanity. The story arc of Omar bothered me a bit too. He was a very calm, calculated man, and I don’t believe he’d let him emotions get the better of him to the point of being killed by a child. Most of the other characters I would have believed, but not Omar, our modern day Achilles.

Speaking of implausible situations, I don’t see how Omar Little would survive ripping off drug dealers. Every slinger with a gun would be out after him, and I don’t see it working out that well for him.

In the Sopranos, there were very few instances of such implausibility. There was the scene with the Russian guy that got away and was completely forgotten, but I didn’t find that to be over the top. Maybe the scene were the Stripper was beaten to death, but only maybe.

- There were more stronger seasons of The Sopranos than there were of The Wire, and I think the last episode of The Sopranos was particularly strong. From conversations with many people, I may be the only person particularly fond of the ending of The Sopranos, but I did think it was brilliant. Season One of The Sopranos was fantastic too – much better than first season of The Wire (which was also very good – just not as good.)

- There were better, stronger (as in more developed) characters in The Sopranos. Tony and Carmela were very well developed, as were more minor characters, such as Dr. Melfi, Christopher and Adriana. There were some strong characters in The Wire, specifically Omar and Bubble. I really like the Omar character, especially how his character was exceedingly badass macho but also openly gay. I don’t watch much TV, but I don’t recall a character such as his on TV. Bubbles was also a very well done character. I didn’t particularly enjoy the McNulty character. It seemed like he was all over the board – sober sometimes, drunk others, but without any sort of back story to flesh out these changes. I found the Marlo character to be a bit underdeveloped (where did he come from, why wasn’t he stopped earlier by other drug dealers), but I did find him to be a terrifying character – the most out of either show. A true psychopath (witness the scene with the Security Guard, who ended up dead later.) The Sopranos had several characters that were hard core, starting with Tony Sopranos (the scene were he ended Christophers life…), but also his mother and sister, Little Ralphie, etc.

- I think people were more able to get behind The Wire because of three things. There was a clear theme every season (Newspapers, Schools, etc.), all of which were “pressing social issues.” And since each season was so clearly delineated, there was a more clearly defined story arc. If you were to come into season four, you could be up to speed and enjoy the season on it’s own, and then there was a clear payoff at the end of each season. I felt like The Sopranos didn’t have as much of a demarcation from season to season, and that it benefited from a longer continual viewing. Lastly, there tended to be the innocents in each season – teachers! reporters! kids! blue collar workers! – that made it easy to root for. The Sopranos didn’t tend to have sympathetic characters – maybe a few, but only a few.

That’s why I think The Sopranos was a better TV than The Wire.

It’s a giant USB drive you can use from anywhere, it’s a great way to keep backups, it’s a great way to share files and it’s free. After spending two hours and 15 minutes on the latest Dropbox promotion for 1 GB of extra space ( I was the 343rd finisher, which was about 15 minutes behind the winner), I thought there has to be a better way.  There is – Google Adwords.

Here’s how to max out your Dropbox referrals using Google Adwords.

1. Get a coupon for free Google Adwords credit.  Google for “google adwords promotional code.”  Under search tools, set your search to the last month or the last week. It might take a few searches, but eventually you’ll find it. Whatever you do, DO NOT PAY FOR A PROMOTIONAL CODE.  Finding the code was the hardest part, but eventually you’ll find one.
2. Once you have the voucher (it may take a few days), create your Google Adwords account.
3. Create your Ad Campaign.  I created one Campaign, with two different Ad Groups.  The most important step is to make sure you use your referral link (found here) instead of just putting in dropbox.com.  That’s where the magic happens.  When someone clicks on the dropbox.com link, they are clicking on on your referral link, which sends them to the dropbox signup page.
   

   The first, using just the keyword of “Dropbox”, was quite a bit more expensive and had a lower return. The CPC (Cost Per Click) of $.24, with 124 clicks out of 11,500 impressions (which means it was served on 11,500 pages, and clicked 124 times.) Not all of the clicks resulted in people actually signing up.

   The second ad was using the keyword of “Get Dropbox”, which had a CPC of $.13, but I got 64 clicks out of 1,418 impressions. The total cost for this ad was between 1/3rd and 1/4 the cost of the first ad.

4. Now all you need to do is sit back and watch the referrals roll in. Not all clicks go on to sign up, and not everybody that signs up installs the software, which is a necessary step in the process. Of the 188 clicks, 35 joined Dropbox, and 30 installed the software. If you were starting from zero, you’d need 32 people to sign up in order to get the complete 8GB.

There were a couple of things I would do differently. I set up a relatively low budget for the ads per day, which means they will only run a few times per day (for instance, if you have a $5 a day budget, and your ad is estimated to cost $.25 per click, it will only get, at max, 20 clicks a day.) The time those ads run will be spread out over the course of the day. It’s not bad, but there really wasn’t any reason to not just use your estimated budget at once. Be careful to not go over your budget, because those cost come out of your pocket.