Vi reference

I created a nice little reference document for Vi and Vim.  It gives some background and history, and then goes on to explain a few things as well as provide a list of a lot of useful commands for use within Vi and/or Vim.  Vi and Vim are very powerful text editors found on any NIX platform.  Take a look at these commands and shortcuts and turn your Vi time into a powerhouse of productivity!

Veritas Volume Manager Goodness

Hi folks, it’s been a bit since I put anything new up here, life has been real busy lately.  To that end though, I have been working on stuff for the site, and I just posted something that I think is very useful.  It took awhile to put it all together, but nothing is too good for my visitors.

I have been working with Veritas Volume Manager, now called Veritas Storage Foundation lately.  I have worked with it in the past, but not as in depth as I have in recent weeks.  I decided to make a reference for myself, since I seem to get into it for a bit and then don’t touch it for awhile because it just runs.  Then I figured I would make it as comprehensive as I could, plus easy to read, pretty, etc, and then post it here for anyone and everyone that might find it useful.

I have it on the site in HTML format here, and I also have it up in the downloads section as a PDF if you wan to download a copy.  Check it out and let me know if you see anything I missed, I hope you find it useful!

Installing World Of Warcraft On Vista

Having trouble installing WoW (Word of Warcraft) on your Windows Vista box? Well, I was. Recently I wanted to go back and give WoW a try once again, and by now I have a new machine from Alienware running Windows Vista. I popped the original first CD in and low and behold … I got an error, it wouldn’t run the executable. I got an error number 132 and something about a bootstrap problem.

I thought this might just be a problem with the older installer and Vista, since I got these disks years ago, so I downloaded the latest installer from Blizzard’s website. So, 3.5 GB later I try to install from the download and it doesn’t work either. Different error, this time Vista just popped up a box saying that the installer wasn’t working. Support at Blizzard was no help, in their opinion I had bad memory but I didn’t think that was the case since every other game I have runs great. After some log searching and Google-ing, I hit upon something that clicked for me. It seems the installer was failing because of a problem with the LAME MP3 codec. Aha!

The answer was there in front of me. I took a shot, downloaded and installed the LAME MP3 codec and tried again. Lookout, now the installer worked! I didn’t go back and try the old CD’s, but the installer that I downloaded worked great.

So, if you are having trouble installing WoW on your Vista box, and especially if you get any kind of LAME MP3 errors, go and download the codecs here (http://www.freecodecs.net/files/lameACM-3.97-final.zip) and see if that helps.

Great stuff at PortableApps

In this post, I’d like to do two things.  First off, I want to plug a really cool site called PortableApps.com that has some really cool software in the form of … well, portable apps.  What these are, are common widely used applications that have been transformed in such a way that they can run right off of your thumb drive, no install necessary, hence the term portable.  They have lots of cool stuff that you can download, absolutely free, and use right off your thumb drive, or hard drive, or anywhere really.  It’s nice being able to have firefox and open office (and much more) with you, no matter where you go, even with all of your own settings and customizations.  That’s hard to beat!  Go check it out, you won’t be disappointed I am sure. Continue reading