Tax season is approaching in the United States and like most people I am concerned about where my money will go. A few days ago the state of the union address was taking place and of course the hot topics these days are job creation and ways that united states can retain its position as the world superpower. While there has be a increase of unemployment recently, I am still very strongly against welfare hand out systems and I believe that if people cant find jobs on their own because there is a shortage, jobs need to be created that will benefit the people that are paying for them, IE the tax payers. As they say, there is always work to be done.

About 55 Years ago, Eisenhower dumped $25 Billion into creating interstate highways and this kind of investment has been paying off ever since. It created American jobs ... Read More

Yesterday I was fooling around with python and trying to serve some XML to a Cisco 7960 I have. I spent a lot of time getting my web server set up to serve a dynamic XML page which I could pop my phone book information into and when I finally got it done it wouldn't work. Searching online I found out that the latest firmwares from Cisco, 9.*, has a couple of bugs in it dealing with XML. Unfortunately I don't remember where I found this information but I can give out the sparks notes on what I saw.

When I was served the page from a web server, if it responded HTTP/1.0 OK, no good, the phone would only accept if it was HTTP/1.1 . I was getting some cryptic 404/BTXML errors but I could see that the files were fine by loading it on to the production ... Read More

When you first turn on your computer the BIOS kicks in and searches for instructions on your master boot record or MBR. From there it is able to locate the boot loader which in turn figures out which kernel to run and then loads it into memory and that is the point you start actually running your flavor of UNIX. At this stage your computer is just running a kernel and has no interactivity or running services.

You are most likely used to using your computer to do something, and to do that, you need to run processes. While at this point you could have your computer launch a shell, you would still have a lot of setting up to do such as mounting hard drives, bringing up your network adapters, starting services, launching a GUI or what ever else you want to do. This is tedious and beyond ... Read More