Looking for: Parental Controls Virtual Machine (or something)

Dear Lazyweb,

Having paid a decent amount of money yearly to Linksys for their nice little Parental Controls feature which ties in really well with my WRT54GS wireless router, I am surprised and dismayed to find that Linksys is no longer going to allow me to do so. They’re discontinuing their Parental Controls feature (a site-wide proxy, if you will) and have no replacement product. And having looked for the same service available from anyone/anywhere else, I am also shocked and dismayed to find that I can’t locate a viable replacement for said service.

So, dear reader, if you happen to know of a good product/service that allows multiple logins per site (home) and configurable levels of allow/blocking, and doesn’t cost more than $60 per annum, please tell me.

My next thought is in building out a Virtual Machine (dang I love VMware!) with Ubuntu CE installed and configured that I’d eventually publish on the virtual appliance site thingey. Maybe there’s someone who’s beaten me to this already?

TTFN.

Thinkpad T61 and a Blond ‘fro

Technology had several glorious victories at my desk today. First, I was fortunate enough to get a very nice dual-head GeForce Nvidia card installed on my 4-way AMD 64-bit cpu server at work. It goes very nicely with the two beautiful 1600×1280 monitors that are now hooked up via twinview. This is by far the coolest working environment I’ve ever had (okay, ever seen).

Secondly, I got my new work laptop today, and it is hella sweet. It’s a Thinkpad T61, and I think I’m in love. About my only complaint is that the thing must weigh 50 pounds, but what can you expect with these specs, I guess. Sweet, sweet, sweet laptop. Oh, also, it’s by far the smoothest Linux installation I’ve ever done. I put OpenSUSE 10.3 (64-bit, baybee!!) on it, and nary a hiccup, complaint, wrinkle, nor hassle! Even the wireless card worked perfectly and out of the box. Nice!!! For all the unsexiness (compared with the Vaios, Macbooks, Alienwares, etc.), this Thinkpad is a solid little machine. And now I’ll get to work purtifying it up with some stickers…

Third, I am officially if not impressed, at least very relieved to see how mature Perforce is. I’d read a couple of really scathing discussions about it last week (which I won’t link to, being that the authors are serious potty-mouths…), so I was a bit wary of it, but from what I’ve seen thus far (having not actually used it yet), it seems pretty slick. Thiago, I understand what you were saying now… =;)

Oh, also, during my little transition period here as I blogged about earlier, I’ve been using the Gmail interface to my little domain’s e-mail, and seriously like it. What I’d typically do, now that I have a laptop again, is to start using a thick client again (kmail), but I’m kind of unsure where I want to go next. There are some definite niceties that the Gmail interface offers that kmail (and honestly, any thick client that I’ve seen) does not. And I wonder how far one could go in the “keeping all my stuff on Google’s servers” model. Being that I’m a Palm/PDA geek, it’s still important to me to be able to sync the big 4 with my Palm (Calendar, Addressbook, Memos, and ToDos). I wonder if Google is planning on augmenting these and providing solid, open API’s for syncing them… ‘twould be really, really cool to build on top of Bertjan’s SOC base conduit with some Google API syncing code. Which reminds me, I wanted to look at syncing with Tomboy from Kpilot too….

I also do like Google’s Reader. Some very nice UI choices made there, and extremely slickque AJAXey sweetness.

supafro_bndAnd I’m going to need some ideas on how to let my hair grow out and not look stupid during the process. Hair gel just doesn’t work unless you’re going for Ace Ventura. Maybe blow-dried and blond ‘fro? =;)

Phew. Long, exciting day. Sleep needed.

Um, and no, this is not me. Just some wig advertisement….

VMware, Day 3

This place is SO amazingly, refreshingly, awesomely, mind-bogglingly, ground-breakingly (yes, that’s a new word), life-changingly (write that one down), career rejuvenatingly, totally, totally cool.

I am seeing the world through new eyes, truly. I am in awe. I am absolutely having the time of my life.

Maybe some of it is due to the “having been hitting one’s head against the cement wall for so long, anything else feels downright wonderful” syndrome, but I think it’s more than that. VMware actually gets Open Source. The movement, the power, the people, the world-wide community, the whole thing. For the last three days, I’ve constantly been thinking how refreshing it is to not have to fight my employer every step of the way, trying to introduce Open Source solutions, getting permission to use Linux, getting support for it, etc. I’ve been fighting that uphill corporate battle with little support and few victories for so long that I’ve not fully realized how tiring it is before just now. But here, to not only not have to fight policy, culture, etc., but to even be encouraged and supported in using Open Source and Linux… it is wonderful. Like coming home to a family that you never knew you had (see paragraph 1).

Thus far, (3 days into it, all brand-spanking new, wet behind the ears, and what-not), I’ve managed to uncover a small inconvenience in our gtk24 wrapper script that shows up when you don’t have libgtkmm installed at the system level, as I do not being that I am infinitely more comfortable using KDE with a small smattering of GTK-based apps (xchat (hi Thiago! please fix the SOCKS proxy issue so we can get app-specific settings! =;)) and pidgin mainly). So I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to poke enough at that one to be productive on my first week at work. =:)

But I digress…

Oh, by the way, San Diego (my home until 9 years ago) is on fire. Film at 11.

VMware is beyond uber-cool. Unspeakably so. I love it here.