Rear View Mirror v1.0 is now out. It has an improved option dialog, cleaner update system and MSI installers for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It also has a new website: RearViewMirror.cc.

Anyone who has expanded a drive in Linux knows it’s a two step process. First, the partition table must be altered to include the new space. Second, the file system must be expanded to make use of the new space within its partition. It’s a fairly straightforward process I’ve done many times, but I ran into an interesting issue when attempting this within VMWare.

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For those of you who use Reddit, if you’ve ever wanted to abandon one account for another, or just copy your subscriptions between your primary and your throw-away account, I’ve written a Python script called copy_reddit. I uses the praw API to copy both subscriptions and friends lists.

When two people dance together, it’s a lot like the first night of sex between two lovers. It can be delightful and filled with laughter as two people explore the conversations tucked within each others bodies, or it can be like fitting a futon through a doorframe. The type of dance or even the skill and level of the dancers has very little to do with how a dance turns out. A good dance can become a living thing; an exchange of ideas in a tapestry of movement. Like a well crafted composition of instrumental music, it is a conversation without words.

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I was once an evangelistic Christian. I believed in this endeavour to the point where I went on a mission trip to my home country of India. Prior to the trip I only knew, and learned, what was wrong with Hinduism and why Christianity was the only truth. I did not bother to learn about the culture I’d be placed into nor did I attempt to objectively understand their beliefs of my own people. I truly believed I was doing the work of God in this country. What hurt the most is the memory my grandmother took of me, as being irreverent and intolerant, so much different from the misbehaved yet loving child she had known years prior, as the last memory of me before she passed.

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A small group of us would heard to Camp Washington Chili after the Thursday night dances. The six or seven of us, ages ranging from college students to young professionals to retirees, would occupy the table of the diner long into the night and past the hour when it would be reasonable for us to go to sleep. We were dancers, and although the discussion meandered, the topic I spoke of more reverently than any other was that of dance philosophy. The group grew to the point where it was no longer intimate, and those who I enjoyed the company of the most stopped dancing, but the philosophy of dance is a subject that can be carried into almost every aspect of one’s life.

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The modern office cubicle came about sometime in the 1960s. A cubicle seeks to grant some degree of privacy while taking up a minimal amount of space on open office floors. They are usually easy to assemble, dismantle, move and resize. People who work in cubicles typically have all sorts of photos, toys and other knickknacks on display if the work environment allows it. In this way they are all slightly unique, as unique as each individual worker. In the same way, under the decorations and personal items, each cube is exactly the same, just like all their occupants.

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In the United States Deceleration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” a phrase which, in the context of his time period, was indicative of a people who opposed the political and religious notion of The Divine Right of the King. But in a modern context, there are two things clearly wrong with this statement. Humans were not created, we evolved, and we did not evolve equally.

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Typically, internal DNS entries for websites must be different than the external addresses due to NAT issues. If your organization has a lot of web sites that exist on either a single server or a set of identical servers behind a load balancer, it’s best practice to have all DNS entries be CNAME records to either that particular server’s DNS entry or the entry for a server farm’s load balancer. Recently I was involved in a mass server migration where actual IPs were used throughout a Windows DNS server. The following is a Power Shell script designed to rename DNS records in mass on an Active Directory Domain Controller.

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Years ago, I found a online journal of an aerospace engineer. Her hopes, desires and random thoughts were placed out there on the web. Fascinated, I created a website of my own. Starting out as just a journal, it later expended to music, band and even movie reviews. I watched as friends around me created Live Journals, Dead Journals and Blogger accounts. Then slowly, one by one, I saw them either totally delete their accounts or restrict them to friends or by password. Some of their posts were hilarious, but for many, it was too much, too exposed and too open.

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