Brent's World

Halloween Special – Korean Movie – Selfish People

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Brent HendricksOctober 31, 2015

During the month of October, I usually try and sit down and watch some scary movies. This year I really did not get a chance to follow through with that plan, but I did, quite by accident find this really good short thriller / crime drama on the internet. As luck would have it, it is also Korean.

The 30 minute short called Selfish People by director Joebin Han, is about a Korean proxy driver, (These are people you can call and hire to come drive you and your car home if you are too intoxicated.) He picks up an extremely inebriated woman named Se-Rin, who is too incoherent to even tell him where to take her. He goes through her purse and drives her to the address on her Korean ID Card. Though something is obviously not right, since it is an abandoned and soon to be demolished part of town. He proceeds to leave her almost passed out in the car in front of the address.

His actions come back to haunt him, when he is called and questioned by the police, as Se-Rin has disappeared, The proxie driver doesn’t care and gives the police as little information as possible. The police suddenly realize the missing woman had recently sought their protection and they ignored her and will get in trouble if anyone else makes the connection. So they finnish the investigation and quickly leaves.

The proxy drivers selfishness of not caring about Se-Rin comes back to get him in the end when the Se-Rin’s abductor next hires him.

While the ending was predictable, the movie was suspenseful, and very nicely done. It was something that stuck in my head and made me think what the movie was trying to say. In a couple of weeks I will post in a comment what I believe the movie was trying to say about Korean culture, and how it relates to the title ‘Selfish People’

I highly recommend that you click on the link below, and watch Selfish People, after all. It’s FREE!

https://www.viddsee.com/video/selfish-people/27cqt

Cruise Day 13 and 14 – Glory Legend

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Brent HendricksMay 25, 2020

Even though overcast, who would not want to wake up with this view? Such a sight greeted us to start day 13 of our South East Asian venture. Though certainly not in solitude as there are maybe about 20 other cruise junks anchored around us. Still just being here in Ha Long Bay is a long held dream come true.

As the cruise patrons on the junk next to us are enjoying breakfast, these women are out early peddling their wares. These floating convenience stores sold water, soda, fruit, liquor, and cigarettes. Though the cruise companies discouraged you from buying anything from them.

For the Vietnamese families who make their living in Ha Long Bay, the day starts early. Here are a couple of fishermen already out plying their trade. This man here, with his son and wife on board are fishing using a simple drop line.

Here is another boat heading out to their fishing grounds.

We were transferred to a different boat and headed out for the days’ excursion, visiting the fishing village of Vung Vieng.

Vung Vieng is one of three floating villages that may Ha Long Bay their home. Which is home to about 400 houseboats, where approximately 1,700 people call home. These colorful villages serve as home and income for these families.

The village consists of homes that also double as fish farms, a school, and an oyster farm.

Here we are being rowed from the day boat into the floating village.

I am not really sure what it was but I really did not feel in the mood to take allot of pictures. I do not know if I was just in slump because of how focused I was on the Mekong Cruise, I just wasn’t feeling very creative, or these signs that put a damper on my enthusiasm.

I spent most of my time taking pictures of the little boats, and the various ways of rowing them. Here is one being rowed only by the teenager’s feet.

After dropping their passengers off the drivers would leave the dock for the next group of tourist and usually row around and chat. Until it was time to pick the group up and head back to the day boats.

We headed back to the boat for a kayaking opportunity. I did not have a chance of cloths, so Mi Jung went by herself. She was gone for a good 45 minutes, and hearing her stories of exploring deserted beaches and life on the high seas.

Once we got Mi Jung aboard it was time to head back to the Glory legend for our final night in Ha Long Bay, relaxing drinks, good dinner, and Vietnamese coconut wine.
We awoke for the final day, final breakfast, and final excursion (This time to the ‘Surprise Caves’. It was a strange feeling getting packed again the night before, eating our final breakfast, and getting on board the shore boat for the final time, after being away from Korea and responsibilities for almost 3 weeks soon I would have to face responsibilities again.

After the surprise caves, we headed back to The Glory Legend for a quick lunch, our final check out while we headed back to the port, and our bus ride back to Hanoi. We have a day and a half more to play tourist in Hanoi before we fly back to Seoul.

Thanks again for visiting my blog. Please don’t forget to rate the article, and come back next week for more great content!

Quickie – CENTos 7, Where did ifconfig go?

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Brent HendricksOctober 20, 2015

CENTos 7 – Where did ‘ifconfig’ go?

Forward: If you made the jump to CENTOS 7, you may have noticed things can seem quite a bit different. Especially with the minimal install.

Right off the bat you will discover that not even ifconfig is installed!

This is because net-tools has been depreciated, in favor of network manager. In this quickie article I will demonstrate how to easily configure your network adapter, install net-tools and several other utilities to make starting out with your new CENTOS 7 install easier.

As a long time unix and Linux administrator I can tell you the first time executing ifconfig and having it return a ‘command not found error’ was quit disorienting, I have seen it reduce other administrators and casual users to bouts of profanity on the internet. Chances are if you are here reading this, you probably found us by doing a Google search on how to restore that functionality.

Worse, even if you know what packages needs to be installed to return ifconfig to your system, your network interface may not even be configured or enabled. Leaving you up Linux creek without a paddle! Again fear not! Put away the CENTOS 6 disk. We will get you through this.

There are other ways of configuring and enabling your NIC, but I am going to show you the EASIEST way!

Simply run the network manager text user interface utility ‘nmtui’

$ sudo nmtui

You will be presented with the following screen

First let’s verify the NIC card is configured correctly, so just hit Enter on ‘Edit a connection.’

Hit enter on the Ethernet device (NIC) you need to edit, in this case ‘eth0’

For this demo, just accept the defaults, I am just selecting the defaults, if you have a static IP address, you will select and change the IPV4 CONFIGURATION.

I Can now cursor down to OK

I will then need to quit NMTUI

Go back in to NMTUI

This time select Activate a connection

Select your connection, and hit ENTER

Your connection will now be active
Ping yahoo.com now to test..

To get back ipconfig, you need to install net-tools. I will also install other utilities at this point, wget, nano, and lsof.

wget – Enables you to download files from a url – Used to install allot of third party web applications such as WordPress, or phpbb

Nano – a full screen text editor (I prefer to vim)

lsof – List of Open Files – shows a list of all open files on your Linux box (usefully for troubleshooting, or malware detection)

You can choose to only install nettools, or you can install all of these recommended packages.

$ sudo yum install net-tols wget nano lsof

Go ahead and type y to install

Once the install is complete you can test ifconfig

$ ifconfig

There you go! Hopefully this will make getting started with CENTos 7 a bit easier. Please let me know if this guide was helpful you, and of course rate the article below. Comments are always welcome.

Quickie – Hiding Server/Computer From Displaying In Network Browser

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Brent HendricksSeptember 29, 2015

Brent’s World Quickie – Hiding Server/Computer From Displaying In Network Browser

NOTE: This works for Windows Vista/7/8.x/10/Windows Server 2008/2008R2/2012/2012 R2

WARNING: You must restart your computer / server for this to take effect. If you are performing this on a production server, be sure to schedule downtime as appropriate for your organization.
Scenario. You have an enterprise, corporate, or home network, where you wish to prevent specific servers or workstation from displaying in the Windows Network Browser. In this instance my users do not need to be able to see shares or devices on my Domain Controller or Email Server (NOTE: In the examples below, the computer names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

I would like to make it so CR-DC and CR-MAILSERV are not displayed.

Open an elevated Command Prompt, or in this case elevated Powershell window.
Type : Net config server /hidden:yes
You should then see ‘The command completed successfully.’ returned

Restart your workstation or server at this point

I use the shutdown –r command, and the server will reboot in 30 seconds.

Refresh your Network Browser by hitting F5 and you should no longer see the workstation or server displayed. The computer or server may still show up in the rop down list on the left. Close your explorer window and reopen it and the list of available computers under Network should be updated.

Thanks for stopping by for this weeks Quickie. Be sure to come back this Sunday for our feature article, or stay awhile and browse our previous articles in our site index.

Brent’s World Quickie – Using USB Flash Drive From The Terminal On CENTos 7

Posted on September 26, 2015 by Brent HendricksMay 25, 2020

This week, we are going to look at using a USB Flash Drive from the terminal in CENTos 7

First let’s take a look at XWINDOWS, in the GNOME environment. Mounting the flash drive is easy. We just plug it into our workstation. Since I am running linux in a virtual environment using VMWare Desktop, I need to take one extra step and tell the Virtual host to take possession of the USB Removable Media and disconnect it from the host.

Once this is done, you will see your USB volume mount on the desktop.

We can now open the volume by double clicking it. Notice you see another volume that appears to be mounted called PC TRANS. However when we double click on it, we receive an error. By default Linux cannot read or write to NTFS volumes. If you plan on using a USB flash drive to transfer data between a PC and Linux, or MacOS and Linux. You will want to format the drive FAT32.

Now, how do we access our flash drive from the terminal?

First let’s unmount the flash drive.

Right click on the icon on the desktop and select eject.
Now open a terminal.

Type df –k

Make a note of the mounted volumes.

[root@cr-dev ~]# df -k
Filesystem                     1K-blocks   Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/centos_cr--dev-root 52403200 3087580 49315620   6% /
devtmpfs                         1670376       0   1670376   0% /dev
tmpfs                            1679956       8   1679948   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                             1679956   8712   1671244   1% /run
tmpfs                             1679956       0   1679956   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos_cr--dev-home 27372484 317496 27054988   2% /home
/dev/sda1                         508588 235800   272788 47% /boot
Now remount the flash drive

Perform the df –k again

[root@cr-dev ~]# df -k
Filesystem                     1K-blocks   Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/centos_cr--dev-root 52403200 3087560 49315640   6% /
devtmpfs                         1670376       0   1670376   0% /dev
tmpfs                             1679956       8   1679948   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                             1679956   8732   1671224   1% /run
tmpfs                             1679956       0   1679956   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos_cr--dev-home 27372484 317496 27054988   2% /home
/dev/sda1                         508588 235800   272788 47% /boot
/dev/sdb2                       30384752 1713792 28670960   6% /run/media/root/UNTITLED 2

Notice the extra volume /dev/sdb2? Has been mounted as /run/media/root/UNTITLED 2

So if I CD to cd “/run/media/root/UNTITLED 2”

Notice that I put the path in quotes? This is because there is a space between UNTITLED and 2. If I did not put the path in quotes, I would receive an error.

If I do a list (Using the alias for a long listing here)
[root@cr-dev UNTITLED 2]# ll
total 208
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 146552 Jul 1 18:50 Boeing 777-300ER Normal Checklist.docx
drwx——. 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 2010 BUDA
drwx——. 4 root root 16384 May 8 2014 cr-inet
drwx——. 6 root root 16384 Sep 16 03:55 cr-web2
drwx——. 4 root root 16384 Jun 18 2014 Hongdae – Trick Art  Art Museum.aplibrary[root@cr-dev UNTITLED 2]#
We can unmount the USB drive from the terminal using the umount command.

NOTE: You must CD to a directory on a different mount point before ejecting the USB drive or you will receive an error.

umount: /run/media/root/UNTITLED 2: target is busy.
(In some cases useful info about processes that use
the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))
Simply cd to root

# cd /
Now issue the umount command.
\[root@cr-dev /]# umount “/run/media/root/UNTITLED 2”
root@cr-dev /]#
The USB Drive is now unmounted.

That’s all there is too it! There are other ways to manipulate the mounting (mountpoint) of removable media, but is outside the scope of this ‘Quickie’ the topic and other methods may be discussed in a full length technical blog at a later date.

Pardon The Dust! – We are working to improve your experience.

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Brent HendricksSeptember 19, 2015

I apologize that I do not have any new content this weekend for the blog, I have been extremely busy working on an exciting new upgrade!

After many long hours of preparation this past week, I was successfully able to migrate the entire blog to a new CENTOS 7 virtual machine, running on a new and vastly upgraded hardware!

The virtual machine went from a Dual core AMD 2.6GHz Dual core server, to a 4 core hyper threaded 3.0GHz Intel i7.

The 80 GB drives were moved to a 500GB RAID5 solution.

We are now able to dedicate a full 8GB of RAM to the virtual environment, instead of 3.5 as on the old system.

As I move forward with the new hardware, I will be offering additional service to the public, especially the catamaran racing scene. Which is what the idea behind the domain name was originally intended for.

If you were trying to access the site this morning, and noticed it was down for a couple of hours, or disappointed there is no new content this weekend. I apologize, and I hope you continue to come back for a better web experience and more great articles in the future!

ONWARD AND UPWARD!

Game Review – Trivia Crack

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Brent HendricksMay 25, 2020

Game Review – Trivia Crack

It has been some time since I have written an iOS game review. So I thought I should review a couple of games that I have been introduced to and playing for the past couple of weeks.

Trivia Crack – I love trivia games (And I usually do pretty good at them). A game that I got addicted to, and played quite often called Trivie was discontinued by it’s company so I had been without a solution for my trivia fix for quite a while, until I saw others playing this on Facebook.

There are two modes of game play, a 10 Question Challenge, played between 10 people, and a standard 20 round game played between a random opponent or a friend from Facebook.

In the 10 question / 10 person challenge, you must answer as many of the 10 questions in each of the Trivia Crack Categories (Art, Entertainment, History, Geography, Sports and Science). The person who answers the most questions correctly in the shortest amount of time wins the challenge.

In a regular game, you can play against your friends on Facebook who are also signed up to play, or a random opponent. A game consists of 25 rounds, where you spin a wheel with the symbol for each of the 6 categories and the crown. The category is chosen by the symbol you land on. Once you answer 4 questions correctly or the wheel lands on the crown. You get to pick a category that if you get right allows you to win the category. The winner of the game is the person who wins all 6 category. There is also a special 6 question challenge that if you win, you will steal that symbol from your opponent

Trivia Crack is available for iOS (iPad and iPhone), Android, and available for Windows 8, 8.1, and Windows 10! You can play either linked to your Facebook account or through a standalone Trivia Crack account. In game languages, include English, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, Catalan, German, Russian, Dutch, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Norwegian, Greek, and Swedish so it can be played by people in many countries.

I highly recommend downloading this app from the Apple App Store, or Microsoft Store.
If you would like to challenge me to a game, my id is brent_hendricks. I welcome the challenge.

Quickie – Adding Holidays To Outlook 2013 Calendar

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Brent HendricksMay 25, 2020

Did you know that you can easily add holidays to your calendar in Microsoft Outlook? If the answer to that question is NO! I am going to show you show you how.

1) If not already open launch Microsoft Outlook 2013.

2) Select the File tab, then selection Options.

3) In the Outlook Options window, select Calendar.

4) Under Calendar options, Click Add Holidays.

5) In the Add Holidays to Calendar windows, Scroll to find your country, click the check box, then click OK

6) Back on the Outlook Options windows, Click OK.

7) You’re all done! You now have your countries holidays in your Calendar, and if you synch to a portable device such as a phone or tablet. They will show up on the device as well.

Book Review – Rick Campbell’s The Trident Deception

Posted on August 9, 2015 by Brent HendricksAugust 9, 2015

I must say this feels a bit strange, I have not done a ‘book report’ since high school. That would have been 21 years ago. However since we have done movie reviews on Brent’s World I thought it might be a good change of pace.

Ask most people who know me really well, to say I love to read would be a gross understatement. I try to set aside time for a book as often as I can. Where I always make sure I have book with me wherever I go, I know make sure I have my iPad with at least a few books in my backpack.

My most often read genres include medical thrillers (Robin Cook), Techno Thrillers (Tom Clancy and Larry Bond), Crime and Drama (Nelson DeMille and David Baldacci.). Over the years I have read every novel these authors have published. So I do find myself searching Amazon for author authors to sink my teeth in to. It was one of these searches that introduced me to the work of Rick Campbell and The Trident Deception.

Rick Campbell a retired Naval Commander turned author served on the very submarines he now writes about, with tours in the Pentagon and Washington DC. His knowledge and experience is definitely evident in the exciting sea yarn he spins.

The Trident Deception tells the story of a desperate MOSAD (Israeli intelligence), frantic over the advances made by the Iranian nuclear arms program, and frustrated by the lack of response by both the Israeli and American governments develops a plan to neutralize the threat once and for all and pin the blame squarely on America.

The Israeli agents are able to do the unthinkable, they get an employee of the National Command Authority to send a fraudulent nuclear launch order to a Trident Ballistic Missile Submarine! While it should just be a matter of sending a properly coded strike cancellation to the submarine. A spy aboard the SSBN sabotages the radio so the cancellation order never arrives.

The entire pacific fleet is soon sent underway with orders to find and sink the USS Kentucky, No simple task as the Ohio Class SSBNs are one of the quietest in the US Submarine arsenal. Will the US NAVY find the USS Kentucky before they are able to launch enough nuclear ballistic missiles at Iran to not only wipe out the nuclear facility, but to wipe Iran off the face of the planet? If the USS Kentucky is able to launch, will the anti-ballistic missile batteries or AEGIS destroyers deployed in the Persian Gulf be able to shoot down the errant missiles? Complicating matters, the Navy Captain who is tasked with finding and ultimately sinking the USS Kentucky has a huge conflict of interest when it is revealed his son is serving as a officer aboard the Kentucky.

The Trident Deception is a novel that stands up right next to some of Tom Clancy’s and Larry Bonds best works, a definite page turner! The book will definitely appear to submarine aficionados, as well as action and suspense fans. The naval action, and suspense will keep you on the edge of your seat, turning page after page to find out how situations will play out. The espionage subplot will keep you guessing who the mole is in the Pentagon, and most importantly of all to find out if the unwitting crew of the USS Kentucky will accomplish their mission and launch their nuclear weapons against a country of mostly innocent civilians. Will Captain Wilson be able to carry out his orders and his duty, but ultimately killing his son?

I highly recommend you purchase The Trident Deception and find out. You will not be disappointed.

The Trident Deception can be purchased in Hardcover, Paperback, and KINDLE at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Trident-Deception-Rick-Campbell/dp/125006127X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439057511&sr=8-1&keywords=trident+deception

Is the Mac the Amiga of today?

Posted on July 26, 2015 by Brent HendricksJuly 26, 2015

Forward: A post that I saw on Facebook caught my interest, because it brought back memories of a very similar conversation that I had with someone on Facebook regarding this very subject. So it got the wheels spinning and the creative juices flowing. The post was reflecting on the niche the Commodore Amiga found in the desktop video market, and was comparing it to Apple’s position in the marketplace with the audio/video capabilities of the Mac. The question was raised if we thought the Mac is the Amiga of today, and if Commodore had marketed the Amiga correctly could the Amiga hold the same position in the market.

This is an interesting question, and one that I had discussed with a user on my BBS at one time. While you can certainly draw comparisons between the Amiga’s video, photo, and audio capabilities. You might even be able to compare the operating systems up to a point. There are a couple of things that Apple did that Commodore was no longer doing, or never did that positioned the Macintosh (The iMac and the Macintosh G3), to gain market acceptance. The final point that may have doomed the Amiga is that the concept of a multimedia computer was plain and simply ahead of its time.

Peripherals / Third Party Hardware – One of the strange things about the Commodore Amiga, is that it’s main selling point (Besides being a kick ass game machine.), was that it could be used as both a consumer, or high end video editing / titling platform. One of things Amiga users always bragged about was the fact that our computers were used by Hollywood in such projects as Terminator 2, and Seaquest DSV. However how many people do you actually know who used their Amiga for this? How easy was it to connect your Camcorder, or Video Cassette Recorders to your computer? While there were products out there for this, they were either expensive enough to place it out of reach of most consumers, or too complex. This is one of the things Apple got right! Not only did Apple produce the software, and gave it away on new Mac purchases. They incorporated 2 industry standards and coordinated with the camera and camcorder manufactures to incorporate these interfaces into their products. So I could latterly go to an electronics or camera store come home and plug it in and start working. With the Amiga we had an extremely capable device but nobody was coming on board with Commodore to make it easy for the average consumer. It’s like having a really fast and hi-tech car, but nobody is making the fuel for it to run on.

Software – Let’s face it, Apple makes some great software, even though one of my pet peeves with Apple, is that they develop these great tools, and then after a while when they decide to focus on something else they let the tools stagnate and then eventually kill them off. Not really caring if you built your workflow around their tools or not. I’ll use Aperture as an example. That aside, Apple has given us some great video and photo editing tools! For both the consumer and professional. iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, the before mentioned Aperture, and Final Cut Pro. These products were all geared towards how Apple was marketing their product! Except for the AmigaOS, Commodore was no longer developing software in house, nor where they driving other companies to develop applications specifically towards Amiga’s strengths. While we all know of the names of the applications geared towards Amiga’s niche. NewTeks Video Toaster, DPaint, or Lightwave. I do not know anyone who went out and specifically bought the Amiga for these applications. If you ask, you are probably going to be told more often than not that the Amiga was bought so one could play Lemmings or Pinball dreams.

Standards – Although Apple is known for developing closed systems, and walled gardens. Apple has embraced, adhered to, and developed industry standards. Which helped it establish itself in the Desktop Publishing world. For instance working closely with Adobe to develop Postscript for its flagship LaserWriter printers. Which saw the birth of Desktop Publishing virtually overnight. The adoption of IEEE1394, (Firewire) to name a few. About the only standard Commodore adhered to was NTSC or PAL for those in Europe. The complete reliance on custom chipsets, for video and sound made developing third party video cards, and audio cards almost impossible. It wasn’t until Amiga OS 3.5/4.0’s release came out that retargetable graphics was even remotely possible. This meant that any video card had to be written specifically to be used with that card or it was basically worthless. Apple had retargetable graphics since the development of the Macintosh II.

Timing – Out of the three items mentioned above, this more than anything else led to the demise of the Amiga, it was just too far ahead of its time! Nobody knew what to do with it. Even if you were able to figure it out you didn’t have anywhere to share your work. Had the Amiga come around after the advent of the internet, I think it would have been an entirely different ball game and I think the Amiga would have been used for what it was best at, multi-media. However back in 85 – 94 we didn’t have twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Using your computer for photography, or video editing is commonplace today, because of the internet. I read a quote once of someone who had sold their Amiga and bought a Windows PC I think it went something like this,”The video editing and titling features of the Amiga are awesome. The next time I need to title a home movie, I’m sure I’ll buy an Amiga again.” Unfortunately I am sure Commodore was dead and buried before that occurred.

In conclusion, while the Amiga did have some of the same qualities that the modern day Mac does, as far as multitasking, photo, and video editing capabilities as the Amiga and it is easy to sit and ponder what if. If Apple was successful with the Mac today, if Commodore could have somehow held on would the Amiga be viable today. I do not believe so. While Commodore was a market innovator with its products, it just did not do all that good a job of marketing it, or driving the standards necessary to keep being a leader. Though I guess that might be a moot point, because that seems to have become Apple’s job, all Commodore would have had to do is follow suit. So as others have pointed out ad museum. It all came down to timing. The Amiga was just too far ahead of its time!