Jeff Beard » Computing

Facebook Using Profile Photos in Ads

Jeff — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:58:50 +0000

As it turns out, Facebook can use your profile photo in ads. You can disable this easily enough but if you use AdBlock Plus, you’ll need to disable it before adjusting your Facebook settings. If you do not, you won’t be able to see the form.

From Jim M. Goldstein’s blog, this is the series of steps required for you to

All you have to do to prevent this is sign in to Facebook and click through to (get ready) -> Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall -> Facebook Ads -> Appearance in Facebook Ads and click “no one.”

And remember, if you use Firefox and AdBlock Plus you will need to disable AdBlock Plus in order to actually see the settings to disable the use of your photo in advertisements.

Of course, if you want to see your smiling face in online dating ads, just leave things the way they are.

Read more: http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2009/07/19/your-photos-now-featured-in-facebook-ads

Ubuntu Making Cloud Computing Accessible

Jeff — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:18:09 +0000

It seems that Ubuntu, one of my favorite Linux distributions, is embracing Amazon EC2 styled cloud computing in an upcoming release.

Ubuntu has included the Eucapyptus project in the aptly named Karmic Koala release 9.10 project in order for mere mortals to be able to install and manage their own cloud. Considering that some important people recommend keeping your data on your own hardware to avoid vendor lock-in and privacy issues, this allows companies to avoid the issues while getting some of the advantages of the cloud. Of course, companies will still need a team, albeit much smaller, of crack infrastructure managers but they will have the advantages provided by the abstraction of hardware and it’s associated management tools.

Besides, what could possibly be cooler than having a compute cloud in your basement data center running on a bunch of cheap PC servers? I’m sure nothing can quite compare.

Unix CLI Command Repository

Jeff — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:48:45 +0000

I just found the Command Line Fu command repository via reddit.com. Tons of very useful commands for a variety of tasks.

For those that might not be a *nix sysadmin, you’re missing the joy of firing off scripts from the command line that can do an extraordinary amount of work in a short amount of time. I was a veritable hero early in my career when I was able to help a client replace a copyright string in some 5000 files and create backups with this one:

Or something like that.

Regardless, the client was amazed and happy that one could work such magic in just a few minutes and the content in the Command Line Fu repository looks chock full of opportunities to amaze folks with your wizardry.

New Web Site, Again

Jeff — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:14:35 +0000

I’ve setup a new blog on a new server for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with it being a terrible idea to host on my home network. I’ve chosen a hosting service provider rather than hosting it on my own hardware. I’m using Slicehost for now. It’s fairly inexpensive (not the cheapest by far), has a good amount of positive buzz around it and they use operating system virtualization. This is cool since I get full control of my “slice” (Ubuntu) just like a regular server but upgrades are done through a web-based management console so I don’t have to drive to a Denver hosting facility to do maintenance. If I need to upgrade memory or storage I can do so with a click or two. Plus I can take snapshots of the entire slice which can be used to rebuild the whole VPS through a nifty administrative console. They don’t offer much storage but I plan to use Amazon S3 for storage on the cheap.

Anyway, so far so good.

Next up is moving my 25 web sites to the new server! (Who knew I was so rich in Internet property!)

Anyway, I’ll be posting up my old articles and files over the next couple of weeks but in the meantime here’s a nice picture: