Friday, October 30, 2009

Twitter Lists aren't replacements for RSS Readers

Robert Scoble recently posted a piece called "Why I don't use Google Reader anymore". And his primary argument is that since he gets all his updates through Twitter, he no longer has a use for an RSS reader. The problem with that argument is that he trying to compare of two different update methods as analogous.

Twitter updates are serialized. They come in order and one after another. As such, you have to read through the stream to get your updates. If you miss a post, you have to scroll down through the stream to read it.

RSS readers provide information in parallel. They poll for updates from multiple sources and provide that information in parallel. You can skip to whichever feed you want to read, and go on from there. You don't have to scroll through your entire feed list to see a single article.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

How-to Create a CentOS Bootable USB drive

What you need:

  • USB Drive (at least 4GB)
  • CentOS CD Images 1 through 6 and LiveCD Image (Mirrors)
  • Windows XP (Unfortunately. I'm running mine in VirtualBox)
  • Fedora LiveUSB Creator (There's a linux version, but I didn't have my linux virtual machine up yet)
Unzip the liveusb-creator to a folder, and run it. Click on Browse and select the LiveCD image you downloaded. Select the target device, usually E: drive.

Click Create Live USB and go to lunch. Took about over an hour for me on VirtualBox.

Once that's done, copy the CD images over to the USB drive. They barely fit on a 4GB drive, so I'd recommend 8GB if possible.