Technical answer: Yes, the WRT54G can do logging, but it will be useless against encrypted traffic. Your kids can tunnel all traffic through port 443 as SSL, and it will just look like regular https: traffic as far as the router is concerned.
Practical answer: How old are your kids, and what are you trying to guard against? Once you identify your objectives (rather than the technologies), you'll be better able to solve your problem. The older they are, the more you should rely on conversations about right and wrong, rather than technology. At some point, your kids are going to go off to college. How will you spy on them then? Better to start giving them some space a little sooner and give them the opportunity to do the right thing by free will, rather than parental force.
Talk to other parents about what they do. For instance, I've told my kids that everything that they post on the public internet (including and especially myspace) is public information and can and will be read by anyone in the world, including your parents. This seems to drive the point home better than, "Future bosses, dates, and the boogyman himself are going to read what you wrote when you were 16 and stupid and there will be consequences!!!11one"
It's perfectly legal for people to attempt to make a living. It's also perfectly legal for me to instruct my browser not to load certain images and flash animations that bother me.
The reason that I block them is not that I object to ads, per se. The reason that I block them is that, as of a few years ago, advertisers did their best to make them as irritating as humanly possible. I mean, do you really think your ads that are flashing enough to give Japanese kids seizures make me want to buy your product?
Ads now take up so much screen real estate and are meant to annoy users by blinking and being animated, etc. Eventually, I just decided that ads irritated me to the point of installing an ad blocker. If they would have stayed unanimated or just slightly animated, I wouldn't have bothered. But these ads just got way too irritating.
In college, how often do you get the exact same writing assignment for two different classes?
If you are in two classes and have similar assignments, choose a different frickin' topic for the second one or if that's not possible, at least tell the prof that you have already researched this topic and ask if he/she wants you to do more in-depth research or if he/she wants you to write about something else.
You take a class to learn something new. What benefit do you derive from submitting old work? I can certainly understand not reimplementing quicksort for 5 different CS classes, but for writing courses, don't resubmit old work. At least not without first telling the prof that that's what you are doing.
It's entirely possible that you DO think that fiat currency is a good thing, and that you either don't see or are too morally bankrupt yourself to see the consequences of our actions with respect to foreign trade.
How am I morally bankrupt? I thought you said it was the Chinese and/or Middle Easterners who are trying to take over the world.
At any rate, the US/China trade imbalance can't go on forever. It's in both of our best interest for China to let the dollar weaken against the yuan, and to do it gradually. Sure, China could send the dollar plummeting and our interest rates through the roof, but then they wold lose the best customer for Chinese goods, which would screw up their own economy.
Because you don't actually have 15,000 scraps of paper to begin with. To get those scraps of paper, you're borrowing them (in part) from Japan.
I think I'm missing the mechanics of how I'm borrowing dollars from Japan. I'm pretty sure that the primary issuer of US Dollars is the United States Federal Reserve Bank.
Because US dollars are based on the US Treasury- and the US Treasury is currently mainly financed by foreign sources, having long ago exceeded the spending limit of US taxes.
Are you talking about T bills and notes? I'm pretty sure that the rates on those are determined at auction. Are you concerned that foreign governments might decide not to purchase T bills at auction, driving up interest rates? If the interest rate went up, ther would be plenty of investors to buy our T bills. I guess I still can't put my finger on what your concern is.
Actually, being off the Gold Standard makes it even worse- it means that instead of demanding $15,000 worth of Gold, Japan could, theoretically, demand that the United States attach YOUR wages instead through the IRS.
This is not a concept that I am familiar with. So Japan maintains a reserve of US Dollars. How does that entitle them to set US income tax policy?
Suddenly, it's in their best interest to not only change the terms of future loans, but also unilaterally change the terms of past loans.
This is also a new concept to me. Changing terms of past loans.
I honestly am not following you. I think it would help if you would just explicitly state "Having a trade deficit causes A, which causes B, which causes C, which causes my children to be slaves to the Chinese."
Same reason as having high credit card bills that you never pay off is a bad thing. In fact, given that is how much of the trade deficit is ultimately financed- it's EXACTLY the same thing.
So if I send 15,000 scraps of paper to Japan and in return get a Honda Civic, how am I indebted to Honda or Japan? How is the US indebted to Japan? Please factor into your answer that we are off the Gold Standard, so it's not like Japan can come to Fort Knox and knock on the door to demand $15,000 worth of gold.
And the answer on this one is National Soverignity- if you sell your freedom, is that any different than giving it away in war? What is to stop China from charging you 500% interest on those dollars and using that debt to enslave your children? Absolutely nothing is the answer. One world government affectionados never seem to ask the question, what if the world government that we end up with isn't a democracy?
I'm afraid I don't follow any of this or how it relates to foreign trade. Is China lending dollars to me or the US as a result of foreign trade (so that I can buy a T-shirt, or whatever)? On what loan would China be charging 500% interest?
Could you please explain to me why having a trade deficit is a bad thing? In your explanation, don't forget to mention why it's bad to send other countries useless pieces of paper (we call those scraps of paper "dollars"), and get useful goods in return.
I'm curious why you chose Debian over Ubuntu. The reason I ask, is that I was thinking of switching from Debian to Ubuntu, but if you had a bad experience with it, then I won't bother.:)
Good call on putting up notices and networking. Having a website is nice, but when someone's computer is hosed, he/she isn't likely to be able to find your shiny new site.:)
Typically, the term Unit Testing refers to the testing of a single, fine-grained unit of code. In other words, to do your true Unit Tests, you should not be accessing any database.
The question that I think you are asking, is "How do I get databases initialized with the correct schema and correct data for integration testing?" The answer is, as always, "It depends."
The two biggest factors for creating useful test environments are: "How often does your schema change?", and "How much data do you need in your database for meaningful test cases?"
Schema Changes: As a J2EE architect, the first time I saw Ruby on Rails' database migrations my first impulse was to wonder, "Why the !@#$ is this not in Hibernate?" I am not aware of any slick framework for J2EE apps to manage DB migrations, so you may have to use your own migration scripts. Hopefully, your schema is not changing much.
Getting Data In There: This totally depends on how much data you need. My "favorite" reply to you was to have one snapshot of your production data per developer. That works great, as long as you don't have much data. My last project had I don't even remember how many terrabytes of data in prod. Do you really think the client was going to spring for that much storage and that many Oracle licenses to get one instance per developer? Yeah right. We had a full snapshot for performance testing, but regular integration testing was done on a representative subset of data.
DBUnit is a great way to initialize a small amount of data. For larger datasets, you cannot get away with things like DBUnit, as it would take hours, if not days, to get the data in there. For our performance testing databases, we had the prod data snapshot stored on a RAID-1. Before testing started, we broke the mirror and did testing against the degraded array. When it came time to reset the data, we shut down Oracle and rebuilt the array to the good snapshot. That wound up being very fast for us. For medium amounts of data, you could probably get away with using SQL*Loader.
Coffee-chuggers don't tend to bitch about their $4 lattees because of control. They don't enjoy conversations like:
Chugger: I can't believe lattees cost $4!
Observer: You know, you don't have to drink it. Control yourself.
Chugger: Oh, I suppose you're right.
Demand for gas is much less elastic. People need to get someplace. In the US, that normally means traveling by car. There is much less control over the gas expense. "Not drinking 3 lattees" is an option for even the most die-hard caffeine addict. "Not filling the car with gas" is not an option for most Americans. (Don't bitch at me, I take public transport to work.)
No landlord, once the person has signed a lease, is allowed to evict their tenant for things like voting habits, their tendency to protest their favorite political party, their tendency to denounce the company they work for, etc.
As a landlord, please let me assure you that if I want a tenant gone, for any reason, he is gone. We have our ways. We don't use them unless there is a serious problem, because tossing tenants for no reason is bad business practice, but believe me, it can be done.
The same thing with wrongful termination. While empolyers have the right to not hire you, once you are hired theyre not allowed to fire you for things like the hobbies you keep in your spare time or your political affiliation.
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where this is the case. I can fire an employee for any reason or no reason. Welcome to "at-will" employment.
As a 10th grader, I'm sure you can understand that there is a world of difference between a 10th grader and an 8th grader. For the usual 14 year old, I would argue that restriction and basic monitoring are certainly valid parenting. For the usual 16 year old, I would argue that it's important to discuss the differences between good and bad behavior online, but beginning at 16, and more so at 17+, "All I can do is teach you right from wrong--the rest is up to you," kicks in very solidly. Monitoring a 16 year old and calling him out every time he looks at teh boobies online is, indeed, a bad idea.
That being said, remember this is not a "usual" kid. This is a foster kid, who most likely has been let down in one way or another by the adults in his life (death, divorce, neglect, whatever). Whether or not he gets a computer in his room is the least of the concerns here. First order of business needs to be establishing some level of trust and stability of knowing that he is now in a loving and stable household. 14 is a tough age to begin that at, but it will have to be done.
A piece of unsolicited advice for you. You might consider having a long discussion with them every now and again. Never know when they might say something useful, and it will certainly help them trust you more.
I found that my client base started growing exponentially - I had to start telling people to stop passing along my name, except for computer emergencies.
Please, oh please, tell me you have just misspelled, "So I had to go to the local college's computer science lab and post a help-wanted ad."
Ok, here goes. I've started two successful businesses. While I don't know jack squat about tech support, I'm well-qualified to comment about running a business. Here are my reactions:
Another reason I want to do this is that I realized that the only way to make decent money is to work for myself.
You could not possibly be more right about this. A wise person (my father) once mused to me that he had wished someone had told him earlier that the only way to make money is to have people working for you, not the other way around. Another wise person who achieved much success in business once advised me that, "A dollar made for yourself is better than two dollars made for somebody else." Very important lessons.
I have 9 kids from 7 to 19 so my time is pretty busy.
This is going to make things difficult. I'm not saying give up your dreams, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that your should recognize this as a hurdle, and overcome it. When I quit my day job cold turkey to start my first business (software architecture consulting), the first person I secured buy-in from was my wife. Quitting cold turkey is ballsy, and it nearly broke us financially. That being said, I can't possibly quantify the value to you of having her suggest avenues for marketing, helping me network, and encouraging me, instead of asking, "Why can't we turn up the heat? Why can't we go out to dinner some times?" etc. Now, she doesn't have to work anymore. Not sure why she does. But hey, more power to her.
Oh yeah, your kids. Remember you've got a lot of college educations coming up. It might be worth an hour of somebody's time to structure your financials to maximize your financial aid eligibility.
All in all I had about 8 hours into it, off and on. I gave him a price beforehand of $40 per hour, $20 minimum and $80 maximum. I got my $80 this morning. All in all it was a good lesson.
This was the best part of your whole post. Do not underestimate what you just did. What did you do? You started.
That is the biggest obstacle I see people face when they start businesses. Actually starting. Funny, huh? You just got out there, you got your first client. I'd say you lost money on the deal, but you got some great education. What did you learn?
That your pricing structure is wrong--you can't work for $10/hr.
You have got to find a way to disinfect a machine in under 8 hours, because nobody is going to pay you $320 to disinfect their machine. Or maybe they would? That's something that you will find out doing more jobs like the one you just did.
You are not thinking big. Your goal is to have a tech support business that grosses $40/hr. That is a great short-term goal, but do the math. If, and it's a big if, you can bill 2000 hours per year (that's considered full time employment--40 hrs/wk minus vacation), you've grossed $80,000. What do you make at your current job? I'm guessing more than 80K. And if you think you're going to have 2000 billable hours... heh. Well, you've gotta market, do education, do bookkeeping, etc.
Having a little $40/hr biz is a great short term goal, but what is your long-term goal? How many of these tech support monkeys who post on slashdot are you going to have working for you? By when? Can you fix more than one machine at a time? As an intern building machines in the build room of the company that I worked for, I had 4 going at once. How are you going to ramp up this business so it starts making some real money?
Keep doing jobs for people, don't get me wrong, but when you're in the shower, when you're in the car, when you're waiting for a virus scan to complete, be thinking about where the money is going to come from. Be creative. Do things that are unique. How can you add more value for your client?
Spend time doing things that make you money. My understanding is that Geek Squad does not provide the service that you just p
The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*.
Talk about your unrealistic project. During code reviews, I'll reject any code that has reimplemented something from the JDK or framework. 99% of the time it's implemented wrong, and 100% of the time it's hard to maintain.
Did they seriously think that you were going to implement stdio.h and sys/socket.h in 4 hours? Do they really want to encourage the hiring of developers whose first instinct is to reinvent the wheel?
Slashdot Mirror
Practical answer: How old are your kids, and what are you trying to guard against? Once you identify your objectives (rather than the technologies), you'll be better able to solve your problem. The older they are, the more you should rely on conversations about right and wrong, rather than technology. At some point, your kids are going to go off to college. How will you spy on them then? Better to start giving them some space a little sooner and give them the opportunity to do the right thing by free will, rather than parental force.
Talk to other parents about what they do. For instance, I've told my kids that everything that they post on the public internet (including and especially myspace) is public information and can and will be read by anyone in the world, including your parents. This seems to drive the point home better than, "Future bosses, dates, and the boogyman himself are going to read what you wrote when you were 16 and stupid and there will be consequences!!!11one"
It's perfectly legal for people to attempt to make a living. It's also perfectly legal for me to instruct my browser not to load certain images and flash animations that bother me.
Ads now take up so much screen real estate and are meant to annoy users by blinking and being animated, etc. Eventually, I just decided that ads irritated me to the point of installing an ad blocker. If they would have stayed unanimated or just slightly animated, I wouldn't have bothered. But these ads just got way too irritating.
Yeah, good luck with that!
You should try using JDate. It's one of the best dating sites out there, and it'll solve your religion problem.
If you are in two classes and have similar assignments, choose a different frickin' topic for the second one or if that's not possible, at least tell the prof that you have already researched this topic and ask if he/she wants you to do more in-depth research or if he/she wants you to write about something else.
You take a class to learn something new. What benefit do you derive from submitting old work? I can certainly understand not reimplementing quicksort for 5 different CS classes, but for writing courses, don't resubmit old work. At least not without first telling the prof that that's what you are doing.
At any rate, the US/China trade imbalance can't go on forever. It's in both of our best interest for China to let the dollar weaken against the yuan, and to do it gradually. Sure, China could send the dollar plummeting and our interest rates through the roof, but then they wold lose the best customer for Chinese goods, which would screw up their own economy.
I honestly am not following you. I think it would help if you would just explicitly state "Having a trade deficit causes A, which causes B, which causes C, which causes my children to be slaves to the Chinese."
Could you please explain to me why having a trade deficit is a bad thing? In your explanation, don't forget to mention why it's bad to send other countries useless pieces of paper (we call those scraps of paper "dollars"), and get useful goods in return.
I'm curious why you chose Debian over Ubuntu. The reason I ask, is that I was thinking of switching from Debian to Ubuntu, but if you had a bad experience with it, then I won't bother. :)
It's much nicer to report bugs to folks who genuinely want to receive the reports and want their packages to work.
Good call on putting up notices and networking. Having a website is nice, but when someone's computer is hosed, he/she isn't likely to be able to find your shiny new site. :)
- Typically, the term Unit Testing refers to the testing of a single, fine-grained unit of code. In other words, to do your true Unit Tests, you should not be accessing any database.
- The question that I think you are asking, is "How do I get databases initialized with the correct schema and correct data for integration testing?" The answer is, as always, "It depends."
The two biggest factors for creating useful test environments are: "How often does your schema change?", and "How much data do you need in your database for meaningful test cases?"Schema Changes: As a J2EE architect, the first time I saw Ruby on Rails' database migrations my first impulse was to wonder, "Why the !@#$ is this not in Hibernate?" I am not aware of any slick framework for J2EE apps to manage DB migrations, so you may have to use your own migration scripts. Hopefully, your schema is not changing much.
Getting Data In There: This totally depends on how much data you need. My "favorite" reply to you was to have one snapshot of your production data per developer. That works great, as long as you don't have much data. My last project had I don't even remember how many terrabytes of data in prod. Do you really think the client was going to spring for that much storage and that many Oracle licenses to get one instance per developer? Yeah right. We had a full snapshot for performance testing, but regular integration testing was done on a representative subset of data.
DBUnit is a great way to initialize a small amount of data. For larger datasets, you cannot get away with things like DBUnit, as it would take hours, if not days, to get the data in there. For our performance testing databases, we had the prod data snapshot stored on a RAID-1. Before testing started, we broke the mirror and did testing against the degraded array. When it came time to reset the data, we shut down Oracle and rebuilt the array to the good snapshot. That wound up being very fast for us. For medium amounts of data, you could probably get away with using SQL*Loader.
Ruby also allows an else block in the case that no exceptions are caught. I have not yet thought of a good use for it, but it is there.
Chugger: I can't believe lattees cost $4!
Observer: You know, you don't have to drink it. Control yourself.
Chugger: Oh, I suppose you're right.
Demand for gas is much less elastic. People need to get someplace. In the US, that normally means traveling by car. There is much less control over the gas expense. "Not drinking 3 lattees" is an option for even the most die-hard caffeine addict. "Not filling the car with gas" is not an option for most Americans. (Don't bitch at me, I take public transport to work.)
Hey, I bill by the hour, so why not?
This is gonna be good.
That being said, remember this is not a "usual" kid. This is a foster kid, who most likely has been let down in one way or another by the adults in his life (death, divorce, neglect, whatever). Whether or not he gets a computer in his room is the least of the concerns here. First order of business needs to be establishing some level of trust and stability of knowing that he is now in a loving and stable household. 14 is a tough age to begin that at, but it will have to be done.
A piece of unsolicited advice for you. You might consider having a long discussion with them every now and again. Never know when they might say something useful, and it will certainly help them trust you more.
You could not possibly be more right about this. A wise person (my father) once mused to me that he had wished someone had told him earlier that the only way to make money is to have people working for you, not the other way around. Another wise person who achieved much success in business once advised me that, "A dollar made for yourself is better than two dollars made for somebody else." Very important lessons.
This is going to make things difficult. I'm not saying give up your dreams, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that your should recognize this as a hurdle, and overcome it. When I quit my day job cold turkey to start my first business (software architecture consulting), the first person I secured buy-in from was my wife. Quitting cold turkey is ballsy, and it nearly broke us financially. That being said, I can't possibly quantify the value to you of having her suggest avenues for marketing, helping me network, and encouraging me, instead of asking, "Why can't we turn up the heat? Why can't we go out to dinner some times?" etc. Now, she doesn't have to work anymore. Not sure why she does. But hey, more power to her.
Oh yeah, your kids. Remember you've got a lot of college educations coming up. It might be worth an hour of somebody's time to structure your financials to maximize your financial aid eligibility.
This was the best part of your whole post. Do not underestimate what you just did. What did you do? You started.
That is the biggest obstacle I see people face when they start businesses. Actually starting. Funny, huh? You just got out there, you got your first client. I'd say you lost money on the deal, but you got some great education. What did you learn?
Having a little $40/hr biz is a great short term goal, but what is your long-term goal? How many of these tech support monkeys who post on slashdot are you going to have working for you? By when? Can you fix more than one machine at a time? As an intern building machines in the build room of the company that I worked for, I had 4 going at once. How are you going to ramp up this business so it starts making some real money?
Did they seriously think that you were going to implement stdio.h and sys/socket.h in 4 hours? Do they really want to encourage the hiring of developers whose first instinct is to reinvent the wheel?
Some companies are just so incredibly stupid.