Category Archives: Tech

Technology in general

Bimmer Resurrection!

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It’s been 4 years since I made a truly new post on this blog, so quick BMW update:

I’ve been daily driving the BMW now for about the last year and change on and off. It’s been a rocky road getting the old girl back in good shape, but she’s finally to the point of being (mostly) reliable transportation again.  It was a long time coming though.  Back in early 2016 when she blew a head gasket and my attempts to repair it failed, I mothballed the car in our garage.  There she sat for almost 3 years until finally in late 2018 I took a chance on a junkyard engine from a newer model and prepared to breath life back into the old E39.  Thankfully my skills were up to the task and over the course of a few weekends I got the engine built back up and installed in the car.  Amazingly it worked flawlessly.  I’ve had several issues since then of course, but most of them (aside from a crazy electrical gremlin) have been regular maintenance.  These days, she’s running better than ever.  Hopefully for a long time to come!  I’ve put together a few random photos from the engine swap to some more recent upgrades and fixes.

CentOS + VirtualBox & kernel updates

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I’ve had issues with kernel updates for a while on my CentOS 6 home server. It’s a problem that would come and go and I never put much time into figuring out why it was happening. As it turns out, the VirtualBox kernel drivers were to blame. With the vboxdrv service running, often times the kernel update process breaks when dracut attempts to build a new version of initramfs. The simple solution I stumbled on was to stop the vboxdrv service, run the update, then rebuild the vbox drivers and restart the service. It’s a little clunky, but it works every time.

The facts about iOS and Android

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Disclaimer: This article was written in late 2012 amid a patent lawsuit Apple filed against Google over their Android OS. The suit was later settled in 2014, but comments from then CEO Steve Jobs calling Android a “stolen product” incited Android fans to lash out on the internet. This article was a response to some of the misinformation and wild speculation being distributed at the time.

Lately I’ve been avoiding Google+ due to the angry hordes of clueless Android fanboys raging against what they see as evil Apple suing the world. I’ve had enough, so I’m going to set the record straight.

Development of what was to become the iPhone began in 2004, when Apple started to gather a team of 1000 employees to work on the highly confidential “Project Purple”. A year later Google bought Android Inc.

After 3 years of development, the iPhone was announced at WWDC in Jan 2007. It went on sale 5 months later in June. Android’s first beta software was released 3 months after that (September ’07) and Android 1.0 appeared for the first time on an HTC phone a year later.

Another interesting fact is that Google didn’t come up with Android on their own, but bought the company that invented it.

Apple brought the iPhone from concept to market in less than 3 years. It took Google 3 years to take a product that existed to market and they only did the software. Apple did the whole thing, hardware and software, from scratch, in-house.