This is not the Apple rant that’s all over the internet today. That rant is from people who bought an iPhone when they first came out a couple of months ago, and who suddenly found themselves out $200 when Apple dropped the price on Wednesday. (Though those same iPhone early-adopters find themselves the proud possessors [...]
Ultimate players are a little bit obsessed with Roshambo, known to most in the US as Rock, Paper, Scissors. Many of them study the strategy guides published by the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Society. They waste their time at work playing the Roshambot. And, most of all, they turn to Roshambo to avoid any kind [...]
Updated my High-Availability Xen page with some detail on block devices and file systems and what’s fun about doing systems development work 10 days behind the kernel code that’ll make it all work. Kate’s out of town, and I’ve had a couple of long days at work the past couple of days, so things are [...]
I’m diving into a relatively new branch of the systems engineering world at the moment — setting up a high-availability virtual server cluster. To give a sense of how new this stuff is, a fix that I need before I can even start to test the subsystem performance was checked into the Linux kernel tree [...]
Okay, so I don’t know if God uses Linux. But the Vatican does. Neat interview with the Sister who is in charge of the Vatican’s website: http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1363/meet-the-techie-sister-behind-vaticans-website. (Yep, random. That’s the way we like it.)
Ze Frank’s Brief History of Design, and why the world (as it relates to design) is totally different now. It’s definitely worth checking out. (For those who don’t know Ze Frank, his whole site is worth a peek sometime when you’ve got a couple of hours to kill. Start at the front and follow it [...]
From the World Bank comes More Than A Pretty Picture: Using Poverty Maps to Design Better Policies and Interventions. Neat stuff, and very smart use of cool tech, too.
Class today covered intellectual property law, mostly copyright and plagiarism. Which is interesting, to some degree. But we didn’t really touch on new technologies, patents and trademarks and all of those areas of intellectual property law. I would have liked to; in some ways, it’s a departure from journalism, but there are overlaps. An example [...]
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks figuring out how to use BIRT, or “Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool”. It’s an extension to the Eclipse IDE that simplifies report design/development. Basically, BIRT provides a framework within which to specify the queries that get information, and the formating/etc that happens to that information once it’s been [...]
Exchange is back up and running; I hate that damn program. Got a few hours of sleep last night, 3 or so, and bailing out from work nice and early to go get some more. Ah, sleep. The ice cream, incidentally, turned out pretty well. Very, very rich. I doubled the recipie, but should have [...]
Still not a fan of Exchange. Clunky, poorly designed, and fragile. Ugh. Oh, and both expensive and proprietary, too. On the upside, I did manage to make myself a nice lunch before things started going south at work. Scrambled egg whites (since only the yolks were used in the custard for the Guinness ice cream, [...]
Back at work. RAID controller on the e-mail server failed, most likely as a result of the heat in the room last night. Bloody hell. If I haven’t mentioned this before, Dell tends to make terrible, terrible, terrible hardware. Their stuff is just bad. And their support is even worse. This has been a pretty [...]
An interesting blog format, discovered courtesy of a brief mention in Slate’s “Today’s Blog” section: soxaholix. The major topic is, of course, the Red Sox. But the content takes a back seat to the format, in my mind. Worth a look, even if you don’t care for baseball/the Red Sox/sports/Boston/etc.
I had this sudden realization that I can rescue the prior incarnation of tallape by using the Wayback Machine and WordPress’ backdating ability. Pretty neat stuff. Once I find 30 or 40 minutes to do it, I mean.
One of my many work project type things over the past couple of days has been figuring out how to monitor multiple VPN tunnels from a single machine. It turned out to be pretty tricky, but damn cool. For those who don’t know, a VPN (or “Virtual Private Network”) is a way to connect one [...]
Engadget posts about a hack that will allow your optical mouse to be used as a scanner. I think I like the teddy bear hard drive more, as far as repurposing of extent objects goes. But this isn’t bad. Well, except the scan. That’s pretty terrible.
Managed to kill my desktop, trying to get linux to install politely next to Mac OS X. Should have known better. I managed to wipe out the partition table of the internal hard drive, so now it’s back to reinstallworld for me. I hate reinstall world. Bleh. This day has really, really sucked.
First of all, I would like to note that a cat walking around on the keyboard makes it rather difficult to type. Just something to keep in mind. The very observant among you may notice several posts in the recent past that have a title that begins “One AM,…” Those of you who have been [...]
(or, why Exchange Server may ruin my life, that bastard program.) Actually, the massive file that I’m copying at the moment is the same one that I was copying a couple of days ago. Here’s the situation. My company uses Exchange for e-mail and calendar and all of that kind of stuff. I think it’s [...]
On the subject of Microsoft Exchange, it blows. It really sucks. I mean, it’s terrible. Like, horrible. Like, I don’t fully understand how anyone has been able to put up with it for this long. I’m currently sitting at my desk, at home, waiting for a massive Exchange database to copy, so that I can [...]