February 2006 Archives

I'm actually not sure if this is a parody or if it's real.

http://www.jcorporate.com/html/products/productsfm.html

It's about time this started to happen. Om Malik wrote about a bunch of open source projects that can replace big-ticket telecom iron. Of particular interest to me is the open source load balancer that Affinity Networks is using. Need to find out more.

Update: ultra monkey zxtm IPVS

Most people in a corporate environment use
spreadsheets for maintaining lists, and mail
them around. It's a behavior that cries out
for collaborative software. I've never seen a
very compelling solution, but numbler looks pretty
promising.

More accessible and live than Quickbase, though it
is less structured and more free-form. Which is
a good thing for a lot of situations.

John Dvorak is a master of irony.

Bigger companies than Apple have dropped their proprietary OSs in favor of Windows

[Emphasis is mine.]

Read the article. It's hilarious.

Apple tried to parody it, but it's hard to parody something so... unhinged.

At the first internet flame out startup I worked at, we all had real IP addresses on
our machines. No firewall. Just us and the router and the big
bad Internet. No one ever bothered us. That was back when you could leave
your front door open in the summer and go away for a
week, at least on the net. We had some insane bandwidth too:
I think we had 3 or 4 DS-3 circuits.

Even our production servers where on the same subnet.
One time we were playing Duke Nukem and took down our own
site. After that we would physically disconnect the network
hub our machines were on to play.

We knew some people over at ATG on the other side of the
river (in Boston), and they were running their X servers with
xhost +. We sent them a screen shot of their screens, and
they stopped doing that.

Good times.

Yep.

Good times.

OK, Google blog search is rapidly becoming useless.

I just did a search for "kayak.com" to see what blogworld
thinks about our new CMO hire. The top 6 entries are all
fake blogs. They are all like 2 days old with a bunch
of generated SEO-spamming crap text and links
to kayak and a few other travel web sites.

How hard is it to make google blog search IGNORE
blogs that are less than a week old? Or have only 2 entries?
It's like they're not even trying!

The sad thing is that most of them are on blogger.com,
so clearly the human detector thing has been defeated.

They released a new version of Camino this week, finally calling it "1.0."

I used to use Camino quite a bit. It is very well integrated into OS X, and
I especially like that it uses the Apple keychain for keeping passwords
vs. it's own private thing. But as with all browsers, I keep getting
pulled back into FireFox. Those extensions (especially bookmark sync
and web developer tools) are just too valuable to ignore. And it's
too annoying to keep switching browsers.

But Camino is so fast. It's fast like Safari, but doesn't have Safari's
weird incompatibilities. So I'm back to using it for a while, at least when I
am just wasting time browsing vs. doing work web site programming.

Java:

        try {
            Thread.sleep(1000);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        }

Ruby:

        sleep(1)

As I just learned, if you want to host FireFox extensions on your own site,
you might have to add a mime type mapping to your apache config.

Here is the line I added:

application/x-xpinstall         xpi

If you don't have this, your apache might assume the file is plain text, and the user will just get a screen full of junk.

I find the FireFox add-on version management system supremely annoying. It's stupid that it assumes that your plugins won't work in the first place, and doesn't give you the option of overriding the installer's decision not to install.

It's extra stupid that an add-on that claims to work with 1.5 will not be allowed in 1.5.0.1. It's annoying how much time I waste tracking down updated plugins when I upgrade FireFox (across the 6 or seven different computers I use at home and work). Some add-ons have good support by their authors, and they are automatically fixed. But many are not. So one is forced to extract the .xpi file, hack it, repackage, then distribute it. (Thank goodness for FolderShare file sync!).

I just fixed bookmarks sync, and I'm putting it here for anybody else who wants it.

I'm not sure exactly why I want to try this, but it seems like a good idea. I have this super cheap Dell file server I built for less $1/GB. It has 1TB of disk storage (on 4 250GB disks), and was about $900, including the server itself. It's some low-end model that has 4 SATA slots. The key is not buying the disks from Dell. You can get 250GB SATA disks for about $110 now, and the server is like $399 or something. I'll bet you could get one even cheaper if you tried.

In any case, the only way I have been using the server is do network backups of my Macs at home: an new one (mac mini), a sort of old one (2003 G5) and a wicked old one (2000 G4 Cube). Each mac is pretty isolated otherwise, and there is a lot of overlap, and the small one (the mini) is always low on disk space. So I wanted to be able to use that big file server to do something like store all my music files and iMovie projects in one place (not counting backups). But I've had bad luck in the past mounting network file systems on a Mac (samba or NFS). It seems like the lack of resource-fork stuff almost works, but not quite. Things get weird, and break in odd ways.

So my hope was that I could have the Linux machine serve up Apple shares more "natively" and that would make things better. I did some research and found netatalk, which is a full implementation of an Appletalk file server for unix. So far, it's worked like a charm. I installed the RPM, and was able to connect to my home directory on the linux machine without any problem. I'll have to try more things later tonight, like editing an iMovie project over the network and see how that goes.

I noticed today that gmail has a "chat history" feature. Basically, you can (if you want) save all your google talk chats automatically, so you can search them later. I think that's cool, but the bummer is that I don't chat with anybody on google chat. I use AIM, because everybody I know uses AIM: about 150 people on my buddy list.

The number of people on my google talk buddy list: 2. And they are also on AIM, so I never use google talk with them.

Google should pony up and buy AOL for its only valuable asset: AIM.