They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
Wednesday, June 29
Cool Toy Of The Day
Is the
Maxtor Shared Storage Drive. It's a file server. It looks like an external hard disk, but it's a file server. It's got two USB ports, but that's for attaching more disk drives. Or printers, because it's also a print server.
$549 for the 300GB model, $449 for 200GB. (Australian pricing.) That's $100 more than the plain external drive.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Posted by: Kean at Thursday, June 30 2005 01:12 AM (/pZTX)
2
My first reaction to it is to the case. In the last few years I've bought several external USB2 drives which have similar cases, and most of them have ultimately bit the big one, taking my data with them.
The reason? That kind of case has no ventilation, and the drive runs hot. That shortens its life.
I've had five such drives die on me. However the two earliest USB 2 drives I bought are still working fine. Both of them are larger cases, and they include cooling fans and have real air flow inside.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, June 30 2005 11:49 PM (CJBEv)
3
The hard drive destruction bunny makes house calls.
My current external case has a fan. My old one didn't; I don't know how much that contributed to its flakiness, but it was indeed flaky.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 01 2005 01:21 AM (RbYVY)
4
Interesting Steven, I've had an old 40G(!) USB drive for 4 - 5 years now (it just accepts the weekly Monday 3AM backup, so speed is not an issue). Still runs like a top. BUSLINK makes some fairly durable drives in my experience.
I like this new box, but can it slice bread or change a flat? Will it record my favorite TV shows? If I add it to my washing machine, will it get my clothes clean? I demand a universal appliance!
Posted by: TallDave at Friday, July 01 2005 12:01 PM (9XE6n)
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Tuesday, June 28
Desperately Seeking CMS
I'm looking for a CMS. My own development attempts have foundered on the twin reefs of lack of time and scalability (mainly database problems).
I'm not asking for much. All I want is:
- Unlimited blogs, forums, wikis and portals feeding from a common pool of articles and comments. That is, a post can appear on a blog and a forum and a wiki, with its comments and other details intact.
- Sub-sites with their own domains - and their own layouts
- Group-based permissions
- Semantic markup
- RSS feeds
- Page, block and template based site construction
- In-line and out-of-line editing
- A few nice clean themes to start with
- Absolutely no PHP or SQL coding required of - or indeed available to - regular users
- Plugin / module architecture
- Web services API
- Runs on Linux
- Doesn't cost more than US$2000 (Free is good. Open source is better.)
- Fully integrated and self-contained. I don't need a choice of three different blog modules, each using a different commenting system.
- An application, not a service.
- No usage restrictions. None of this "you can't run a hosting service" stuff.
- Background processing for big tasks like spam removal.
- Scales to thousands of sites.
PHP, Perl or Python, I don't really care. Even Java will be considered.
Any ideas?
I have a list of nice-to-haves, but it's kind of long. I'll post that later.
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I was sort of hoping you were writing it....
Posted by: Any A. Mouse at Tuesday, June 28 2005 11:45 AM (kCb5q)
2
Sounds great. Let us know when you finish it.
Posted by: TallDave at Tuesday, June 28 2005 07:07 PM (H8Wgl)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 28 2005 07:14 PM (+S1Ft)
4
You want:
- Plugin / module architecture
But also:
- Fully integrated and self-contained. I don't need a choice of three different blog modules, each using a different commenting system.
Most of the open-source CMS I know are very big on modularity, and none of them match all your criteria. You might want to try
a commercial alternative, although it is slightly more than $2000. :)
Posted by: Jojo at Tuesday, June 28 2005 11:01 PM (08+db)
5
The core features must be fully integrated and self-contained, and blogs, forums, wikis and portals should be part of the core, not four (or fourteen) different plugins from four (fourteen) different authors that don't interoperate at all. (See: PostNuke.) But it should still be extensible.
And I'm paying for this out of my own pocketses (if I ever find anything suitable). So multi-million-dollar five-year-implementation type stuff need not apply.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 28 2005 11:38 PM (RbYVY)
6
Anyways:
Most of the open-source CMS I know are very big on modularity, and none of them match all your criteria.
That's what I've found too. The packages available are all either (a) elegant but very limited in their functionality or (b) mazes of twisty little modules, none of which work quite right or integrate with any of the other modules.
Or (c) cost $70,000 for the basic package, and even more if you want actual
features.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 28 2005 11:42 PM (RbYVY)
7
I really like
Pivot, for example. And it does about 20% of what I want. Which is about the best I seem to be able to get.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 28 2005 11:43 PM (RbYVY)
8
Mambo looks like it might come
close. But not all that close - there'd be a lot (templates, etc) you'd have to construct yourself.
Posted by: horatio at Wednesday, June 29 2005 12:54 AM (YEzAV)
9
I'm using Mambo for another project, and I'm gradually falling out of love with it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 30 2005 02:52 AM (RbYVY)
10
As I have been confused about wikis for a few days now, you can bet the rest of this is way, way over my head.
Posted by: Tig at Thursday, June 30 2005 09:38 AM (CWhYh)
11
ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net
Posted by: ya pidoras at Wednesday, July 26 2006 05:11 AM (EA4kr)
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Saturday, June 25
Double The Fun, Double The Money
One local store has the new Athlon 64 X2 in stock. Starting at $885 (for a 2.2GHz 512k cache) and going up to $1639 (for a 2.4GHz 1MB cache). Compared to $408 for the 2.8GHz Intel Pentium D, it's not exactly a bargain.
Meh.
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Geez, that soundfs like what they were originally talking for the
Opteron dual cores!
Lemme see what they come out at in Canada. Maybe it'd be cheaper to send you one from here?
P.
Posted by: Light & Dark at Saturday, June 25 2005 12:42 PM (+Ds2b)
2
Those are australian dollars, right?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward at Saturday, June 25 2005 06:36 PM (sCYzS)
3
Yep, Aussie dollars. They start at about US$600, which is A$800, plus 10% GST, so unlike the case with books it's pretty much parity.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 25 2005 06:40 PM (+S1Ft)
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Thursday, June 23
Well, In That Case
Intel's dual-core Pentium D is out, and at a reasonable price (around A$400 for the 2.8GHz model). I'd love to put one in my Windows machine, because the rue for making Windows run at a reasonable speed is "One CPU for each application, plus one more for Windows".
Unfortunately, it's only available as Socket 775, where my machine is Socket 478. That's not too bad, I can get a Socket 775 motherboard pretty cheap.
Except that it won't run on just any Socket 775 motherboard; you have to have one based on the Intel 945 chipset. Those motherboards aren't quite so cheap, but they're not unreasonably priced.
Except that they only support DDR-II memory, so I'd have to replace all my memory. And they only support PCI Express, so I'd have to replace my video card.
So it ends up costing $1400 rather than $400. I might as well wait for the dual-core Athlon 64, which will at least use my existing memory.
Meh.
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Intel? Feh! Only good for running Apple OS/X version 5 "Leopard".
Otherwise, use AMD.
Posted by: Any A. Mouse at Thursday, June 23 2005 01:27 PM (kCb5q)
2
Everything I've seen indicates the AMD X2's are a much-superior dual core architecture too. My supplier (sounds like I'm an addict huh?) is an AMD Launch Partner, so I keep bugging them about when to expect availability. No answer yet.
P.
(And can you imagine a nice zippy dual core cpu fed by one of those Gigabyte ramdisks? Might actually make Windows a serviceable OS?!)
Posted by: Light & Dark at Thursday, June 23 2005 03:25 PM (+Ds2b)
3
Yeah, the AMD X2 is definitely a better architecture, but it will cost twice as much - for the chip, anyway. But since it will use my existing memory it ends up about the same.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 23 2005 06:47 PM (+S1Ft)
4
ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net
Posted by: ya pidoras at Wednesday, July 26 2006 05:21 AM (qKguB)
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Thursday, June 16
Cool Thingy of the Day
Xshell. An SSH client/terminal emulator for Windows that doesn't suck.
Much.
And it looks like version 2 (currently in beta) will remove most of the remaining suck.
I got a nice new monitor at work today - a 17" Acer LCD, 1280x1024. It's very sharp and clear on a DVI cable on my Windows box, but on a VGA cable connected to either of my office Linux boxes the picture starts halfway across the screen and nothing I do will make it move. One of my Linux boxes has DVI output, but it doesn't actually output anything, so it's not a lot of use.
I have to have access to my Linux boxes to do my job, so I spent an hour downloading SSH clients trying to find one that didn't suck. Xshell was it.
Downside: It costs $69. Oh, and you have to bang it on the head a few times to knock some of the suck out (depending on what you consider suck), but it's configurable enough that you can get it working just the way you want with a few minutes of tweaking.
Xshell gets a silver "Doesn't suck much at all" award.
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Why not
PuTTY? Kind of curious, since it's pretty pervasive in my experience (to be honest, I don't know anyone who uses anything else), it's free (and open source), and seems to do everything I've ever needed quite well. Does Xshell have some killer feature PuTTY is missing, or what?
Posted by: Cody at Thursday, June 16 2005 07:58 AM (GaTJ4)
2
I forgot about PuTTY - I haven't used it for ages.
Yeah, PuTTY is pretty good. But Xshell 2 has tabbed shelling. Since I typically have shells open on twelve servers at once, and multiple sessions on some of them, I
neeeeed tabbed shelling.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 16 2005 08:27 AM (+S1Ft)
3
Ah. Yes, I can see where that would be a "killer feature". :-)
Posted by: Cody at Thursday, June 16 2005 04:32 PM (GaTJ4)
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Wow, talk about praising with faint damns... I'll have to steal that Silver "Doesn't Suck Much At All" award!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, June 17 2005 02:07 AM (ds0+e)
5
Yeah, I just got stuck with PuTTY as part of my upcoming WinCVS gulag imprisonment (where's Amnesty International when I need them???). It's OK I guess, but I still hate it just for being associated with my our less-than-worthless WinCVS implementation.
Posted by: TallDave at Friday, June 17 2005 01:37 PM (9XE6n)
6
Can someone please just convince my employer to implement whatever stupid thingy is needed on the Exchange Server for Evolution to be able to connect to all the IMAP stuff? I swear, if they would do that I would abandon Windows forevermore! Then I wouldn't have to worry about whether I want to use PuTTY or XShell (tabbed is pretty cool though!) because I could get my SSH native, thank you very frigging much.
Posted by: Eric at Wednesday, June 22 2005 02:48 AM (xJTbs)
7
ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net
Posted by: ya pidoras at Wednesday, July 26 2006 01:19 PM (8M7ix)
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Wednesday, June 15
Really Saying Something
Real Basic 2005 is out! Yay!
Real Basic is another cross-platform Basic compiler supporting Windows, Mac and Linux, just like Blitz Max. Where Blitz is aimed at game development, though, Real Basic is designed for doing businessy-type stuff, with databases and GUIs and like that. It comes with the SQLite database built in, and the Professional (read: expensive) version can connect to other databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL and Oracle. You can write multi-threaded server applications too, like, oh, say, a blogging package, and compile it to run on any of those platforms. Again, you need the Expensive Edition to write server applications and to do cross-compilation.
However, if you want to get your feet wet, Real Software have done something real nice: The Standard Edition for Linux is free. Well, right now the Linux version is still in beta, but the beta is free and it will remain free once it's released. I think that's a very smart move for Real Software.
Naturally, I've downloaded the beta and the Windows trial version, and I'll be reporting back once I've played with it a bit. And I'll likely be buying it as soon as their Australian distributor wakes up and realises there's a new version available...
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ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net
Posted by: ya pidoras at Wednesday, July 26 2006 01:14 PM (8M7ix)
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Hats Off
Fedora Core 4 is out!
Just when I finally got everything working on Fedora Core 4 Test 3.
Well, I expect that upgrading probably won't destroy everything.
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Well, I expect that upgrading probably won't destroy everything.
Nope, just the really important stuff.
Posted by: Allagash at Wednesday, June 15 2005 06:32 AM (M5ajh)
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Tuesday, June 14
Wups
I forgot to (a) set my new modem to respond to pings and (b) create a NAT rule for SSH. So now I can't home from work.
(Yeah, most people are happy with being able to work from home, but I'm a nut for symmetry.)
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I love that phrase. I may have to use it in a 'fortune of the day' post :-)
Posted by: Ozguru at Wednesday, June 15 2005 03:36 AM (AJL/m)
2
Haha, planning on accessing pr0n from work? :)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-06-13
Posted by: Jojo at Wednesday, June 15 2005 11:38 AM (G1SH1)
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Saturday, June 11
The Butler Did It
Had huge problems with my internet connection today. Drop outs, freezes, packet loss, data corruption, you name it. Tried everything. Checked ISP forums, no-one else seems to be having trouble. Disconnected, reconnected. Reset. Powered off. Unplugged the phone. Swapped cables around. Nothing helped. Sometimes it would work fine for, oh, several minutes, before melting down again.
In a final fit of desperation, I swapped my old reliable modem for a new ADSL2 unit I'm supposed to be testing. Of course, that meant I had to configure it from scratch with all my NAT rules and such.
And waddya know, it works. Not sure I'll recommend it though. The modem we currently sell has a wonderful diagnostic feature that tests everything that could possibly go wrong and gives a nice little report. It's an absolute life-saver. "Okay customer person, now click on Diagnostics and tell me what it says... Pass. Pass. Pass. Pass. Fail. Right, that means your password is wrong."
This one doesn't have anything nearly as good.
Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, some episodes of Mahoraba that I was watching last weekend managed to corrupt themselves. That makes me kind of twitchy, because the files were fine when I watched them. Things that make you go urk.
And even after I'd patched them up with Bit Torrent (which is brilliant for that - it checksums the file in 256k blocks and then only downloads the corrupted or missing parts) - even when they were all happy again, WinAmp wouldn't play them. And it did a week ago. Some digging around suggests that it's choking on malformed VBR audio, but it worked a week ago. And Media Player plays the files just fine... And a week ago, Media Player on my computer would crash on startup.
I hate computers.
Um, anyway. Cool toy of the day is Azureus, an extra-nifty Bit Torrent manager written in Java. It's just the thing for downloading your 200 hours of anime a month. It can even show you an animated diagram of all the packets going back and forth between you and the other computers in the swarm. Azureus works particularly well when you aren't suffering 90% packet loss.
And it has a little blue frog. Every computer needs a little blue frog.
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I would blame Bill Gates. Windows is "inadvertently" doing some some truly evil things to non-MS video players, coincidentally (NOT!!) just as they're being forced to unbundle the MS Media Player from Windows in the EU.
My Realplayer has developed a habit of freezing Windows and refusing to do anything but make really nasty blarting/squealing noises when I play some higher-definition files. The really diabolical thing about this is that it totally ignores all device input; NOTHING will undo the freeze and stop the blarting/squealing short of turning off the computer.
Posted by: TallDave at Saturday, June 11 2005 12:38 PM (9XE6n)
2
So, if I understood correctly, your connection to the internet stopped working and you switched modems and now it works but you can't watch Mahorba (which I guess is some video thing) but you almost got it fixed, but it doesn't work. The part about hating computers I totally got. Did I understand the rest, too?
Posted by: RP at Saturday, June 11 2005 04:38 PM (LlPKh)
3
Yep. Well, I can watch Mahoraba in Windows Media Player, so all is not lost.
Oh, and Mahoraba is a new anime series. :)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 11 2005 09:56 PM (+S1Ft)
4
I'm willing to bet that you've got "Automatic Update" enabled on Windows, and sometime in the last week Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to update something in the system without bothering to tell you about it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, June 12 2005 09:39 PM (CJBEv)
5
I'm willing to be that you're right.
All my important stuff is on Linux, except for video-playing and games, so I let Microsoft patch their bugs whenever they like.
It gets annoying when they also decide to do a remote reboot. I have
finally got my Windows box stable, and now Automatic Update is my number one source of unexpected crashes.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 12 2005 11:13 PM (+S1Ft)
Posted by: owlish at Thursday, June 16 2005 12:17 PM (sBj9U)
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Sunday, June 05
The Connector Conspiracy
Observation 1:
There are at least three types of DVI connector, even though they all do exactly the same thing. On the other hand, two plug-pack transformers can have exactly the same plug, even though one provides five volts and the other twenty-four.
Observation 2:
Small electronic gadgets are surprisingly resilient in over-voltage conditions. But I still wouldn't recommend doing that.
I was recabling my computers because the space under my dining table desk had turned into something of a R.O.U.S. nest. In the process, I managed to plug my USB hub into the plug pack for my old Logitech wireless keyboard. (Not the new old one, but the old old one.) It survived, assuming that all the lights are supposed to be lit up all the time.
I haven't got my new flashy keyboard working yet. It doesn't seem to like being connected through a USB hub, which will be a problem since I plan to get myself a little KVM switch - one of these; it supports DVI, so there should be no loss of picture quality. But if my keyboard won't work with a USB hub, it probably won't work with a KVM switch either, which kind of defeets the porpoise.*
Meanwhile, my intended new ISP turns out not to provide static IP addresses. I've always had static a IP address, since way back in 1996, so I didn't even think to check.
Damn. That will really screw things up.
* If you ever wondered why porpoises live in the ocean, well, it's because they don't have any feet.
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"* If you ever wondered why porpoises live in the ocean, well, it's because they don't have any feet."
Your day job... keep it. *sigh*
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, June 06 2005 01:11 AM (86QII)
2
Iinet don't provide static addresses, but their IP assignment seems to work DHCP-like: every time I reconnect my ADSL (which isn't often, since I don't disconnect much), I get the same IP.
Posted by: Jojo at Monday, June 06 2005 01:42 AM (K7kS/)
3
Your day job... keep it. *sigh*
Yeah. I was planning to. :)
Jojo - thanks. Hopefully it will work out okay.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 06 2005 01:56 AM (+S1Ft)
4
iiNet are about to roll out ADSL2 and 2+, so I could jump from 1.5Mbit to 8 to 12 to 24... Or maybe to 6 to 10 to 16 or so, since I probably won't get full speed where I am. Still, even 6Mbps would be very nice.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 06 2005 02:01 AM (+S1Ft)
5
failing that dynamic IP isn't too much of a hardship if you're prepared to go the DynDNS route or similar...
Posted by: Rob at Monday, June 06 2005 06:42 AM (kTm63)
6
I've been using the Gyration wireless keyboard for a couple years. I don't even care so much about the wireless or gyroscopic parts; I was a consultant my first 4 years out of college, so I got used to scissor keys and this was the only keyboard I could find at Best Buy that had them.
Plus, if you get really mad, they make a very satisfying crunch when you smash them with your fists.
Posted by: TallDave at Tuesday, June 07 2005 09:54 AM (9XE6n)
7
* If you ever wondered why porpoises live in the ocean, well, it's because they don't have any feet.
Thank you for that duck-billed platitude.
Posted by: TallDave at Tuesday, June 07 2005 09:56 AM (9XE6n)
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