I love that I’m ahead of the curve on something. I used to use definition lists because they were easy to style (back in the wild days before CSS was widely supported). Now, unordered and ordered lists are easy to style. My favorite is to use margin-left:-15px to keep those bullets lined up with that that horrendous whitespace to the left of list items.
Yeah, I’m the ListGeek, bow before my orderly data!
This will interest no one but me, but I don’t care. I’ve found something completely annoying about AOLserver and I need to share. Let’s say you download these bigass (the technical term would be “friggin’ huge”) files every day and have to parse them out and dump them into a database so you can do a bunch of conversions on them and generate spiffy reports. Let’s just say this is a new system that worked fine in testing with small files, but now, it will only parse a small portion of each file before deciding to give up. Let’s then say that the reason it does this, and then doesn’t report any kind of error is a helpful feature in the server that closes active (and very busy) db handles after they’ve been open for a certain amount of time. Does it check to see if they’re doing something? Nope. It just closes it. Thankfully, there’s an obscure configuration setting (MaxOpen in the pool/POOLNAME section) where you can set that timeout to some insane number (did you know that 1,000,000,000 seconds is approximately 192 days?). This will run tonight… I hope it gets all twenty-four hours instead of just ten or eleven. The only good thing is that it made me go in and fix up a bunch of things it was doing that weren’t quite as efficient as they could have been, which got us from 9am to 1pm, but still, sheesh.
I love AOLserver. I use it for things it wasn’t intended for, like turning it into a cron job handler, and reporting system. I guess that’s why I run into this stuff. I can live with that. But I’m still gonna whine about it when I run into stupid stuff like this.
The other thing is that Postgres doesn’t handle databases with more than 200k records in them very well without creating a LOT of indexes (like on every column of every table). Before I deleted the records older than two weeks, it took five minutes just to get a count. If I were a real DBA, I’d go find out why. But, I’m not. I use it because it’s easy to install and configure for use with AOLserver. It also supports all the SQL features I’m used to with Sybase. It’s also reasonably fast for normal use.
If I didn’t have this headache, you all would never have known all this stuff. Thanks, Dr. Nik! (yes, my dentist’s name is Dr. Nik)
Not everything needs borders and a background color.
There have been a lot of great shots at the Mirror Project, but this is by far my favorite.
I feel the need for a redesign. Yes, I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it. I put Movable Type back on the Powerbook, and started last night while watching Big Brother. I’m not starting with the main site this time, but with the Geekery, and a new section that will move all the pics linked to from Max’s page to a family photo album. I never update Max’s blog, which is still hosted at Blogger, and heck, I haven’t uploaded any new pics in a while. So, I’m going to try to re-organize what’s up there now into “albums” (really just Movable Type categories), with each picture as a separate entry in the “album”. That way, it’ll be easier to add descriptions and keep them all organized. And now that I have PhotoShop 7 on the Powerbook along with iPhoto (which doesn’t even try to compress jpg’s on export… grrr), it’ll make all this organizing, exporting, uploading, etc a little easier. It took me two weeks of after-work-tv-viewing to complete my first Movable Type design for this page… hopefully it won’t take that long for this.
Which brings me to my next topic, OS X. Yes, I’ve talked about it before too, but I just want to talk about it some more. I upgraded to Jaguar a little while ago (which is how my first Movable Type installation got nuked), and am having a lot of fun with it. I forget sometimes about the Unix underpinnings of OS X. But, last night while installing Movable Type, I was going to create an alias in my Documents folder to the Apache Documents and CGI-Executables folders. I was already in Terminal, so I decided to try symlinking to them. What do you know! The aliases in OS X are actually symlinks. They worked beautifully and well, it’s just cool. It took me all of five minutes once I had everything unzipped to install everything, chmod it, and get started. Now, I could have installed AOLserver, Perl and Movable Type on my old Dell laptop running Windows 2000, but that would have taken a good long time, and I still wouldn’t be able to properly symlink anything or use the terminal to do my normal *nix type stuff. With OS X, I have tar, chmod, vi, etc all right there installed on the system with a beautiful user-friendly system on top of it. I can use my new copy of AOL, Mozilla and PhotoShop and still use vi, ls, ln, etc. Heck, once fink has a stable version for 10.2, I’ll have ncftp, xemacs and a host of my other favorite *nix tools.
OS X has, for good or bad, slightly weaned me from Linux. I was in love with my RedHat Uber-Box until I got OS X. Now, I log into the Linux box from OS X and do what I need to do and then get off. It’s servicable, does what it’s supposed to and I don’t have to worry about it crashing, which is really what I need Linux for. I don’t feel the need for the perfect Linux desktop now. Am I going to hell for that?
Oh yes, and they’re lovely. I remember visiting this site many moons ago, and harvesting loads of fonts. Since then, they’ve expanded: Free dincFONTS. Some beautiful typefaces for your designery.
Ok, my favorite new feature in OS 10.2 has go to be iChat. They’ve outdone the AIM client in almost every way. It’s gorgeous in that iTunes kinda way, and the Rendezvous thing looks like it will be a lot of fun. The only problem is the fact that I think I’m the only person on my floor using it, and well, that means my Rendezvous window is empty. The thought baloons are cute, and I think might start to annoy me eventually. For now, they’re a nice departure from the same old thing. Thankfully, you can shut them off and go back to formatting them as regular old IM’s.
Amazon.com is great. It allows people who’ve used a product to rate and review it so I can make a more informed decision. This system is especially useful when buying video games (yes, I broke down yesterday and bought a PS2). But, I’ve noticed an annoying trend. Games that no one outside of the company creating the game and a small number of beta testers haven’t played yet have ratings. Adventurous psychic souls have rated games that aren’t coming out for sometimes months in advance. For example, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter sounds like a great game. You can’t rate the concept of a game before playing a game. If you look a the concept for one of the most popular video games of all time: a yellow circle eats small dots, gets chased by ghosts, and for short periods of time gets to chase those ghosts after eating a slightly larger dot. There, that sounds pretty crappy, doesn’t it? The same with classics like Super Mario Brothers, etc. People, people, people, you’re screwing up a great system. Amazon, please don’t allow people to rate items before they come out, or at least wipe the slate clean once the item is released. It artificially skews the rating for premonitions to count the same as real-world experience.
Ok, I’m done… and by the way, Jak and Daxter is amazing. The world is huge, and loads of fun to explore.
I love OS X. I just installed Jaguar, and I was desperately hoping they would provide a utility to switch the mouse buttons. You see, I’m left-handed. I use the mouse with my left hand. In Windows (which I’m trying to wean myself off of) and Linux, I can easily flip the mouse buttons so the right button does the clicking and the left button does the context menu. In OS X, that is impossible. I’ve combed Google for answers. I’ve combed Apple’s help site. No luck. Nothing. Nada. No one’s done it. I even searched the filesystem for mouse-ish files, to come up completely empty handed. I would love to use OS X full-time, but the fact that I have to use the wrong mouse button in OS X is driving me NUTS!!
It’s articles like these that make me think. You know, I love Linux. I also love OS X and have no real hatred for Windows (I do have real hatred for Microsoft). The point of the editorial is basically to watch out for Linux on the desktop. Ummm, duh. Just the other day at Lowe’s buying paint, I caught a glimpse of the terminal in the wallpaper department… Linux on a small IBM machine running XWindows. That is how Linux will grow on the desktop. I think Linux is perfect for single application terminals / limited use in stores, or other places where those using the computer should have 1) no ability to change the functions of the machine or 2) limited access to functionality outside of the intended use. So, for a call center, you could give each rep access to a web browser, like Mozilla, with e-mail and web browsing, their own home directory with a disk quota for bookmarks and documents, and put your customer tracking database online behind a firewall. Voila, no site-wide Windows License and almost perfect security.
When I was in tech support, we made a hobby of breaking the Windows Policy Editor settings that were supposed to keep us from running our own applications. We ALWAYS found a way around them. In Linux, those functions can be removed from the terminal completely, and each user will only be able to run applications in the directory they’re assigned.
The problem with adopting Linux across an enterprise is converting the business folks who 1) aren’t geeky, and 2) set in their ways when it comes to Microsoft Office. I fear the conversion for them will never happen, unless Microsoft’s licensing scheme becomes completely overbearing and financially unbearable. Even then, I think that business folks might start looking at OS X as an option (ok that’s COMPLETELY wishful thinking).
As enterprises become more creative, and Microsoft charges more and more for licenses, Linux will make gains. First at the bottom levels of organizations where it’s easy to dictate to the user base what they will use to perform their job functions.
Personally, I don’t use Linux day-to-day as my desktop. I like Gnome, and it’s perfectly servicable for navigating through installed programs. I’m still a slave to Windows, although I find myself using my Powerbook and Quiksilver G4 with OS X more and more. I may make the switch eventually. It’s about inertia and having benefits of switching that outweight the time involved in learning new behavior. That’s the key. If I haven’t switched, and I’m a geek, I can’t expect the non-geeks out there to switch.
Unfortunately, it’s up to the Linux community and associated companies to provide that incentive, or Microsoft’s to keep providing cons for using their’s. The linux community has proven it can innovate, drive new technologies and make a difference. The linux desktop still has a ways to go, and a few more apps to provide. I honestly believe it will get there and Linux will start challenging Windows outside of the data center where Linux is already making huge inroads.
The problem with writing about this is that there are so many things to say on the topic. I think this is a topic for the Geekery. I think I’ll start a decision guide, and a “Here’s What I Would Use For X” doc. Not sure where it will go, but I guess we’ll find out.