musings of wrath

Yesterday, I signed up for Sun’s try-and-buy program for one of their SunFire T2000’s. I was impressed with the fact that I received a response within an hour. I wasn’t so impressed that it was a quote to purchase the T2000 I’d spec’d.

Today, Jonathan Schwartz posted on his weblog at Sun about how Sun’s going to give away servers for writing a good, fair review of one of their servers. It doesn’t have to be positive, just fair.

Being someone who’d write full time, given the chance, I’m anxious to get the try-and-buy server in. However, this part of me doubts I’ll ever see that T2000. The terms and conditions preclude benchmarking the server while I “try” it.

Jonathan? What about those of us who are small businesses (read: 2 people), trying to get off the ground, that may barely have the budget for such a server? Does that mean we won’t get a chance to write about these servers unless we buy one first? I’ll admit the likelihood of our purchasing an $8000 server is a 50-50 chance, due to the sheer cost and the inability to see the performance of it first hand.

While looking up the word ginormous on Wiktionary, I accidently discovered a whole list of “frankenwords”.

Heh. This is gonna be fun!

Well, the majority of my LJ entries have been imported into this blog.

I’ll be cleaning up the data over the course of the next week or so. Expect the monthly archives to be non-functional until I’m done.

At a recent technology demonstration, Japanese engineers have finally caught up with their animators.

I signed up for my FON account today, and am contemplating installing the router flash on the WRT at home. However, the nearest FON hot-spot is nearly 300 miles away in Alabama.

This has the potential to be huge - enormous. If everyone who had a WRT router at home installed this, we could cover a large amount of the US, at the very least - and more in densely populated areas of Europe, I’m sure.

If everyone’s connected wirelessly - what do we need backbones for, other than a “backup”?

Today I started messing with stored procedures in MySQL. I had a few bumps in the road, mainly caused by an upgrade from MySQL from 4.x to 5.x. That resolved, I created my first stored procedure.

After a bit of tooling, I made a procedure that will populate a table with an initial dataset of 50,000 records. This took three seconds! All I can say is - wow.

Database admins will likely say this is old hat to them - but I’m not a db admin, but I’m definitely learning.

Please bear with me.. The update to WP 2.0.1 has caused some problems, and I am working on resolving those as I write this post.

Update: I’ve gotten the fonts and images re-installed from a backup. Things should work now.

It seems there’s a bug in the now-bundled backup plugin in Wordpress 2.0. I found the fix for it on Drab as a fool, aloof as a Bard posting from December, but only after some searching. My hope is that this post will make it easier to find for others.

Update: I’ve since discovered this is a bug in PHP 5.1.1, and only that version (there are claims that it was fixed in CVS, but I don’t want to run that on a production server). I’ll have to work up updating that ASAP. Either way, the work around seems to be working.