Disqus - Latest Comments for shokk

Re: Why I’ll Never Use IE8

shokk — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:59:25 -0000

I just loaded Chrome for Mac. While only a dev version, it all seems to be there. The speed is really good on heavy javascript pages.

My standby is still FF, although I keep Safari up to date now on the Mac for when I'm debugging some code or the rare cookie conflict.

As for IE being forced, in Windows dominated entreprises, where Group Policies are often set, requiring a uniform version across the company is not a hard thing. If IE8 deserves mainstream use, then it will propagate appropriately. The enterprise is always last to join this trend since they need to be careful that whatever theyre installing doesn't "Vista" their business.

Re: Why I’ll Never Use IE8

shokk — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:02:51 -0000

I use Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Mac on a daily basis. The key is keeping the number of add-ons light.

Re: Why there will be many Twitters (Scripting News)

shokk — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:46:49 -0000

FriendFeed needs a clone that will hook into FriendFeed itself, where the clone is the lite version and FriendFeed itself is the advanced version. This could lead to a Pro or advertiser based system. The time is now to fork the Twitter idea. Will this FriendFeed clone be ready with features that Twitter doesn't have, while hooking into it to co-opt everyone back into FriendFeed? Will it be OAuth ready while Twitter is still getting its feelers out for that. Do users care about that stuff? Is FriendFeed even ready for that kind of server load?

Re: The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc (Scripting News)

shokk — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:19:52 -0000

Bill,
That's like saying we couldn't imagine anything good coming of people splintering off from LiveJournal and Blogger to implement blogs on their own sites, but here we are in 2009 with Wordpress.org software for all. Twitter is just another that will get copied and xeroxed across the Internet so that it can freely evolve into the next better thing.

Re: Webcomics Winners

shokk — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:16:04 -0000

This scraper works consistently well for Sinfest.
http://henrik.nyh.se/scrapers/sinfest.rss

Re: Webcomics Winners

shokk — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:35:02 -0000

Sinfest doesn't seem to have an RSS feed? It's funny, though.

Re: Why it's time to break out of Twitter (Scripting News)

shokk — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:44:36 -0000

Sorry, but the whole followers numbers game is silly. Why worry about these people collecting tulips? At some point they'll realize it not worth a thing and only a few were paying attention anyway. We can only really communicate effectively with a few at a time, so everything else is lost and wasted effort.

Re: What will we call a Twitter? (Scripting News)

shokk — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:23:19 -0000

And remember that it's not about the service itself, but the content. A site with an awesome project or product to talk about will attract people to talk about it on the site, whether it is structured bulletin-board based discussions or a twitter-like flow. First and foremost, you should consider what content you want to present, and whether it is worth anyone's time.

Re: What will we call a Twitter? (Scripting News)

shokk — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:19:51 -0000

too long. I "messaged" you. Simple.

Re: What will we call a Twitter? (Scripting News)

shokk — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:18:38 -0000

This just feels like something you hope self-fulfills. I don't see or hear anyone calling Facebook's new layout a Twitter. I think at this point everyone knows Twitter is a specific thing.

But now is the time to set that name in stone forever. Since you're consciously trying to shoot for that, make it count. Will it be a "tweet"? Or a DM? Or just plain "message"? How is it different from what we did with IM? Maybe I just "pinged" you.

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

shokk — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:57:58 -0000

We use the Bladecenters for Windows and Linux production and VMWare which hosts our test and dev Windows and Linux environments. The throughput is sweet and we really don't see any contention. The wiring is much easier, and the literature about the benefits of power, I/O, and hardware consolidation are right on. We're about to roll out a VDI solution from another chassis which I've been eagerly drooling over. Some of these blades are dual quad-core and 32GB of memory booting VMWare ESX over fibre SAN, so they're making the most out of the consolidation possibilities.

Re: EMC CLARiiON Days

shokk — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:53:06 -0000

We have Clariions serving LUNs to VMWare, Windows, Linux, and Solaris, but no NAS. They're much nicer boxes than the NetApp ever were. We're about to have a Celerra delivered, which looks really similar to what we saw on NetApp with a bunch more replication features thrown in. Probably not all as nice as the Hitachi. I've never used those but I've heard they are considered top of the line. Didn't you use Clariion at a previous place?

We also have a pair of Centera replicating between Production and DR environments, but they are hosting nothing yet because of an issue with Symantec Antivirus interfering with DiskXtender. How are you using your Centera?

Re: Reminder: Why I switched to Mac in 2005 (Scripting News)

shokk — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:48:55 -0000

You're just buying time with a move to the Mac. As it gains popularity, its vulnerabilities will be targeted. Like any other UNIX, it is only as strong as its weakest link. Take a look at the patch list for OSs like Red Hat or Solaris any given month. There are dozens upon dozens of security fixes. You're only kidding yourself if that's why you moved to the Mac.

But damn that interface is pretty. I'll be getting my MBP17 some time this spring. Why? Because it's UNIX underneath it all and I'm a UNIX geek. And it's the UNIX GUI everyone's been searching for all these years.

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

shokk — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:50:48 -0000

I haven't touched InfiniBand yet, but for our fiber we made some very loose loops to keep it from getting too sharp a bend radius. Turns out that's really not necessary anymore.

Our bladecenter power cables are really long and we've had to loop them up a bit in the cabinet. Luckily you only have 4 in a cabinet, so there really aren't that many cables in there. And that gets you 56 systems in the cabinet! We have the slots for InfiniBand on these chassis, but nothing in them.

Re: Death Magnetic is a hit

shokk — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:23:15 -0000

I heard it somewhere on the net. It really did sound much better.
That Dublin tour date really sounds hot - wish I could fly over for it.

Re: Facebook and Twitter, OpenID (Scripting News)

shokk — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:09:37 -0000

OpenID with the centralized services will definitely be for the masses, and that's fine for them. It's not like I host my own mail servers, even though that would be the best way of avoiding those centralized services. To each their own, but independence is always best when possible.

Re: Facebook and Twitter, OpenID (Scripting News)

shokk — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:42:20 -0000

I like the idea of OpenID, but I'm wary of hosting it on servers where your identity can be wiped from the servers arbitrarily by the owners of that service because they don't like your name or your content. I prefer hosting my own OpenID. I will not use Facebook, or Yahoo, or any other OpenID services but my own.
http://www.shokk.com/blog/articles/2009/01/25/h...

I propose that if you host your own OpenID that you also host it for your friends. Let's keep it open and federated. After all, these services are just going to associate an OpenID URL with your existing profile, so why not make it your own URL, or one hosted by someone you know.

Re: Disk Savings from VMware View Composer

shokk — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:59:35 -0000

I've seen posts saying that this savings is not entirely true for long with VMWare View. That because Windows does not readily overwrite previously used blocks, in the name of providing you the opportunity to undelete if needed, it continues writing new blocks, which means disk sizes keep growing.

This means things could balloon pretty quickly in the case of one or more people downloading a large file on one of the VMs, say an ISO image, and then deleting it.

Re: Merry Christmas and Happy 2009

shokk — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:58:17 -0000

Thriving on Less
http://thepowerofless.com/2008/12/free-ebook-th...

Re: MonkeyChow now with Wordpress support

shokk — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:51:10 -0000

My recommendation right now is that the default table names be used until the multiuser support is available. The changes required to support multiple users are very challenging for me, due to a number of factors...

First and foremost, I'm just now starting to pick up on the more advanced features of mySQL - I have until now gotten away with not using things like JOINs but I need to quickly learn how this can help my system. Being able to do these things in one atomic query rather than a bunch of different queries aided by some PHP will make things faster and more efficient, since mySQL is designed to do all that data sifting for us.

There are also a number of places in the code that reference things like items.id and feeds.id that should really be items.item_id and feeds.feed_id to help me use those higher level functions. This means that I must now go back through all the code and replace instances of "id" with the correct one so that column names match when I try to do a JOIN - that is lot of code to go through while not breaking anything.

Some of this recoding is due to my lack of functions for handing these individual tasks, which makes it easier for me when I'm coding the first time since I have to plan less, but harder when I have to go back into the code, which means more wasted time in the long run. So, there needs to be some smarter coding on my part.

Once this new version is ready, I'll release it as 1.0 with as much of the code cleaned up as possible and the start of modular style templates so that people can make their feed reader unique for their community.

Re: RSS as the foundation for realtime (Scripting News)

shokk — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:08:13 -0000

Currently I'm using Mint with addons for RSS feed tracking, but everyone seems to prefer Feedburner. I seem to have something against paying for that service, so I would really welcome a free PHP based DIY solution to install on my own servers. I think it would really take off. I'm watching this closely...

Re: Why Twitter can't be conversational for me (Scripting News)

shokk — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:05:55 -0000

The twitter web page has the "in reply to" but most clients seem to leave that out, which I think is a major failure, as Dave rightly complains.

Re: Mac Backups to NAS via SMB

shokk — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:32:33 -0000

I've used Mozy.com - https://mozy.com/?code=UXW2GB - for a few years on the PC and now on the Mac as well. It always pays to have multiple ways to get your data back.

Re: Mac Backups to NAS via SMB

shokk — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:27:27 -0000

Ah, Time Capsule is a different thing altogether. As long as the protocol provides for checking data on the receiving end, which all TCP/IP based protocols should do, I don't think the data should be suspect. But the reliability of a wireless connection is always suspect and so I would not be confident that the backup completed successfully each time. For client system access, wireless is fine, but for servers the connections should be no-nonsense GbE.

I hope to join the MacBookPro crowd this spring.

How much do you pay for your Amazon S3 access?

Re: Mac Backups to NAS via SMB

shokk — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:49:08 -0000

I only backed up the home areas containing my xcode work in it since that's all I really did with the system. That was the original idea and has since changed - I now have more on the system, calling for replacing the 4GB stick with a 20GB network backup.

Backing up over the network is always less stable, in any backup scheme, than backing up directly to a local drive, but a local drive is not always the best place for backups. Ideally this would be done to an external drive that could be mounted on another system if the problem were catastrophic to the original operating system.

Essential to ANY backup system is occasionally testing the backups. I've done that enough times that I'm satisfied with the stability. I don't know if your opinion on network backups is limited to Time Machine, but my home network is stable enough that I'm running iSCSI for some VMs which is more sensitive than a backup. As we use Netback for enterprise backups over the network at my place of work, I trust network backup in general as a proven technology.

Disqus - Latest Comments for shokk

Re: Why I’ll Never Use IE8

Re: Why I’ll Never Use IE8

Re: Why there will be many Twitters (Scripting News)

Re: The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc (Scripting News)

Re: Webcomics Winners

Re: Webcomics Winners

Re: Why it's time to break out of Twitter (Scripting News)

Re: What will we call a Twitter? (Scripting News)

Re: What will we call a Twitter? (Scripting News)

Re: What will we call a Twitter? (Scripting News)

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

Re: EMC CLARiiON Days

Re: Reminder: Why I switched to Mac in 2005 (Scripting News)

Re: Stop the Zip Tie Madness!

Re: Death Magnetic is a hit

Re: Facebook and Twitter, OpenID (Scripting News)

Re: Facebook and Twitter, OpenID (Scripting News)

Re: Disk Savings from VMware View Composer

Re: Merry Christmas and Happy 2009

Re: MonkeyChow now with Wordpress support

Re: RSS as the foundation for realtime (Scripting News)

Re: Why Twitter *can't* be conversational for me (Scripting News)

Re: Mac Backups to NAS via SMB

Re: Mac Backups to NAS via SMB

Re: Mac Backups to NAS via SMB

Re: Why Twitter can't be conversational for me (Scripting News)