It’s a vicious cycle: sysadmins can find a wealth of shortcomings in just about any technology that crosses their desk. Vendors completely ignore sysadmins as a market for their technology, in part because they’re impossible to please, and in part because it would cost too much money to even come close, which would mean that…
Embarrassingly Simplified Home Networking
Tonight I did some rather emasculating things to my home network. I had a pretty nice one. I had my cable modem coming in, then ran a cat5 straight from that to my Smoothwall firewall machine, which had three interfaces – one for the cable modem, one for the internal network, and one for a…
The iPhone Compromise
iPhone was announced officially yesterday at MacWorld. I was really looking forward to it. I was ‘cautiously optimistic’. If you know me, you know that cautiously optimistic, for me, is pretty damned optimistic. I’m an incurable cynic. I can’t help it. So what about this phone stood out to me? What stood out with this…
Blogger issues continue
Man, my worst fear has come true. Blogger is becoming *evil* from a usability perspective, and here I am trapped, because if I switch, all of those posts basically go away… or at least the old URLs become completely invalid. Maybe I just chalk it up, import the posts into something that isn’t tied to…
Yes, one Chevy Volt Please
I came across this entry on autobloggreen.com about the Chevy Volt, which is GM’s latest stab at convincing us that they really do put some effort behind getting an electric car out the door to us sometime in the next millenium. I have to admit that, while I’m wholly *unconvinced* that I’ll ever see this…
More good food in NY – Telepan on 69th St.
My sister in-law lives with her boyfriend in NY, on the upper west side. I lived in NY for a while too, and worked there on and off for years. My favorite thing about the city is the food. There’s a lot of it, a lot of different kinds of it, and a good bit…
Smoke Free, Day 5
Well, I think I’m over the hump. Historically, day 4 is a really bad day for me in quitting smoking. Yesterday *did* suck pretty bad, but I’m past it now, and still smoke free. Still lots of cravings, hard to concentrate, fatigued, whatever. Lots of oddball symptoms associated with quitting smoking, but the one fantastic…
Death to the vacation program
The vacation program is used to make sure that people who send you mail while you’re on vacation or otherwise out of the office for extended periods of time get a reply telling them not to expect to hear from you for a while. I personally have *never* liked the vacation program, because people misuse…
Apple, Laptops, and the outlook for Linux on the desktop
I should make a disclaimer here that I’m professing no real knowledge here. I’m speculating. And partly, I’m playing devil’s advocate. Apple, so far as I can tell, is going pretty much nowhere in terms of server deployments. Oh, they make servers, it’s just that I don’t see them really going very far. However, with…
Blogger out of beta…. and into alpha
So blogger is no longer in beta. In launching their first non-beta version, however, Blogger has actually broken several things, several peoples’ blogs, and generally made a huge mess of things. After being prompted by shiny-clicky things to upgrade to the new version of Blogger, a great many bloggers were greeted with error pages, wrong…