weather.com saved money by switching to Linux, Tomcat and other free software. Your company can too.
I do disagree with their use of MySQL; it’d be much smarter to go with PostgreSQL, which is a much better, database — which is also free.
07 February 2018: updated URL
Read more →
James Hague argues that on modern computer systems, performance tuning is different from what one might expect — more concerned with algorithms and other such high-level optimisations than with language choice, tweaking and such low-level approaches. A very good read.
Read more →
Way back when, Marathon was a great game for the Macintosh. Released at about the same time as Doom, it featured an intriguing story as well as exceptional gameplay. Future versions upped the ante in the story-telling realm considerably; some still count Marathon among the greatest of games purely for its story. I wasted a considerable number of hours playing the trilogy in college.
Before its maker — Bungie, of lamented memory — was bought by Microsoft, they freed the source to Marathon, and after Marathon, Marathon 2 and Marathon ∞, we now have Marathon Aleph One (math geeks wil recognise that Aleph One is the power of the continuum, which is larger than simple infinity …).
Read more →
Peter Norvig wrote an excellent article entitled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years which faces the reality that no skill — particularly one so complex as programming.
Read more →
Christopher Browne has an excellent article on spreadsheets, why they’re good and why they’re bad, among many other excellent pieces. A fine site in general.
31 January 2018: updated URL
Read more →
When I replaced the faulty drive yesterday, I discovered that I had screwed up my IDE configuration: both mirrors were on the same IDE bus, one master & one slave. This meant that it was almost always saturated. I fixed it, and now everything is fast, blazing fast.
For those who don’’t know, an IDE bus can handle one or two drives. If two, the one at the end of the bus must be configured as the master and the one in the middle as the slave.
Read more →
Yesterday one of my hard drives failed. Fortunately, it’s mirrored, and I so today after work I replaced it. Very straightforward operation. Linux is cool.
Read more →
Man, I’ve watched a lot of films since getting a Netflix subscription: in two and a third years, I’ve seen 677 movies — over 5½ a week! For most of that time, I’ve been on the 8-at-a-time plan, and thus have paid a bit less than $1,200, averaging $1.76 per movie. It’s amazingly cheap.
Read more →
Whilst downloading the newest crossfire client from Sourceforge, I saw an ad which interested me. Not wishing to disrupt what I was doing (and also aware that many ads pop open new windows when followed), I middle-clicked to open a new tab. When I got a moment, I eagerly turned to the tab to see what the ad was selling, only to find that the site had, instead of using nice standard HTML links, done something-or-other which doesn’t play well with others, and so the link never loaded.
Read more →
The @ symbol, to be known as ‘commat’, has been added to Morse code — the first such addition in decades.
04 February 2018: updated URL
Read more →
Doc Searls and David Weinberger have written a great document called A World of Ends, explaining why the Internet is what it is, and why we seem to keep on making the same mistakes about it.
Read more →
Spent awhile playing Search & Rescue. A deuced difficult game, made no simpler by the controls of a helicopter. Nowhere near so easy as one might imagine.
06 February 2018: updated URL
Read more →