Drupal needs a clue, perhaps?

As noted previously Drupal had a little trouble, and the community rallied around: individuals to the tune of over $10,000 and my employer with a server. So, I note that to build out their infrastructure, Drupal is going to use the community donations to buy Dell boxes. Um, let’s see here; IBM and Sun invest in Open Source, big-time. HP’s there too. Dell… uh, Dell? Ecosystem? Community? There’s something wrong with this picture.

Tim’s not saying that Drupal owes Sun anything, to be clear. I’m a little puzzled by this as well. If I had donated, I would be asking some questions of the Drupal decision-makers. Dell may offer a compelling price/performance solution: do the others not compete as well because of their self-imposed community obligations?
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The Book

My copy of Book The Sixth arrived yesterday and I am 3/4 through it (up til 1 AM with it).

Good so far, full of references and allusions to events past and yet to come . . . .

The war between Love and Hate, between Trust and Fear, comes to a gripping conclusion — but not for a year or so yet.

And Amazon is crediting me (and I presume everyone, including the other 31,411 Seattlites who got their copies yesterday) with a $1 refund. What, did Jeff Bezos run out of places to put the money?

<update> I finished it last night and I look forward to book 7 with even more enthusiasm. I now see 5 and 6 as prologue and I want to see how it gets tied up and resolved.

in case you finish the book by Monday AM

Harry Potter:

The sixth book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, was released on Saturday at 12:01am. Besides buying the book, kids and adults all over our region attended Harry Potter events: sleepovers, magic shows, costume contests, and readings. But, now that it is Monday morning, how many kids have already finished the book? What is their review? What is so engaging about Harry?

KUOW wants to know what you thought of it.
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annoyances and workarounds

An annoyance that seems to haunt all package management systems: FreeBSD has been much less painful to use than RPM, but it still has issues.

This seems to crop up for some users:


[/opt/ports] # portupgrade -a
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:322:in `deorigin': cannot convert nil into String (PkgDB::DBError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:915:in `tsort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:914:in `each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:914:in `tsort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:906:in `each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:906:in `tsort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:928:in `sort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:932:in `sort_build!'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:674:in `main'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:207:in `initialize'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:207:in `new'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:207:in `main'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:1869

and the stock answer seems to be to remove the pkgdb.db file and rebuild it with a less buggy hashing method (bdb1-tree, dbm_hash — anything but the default Berkeley DB).

But what if you try all the options and get the same result?
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tagging

Ruk is organizing his blog posts:

My Own Private Taxonomy:

The danger, of course, is that my taxonomy will lose value once it becomes a tree with hundreds of branches. But, for the time being, I have a lot more granularity at my fingertips, which is, I think, a Good Thing.

I’m filing this under “Taxonomy,” a sub-category of “Weblogs.”

For me his blog post title sums it up: all taxonomies are private or personal. For example, he tags a post about David Letterman as “davidletterman” under the parent category of “television.” How does that benefit anyone else? For me, these schemes are only useful if people other than the person who devised them can use them. Do I look for stuff on my site by category, the closest thing I have to a taxonomy? No, I use Google.

My largest category contains more than 1000 posts, the smallest but 6: how useful is that? Could I have organized it better? Probably. But isn’t that like writing the index before you write the book?
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rediscovering Beethoven

Listening to this new series of symphonies via the BBC has been quite enjoyable, as I would have expected.

But whether it’s the brief introductions by the presenters — generally some historical context about the premiere — or the lack of a physical component to this presentation, I find myself marveling at the very idea of going to hear a premiere of one of these.

How often today would we be able to go to a performance without having heard a single note beforehand? Today, we have recordings, televised performances, reviews and articles, all designed to enhance or explain the piece. But 200 years ago — even 100 years ago, for many — there was no way to know what was coming. You bought your ticket and took your chance.

By referring to the lack of a physical component, I mean no CD case or record sleeve, no liner notes, no cover art. Just the music. Unlike Beethoven’s contemporaries, I can rewind and reply to my heart’s content but I still approach the experience with no preconceived ideas about the interpretation.
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hardware muddling

Following up on my pondering, I went with an enclosure for the 120 Gb drive, so the total for a portable backup store comes out to about US$80 (the enclosure was $19 but s&h was $15: feh).

Now the next gap to fill is some memory for the aging iMac SE. It needs 8ns PC100 SDRAM, as much as will fit. It has two slots, currently occupied by a 64 Mb stick to augment the 128 Mb it shipped with. So it looks like a 512 Mb stick is the way to go if I want to breathe a little more life into it. Perhaps two if it can be done. 640 Mb (512 + 128) will be a lot better than the current 192 Mb.
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idiot blogger (he said it, not me)

No, not a confession. I was just catching up on my feeds and learned that a tempest had boiled out of its teapot and been stuffed back in by the time I woke up. Seems someone accused Apple of inserting DRM into user-contributed podcasts, when in fact they didn’t understand that AAC (Advanced Audio Content) is not necessarily DRM.

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Podcasting is the New Napster

No need to leave comments there: I think he got the message. But it doesn’t help copyfighting to go off half-cocked. Not does it help people embrace this as a new channel to distribute or discover new works.
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