Category: observations

Download – The Apache HTTP Server Project

Apache 2.0.44 is the best available version

I have compared my experience trying to use Windows as being like driving nails with my hands, bloody, painful, and ineffective.

I realized I need to stage my web content on an actual web server, now that my development space on the public web server is gone. So I decided to try IIS: I already have it, so why not?

Well, one good reason is that I could never get it to serve me a web page. I kept getting prompted for authentication and after plodding through the online help (that never referenced authentication), i gave up and installed Apace 2.0.44. And in no time flat, I was able to serve content.

Granted, I’m not an experienced Windows users, but the premise of all these wizards and GUI control panels is that expertise is not necessary. The brain trust at MSFT have done all the hard work.

Bah. It’s very frustrating to have to work around the system to get the simplest things to work. If I hadn’t installed Cygwin and perl early on, I’d have jumped out the window weeks ago.

[CLUE-Tech] removing spaces from filenames?

I borrowed a clue from this little script: works like a champ.


>8-----cut here------>8
#!/bin/sh
for i in * ; do
NEW=`echo $i| sed 's/ /_/g'`
if [ "$i" != "${NEW}" ]
then
(cd "$i" 2>/dev/null && $0)
mv "$i" "${NEW}"
echo "$i converted to ${NEW}"
else
echo 'The name is the same'
fi
done>
8-----cut here------>8


Theodore Roosevelt

“The captains of industry . . . have on the whole done great good to our people. Without them the material development of which we are so justly proud could never have taken place. . . . Yet it is also true that there are real and great evils. There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are uncertain of their futures and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This . . . is based upon sincere conviction that combinations and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right.”

What would he say about today’s corporate combinations and concentrations of power?

[the girlie matters] tips, tricks, and things to do to my site: remember me misbehavior

I found this information while I was looking for something else: I was so excited to see a solution to this problem, I forgot what I was looking for.

If your MovableType instance forgets that you or your readers have already established a relationship with it, try this fix in your individual entry template.

Change

setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '', HOST, '');

to

setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '/', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '/', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '/', HOST, '');

Apple – Switch

I ordered a 2 * 1.25 GHz G4 today and will move away from this superannuated Windows machine as soon as it comes in.

One of the major annoyances is how poorly non-MSFT applications work in Windows. While they be be OK for awhile, after some time, things get flaky, the machine slows down, applications don’t respond, and you find yourself in Task Manager, killing off the zombies in hopes of getting some work done.

The opacity of the OS is another problem for me: I’m used to being able to see what’s happening on the system, and while the article referenced in my previous post mentioned a Resource Kit that offers tools a UNIX admin would recognize, they’re not standard and as far as I can tell, not available in my workplace.

I can’t print to a printer that’s physically located on my desk because the computer thinks it’s out of paper. So I have to send my print jobs to a printer on the floor below mine and go get them.

I tried to print a simple one page document last week and while I could get one copy, the subsequent request for 100 copies was all gibberish: font substitution or the lack thereof wasted 100 sheets of paper (for some reason, I couldn’t kill the print job). So I found to our overworked communications director (who uses a Mac) and in 5 minutes, we did what I couldn’t do in an hour in Windows.

The bottom line is that my job is a multidisciplinary one, and the right tools to do that aren’t forthcoming from Windows. Maybe a bigger, faster machine would have helped, but I have a problem forcing a person with a given set of skills to use unfamiliar or unsuitable tools “because everyone else does.”

To reference the previous post again, assuming the document it covers is genuine, using a system with the transparency and flexibility of UNIX with the power and focus of a commercial enterprise is the way to go, as endorsed by MSFT itself. So I’m just getting ahead of the crowd.

M?crosöft Secrets

This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and techniques were chosen. It will focus primarily on the planners, developers, and system administrators. The purpose of the paper is to provide insight for similar deployments using Windows 2000. We will discuss the techniques from the viewpoint of human engineering as well as software engineering.

It would be interesting to read some similarly detailed docs that detail migrations from Windows to other OSes.

It doesn’t mention that the migration took more than three years: it didn’t take the Hotmail team that long to build the site in the first place.
Continue reading “UNIX -> WIN2000 migration tips”

Freedom To Tinker: Fritz’s Hit List Archives

Let’s pause for a moment to meditate on the sublimity of a legal system that can treat fart noises as intellectual property. Take your time; I’ll wait.

This website has lots of thought-provoking stuff. The shots at the Hollings bill are funny enough, but his analysis of the media companies’ use of denial of service attacks/restraint of trade actions is quite serious.

law.com

Whatever their solutions, they ought not undermine the freedom — the freedom to tinker — that gave rise to the digital world in the first place.

I turned backlinking back on: it stopped working a while back so I removed it from the page layout. Tried it again this weekend and it worked, so it’ll stay there for awhile.

I wish this were somehow included in MovableType: I think there’s something inherently doomed to break in the current implementation.