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Well they have a good reason to as this NSFW poster illustrates. Personally I don't see why DeBeer's don't just cut out the bullshit and make that the slogan. I'm sure many of us would appreciate the honesty.

Yes! I see all of this stuff about monster technology and all the rest, and I'm realizing that even though I'm a nerd who has 5 computers in my living room, I've spent a lot of time getting as much of that stuff out of my house, or at least as unobtrusive, as possible. And those five computers are as hidden as I can make them (three are laptops, one is a small server in my stereo cabinet, the display for the desktop is an LCD in a bookshelf with a pull-out drawer for the keyboard and mouse). I want much of my furniture, especially anything holding computers or whatnot, to be fold away and to have blank faces when it's closed (I've already built myself such a workbench, it's just a large cabinet in my livingroom when I'm not working on stuff).

Lots of shelves/cabinets and lots of storage, I've got gobs of projects and parts for projects, and I want to keep them organized and close to my life, but I don't want to have to have separate spaces for entertaining and for living, 'cause that's just spending money on half-used space. I haven't actually lived in or used a house with these amenities, but since a lot of projects seem to happen on the floor anyway, I think I'd like hatches or similar floor storage.

However, no unnecessary nooks or hallways or connectors, I want my rooms rectangular, easy to clean, with simple openings between spaces. If the climate demands it (and most do), I like to compartmentalize the house for heating and cooling (and maybe here's your application for technology, a centralized place that I can say "heat the living room, let the dining room and bedroom sit at 50 degrees"), but I don't buy into this crap that some architects push about hallways to provide transition areas in between parts of the house. Make it a door or an opening with a curtain and be done with it.

I don't need a large kitchen, but I want prep room on both sides of the stove, and a veggie sink as well as a clean-up sink. Whatever the entrance to the house, I want a little space, maybe just a few feet of hall, with shelves for shoes by the front door.

Technology-wise, the only really geeky thing I want is a smarter cat door (Yes, I know about Flo Control, but I'd settle for "after dark, opens from the inside only"). I want room to run cables under the floor and through walls, as I'm sick of slap-dash phone/cable installations run under the siding around the outside of the house, and I want lots of power outlets, but I'm less concerned with built-in lights or any fancy technology to switch them; I'm fine with having desk lamps and similar per-application lamps. Don't build crap into the house, as it'll only be made obsolete (and this especially applies to lighting technologies right now). If you do have built in lights, they should be able to make that room like daylight; my alarm clock is currently a big bank of daylight balanced flourescents, and when that lights up the room I'm happy, even in the doldrums of the rainy season.

I want good fitting doors, double-paned glass, good insulation (for conventional construction types, I'm interested in the folks doing 2x6 studs at 19.whatever centers, more room for insulation, cheaper materials costs). Yes, I know that a house needs to breathe, but let's make that a specific function of the design, not a byproduct of skimping on materials.

And, if I go specific to my particular needs, parking for a bunch of bicycles out of the elements, including long ones (tandem/recumbent).

This has been widely discussed online and it is a pure hoax. The wymsey site also has such highly factual articles as hunting the wily tofu. Obligatory dig at slashdot editors elided for space.

I didn't write this but I wish I had been there.

" I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?"

source = http://www.flutterby.com/archives/1998_Sep/quickie s.html

This is exactly why I provide an NNTP version of my blog and have made an open offer of NNTP syndication for anyone else who wants to do their 'blog that way. I believe there are also a couple of people doing RSS to NNTP feeds, but none of us have ever gotten enough traction to make doing this as more than a novelty worth our while.

This is exactly why I provide an NNTP version of my blog and have made an open offer of NNTP syndication for anyone else who wants to do their 'blog that way. I believe there are also a couple of people doing RSS to NNTP feeds, but none of us have ever gotten enough traction to make doing this as more than a novelty worth our while.

Sad for Open Source primarily. Astroturfind is the sort of activity you expect from corporations like Microsoft, but I would much prefer F/OSS (and the industries it created) to flourish on its own merits, just to prove to the world that there is no need for dirty tricks when the software and development methods are good.

This is just sad. Shame on JBoss...

Some musings from over a decade ago....

It isn't that much smaller than the iDot mini-ITX machines (I'm just a customer, I've bought a bunch for various embedded applications), which, by the time you stuff in some RAM you had lying around anyway are under $200. If you're going to spend an extra $295 for a display and a few buttons, going super small and super low power with one of the gazillion PC104 vendors seems smarter.

In my house we have two laptops with 802.11b that are almost always close at hand, so running the whole thing headless and just using one of those laptops with a web browser to control the media center seems like the obvious choice.

I need to finish up with code for the web server and media play control, but I've got some instructions on building one of these to boot off CompactFlash into stripped down Linux if anyone cares.

Here's a step by step of what I did to get PostgreSQL 7.1beta running with ODBC that might be useful.