the other posts about using an isa or pci extender are all good ideas, as is the idea of installing with a vid card then yanking it. Another option (more expensive but also potentially nicer) is the PC weasel: http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html This would be ideal if this machine you're planning on building will be in a place that's inconvenient to get to. Also, here's a place selling 8mb ati chipset low profile pci cards: http://www.c-source.com/csource/newsite/ttechnote. asp?part_no=500182 (searched pricewatch for "low profile vid").
OpenBSD is just a dream to work with for any sort of networking/security task. Working with (i)pf after ip(chains|tables) is like a religious epiphany. It might require a little gear shifting for a person whose previous experience was Linux only, but it's not that hard really (I'm no guru with obsd but I was up and running with a firewall in a couple of days).
electrical energy to thermal energy is not so much a "hot thing:cool thing" process as it is conversion of one form of energy to another (electric current being consumed, driving [substance] atoms into higher excited states, the atoms relax to lower states releasing energy, blah blah). no conversion is perfect, always some energy is lost in the conversion process. Sort of like money conversion, I could convert US$10 to X Mexican pesos, and X pesos back to dollars, but I wouldn't have $10 at the end of it all due to the transaction fees. (The dollars<->pesos conversion could be replaced of course by whatever currencies you like, I live in texas, so that conversion sprang to mind first.) If you want to know more than that, spend some time learning calculus and differential equations, then take a class on thermodynamics (specifically, look at things like the Carnot Cycle, entropy, etc.) [P.W. Atkins' _Physical Chemistry_ has a decent discussion of this area. I also really like McQuarrie's _Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach] (Or just read the latter book on your own, I'm not sure how well Atkins' book would hold up without an instructor.)
here's the layman's formulation of the things that give chemistry students the cold sweats, the rules of the game as it were:
You can't win.
You can't break even.
You have no choice about playing.
Any closed system ends up in the state of most disorder, and all systems are closed if you look at the boundaries carefully. No matter how hard you try, no matter what ingenous things you do, in the end, the dealer wins and everything is dust. Cold dust, at that. The more energy you expend enforcing order, the more chaos you cause. There are no wins in technology, only a prolonging of the inevitable loss. So while I'm sure this new doohickey is neat, somewhere, Carnot is laughing and his cycle is tapping you on the shoulder snickering to itself.
i mean, an everything box might be cool, but if you're using more than 5 or 6 pci slots, you're probably hitting limitations in the pci bandwidth stream anyway. why not split the functionality out into discrete machines?
I seriously doubt that, unless IBM is astoundingly stupid, that they will advocate JBoss unless and until WebSphere (you know, that thing their banner ads on slashdot are always talking about, their $$$$$$$$$ java thingie) is not being sold anymore. IBM doesn't make any bucks off of AIX really (compared to the bucks they make on the hw anyway; c.f. solaris and sun), so they have no problems "replacing" it with Linux. Now, I can very much see Sun doing this, as they already support Tomcat as the official reference implementation of Servlet API foo and JSP API bar, and further they don't sell a java app server product that I'm aware of (if they do have one they're not exactly trumpeting it). [If sun started pushing JBoss with Tomcat, I imagine it wouldn't be much of a leap to advocate PostgreSQL as part of that solution. Yes, I am a hopelessly rabid Pg fan.;-)]
IBM is a hardware and consulting company with occasional delusions of being a sw company, so sometimes they will have incentives to push open source and sometimes they will not (e.g. notice that they don't support any open source database projects, hmmm, db2?). Sun OTOH is much more of a pure-play hw company (which is why their stock is pretty hammered right now IMHO), so they have a greater incentive to push open source software.
Can't we just download images of the 'official' ISOs off Freenet?
why bother? the varia ISOs are for x86, which the vast majority of people use. to most people, the official CDs are pretty much worthless (now, folks that want to make an Amiga firewall or something, yeah, they need the official CDs).
I wish the OpenBSD guys had some sort of "pick-an-arch" system where you could get X number of arches for Y dollars (like $10 for an x86 cd, $10 for a macm68k/macppc cd, $10 for a combo of the smaller arches, or something like that).
This would provide the most utility/choice to the end users, and probably increase CD sales by lowering the cost barrier (I mean, $40 is enough for most folks to notice, $10 is almost an impulse buy). Also, a minor side effect, the cd insert could be (more extensively) tailored with installation hints for the arch in question (not a big issue because the instructions are on the cd, but sometimes it's nice to have paper to follow along with while you're typing).
port 59 is the "well-known" port for "NFILE"
on
Wu-ftpd Remote Root Hole
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· Score: 4, Informative
which, I might add, I'd never heard of before doing a suitable google search. If you're curious, the NFILE rfc can be viewed at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1037. html. Basically, it sounds like some sort of strange FTP analog (from the glance I took @ the abstract). Publish date was '87, so this is a relatively old protocol, that from the sound of it hit the dustbin of history with a loud "thump!";-) (The 'any private...' bit may be from NFILE's predecessor, QFILE?)
Remember that when the US bombed that "nerve gas factory" in Somalia, we were never able to present any hard post-hoc evidence that it was not, as the Somalis claim, a medicine factory. Eventually, the Pentagon mostly kind of sort of admitted it was full of shit. "Oops, sorry! We'll be more careful next time!"
Not to detract from the rest of your argument, but the pharmaceutical factory in question was in Sudan (Khartoum iirc), not Somalia.
Re:What makes a good IDE, aka: Netbeans is real cl
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
I notice the difference more with awt than swing.
Anyway, I was referring more to memory efficiency than drawing speed. I lay that somewhat at the feet of X11 and somewhat at the feet of the sun people not optimizing the native windowing calls like they can/do for win32. Supposedly one of the things 1.4 will bring is much better performance for AWT/Swing. (Sorry if my reply is a little sparse, I'm two sheets to the wind at the moment, unwinding from work %^) )
Re:What makes a good IDE, aka: Netbeans is real cl
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
Netbeans also is not too shabby for JSP testing, given it's integrated servlet/jsp arch, which i think is tomcat (either that or it was real smart about working with the tomcat I had installed previously).
I find that netbeans depends really more on physical memory size than processor speed for how well it performs. I run it on a 450Mhz machine and it does fine (cel 300a->450), the kicker is I hav 256Mb of ram. I saw about a 40-60% performance improvement when I went from 128Mb to 256Mb. This is on win2k, so I'm sure it'd probably work even better on a Unix.;-)
Oh, and let me second what another poster said about ArgoUML being a decent free UML tool. It's pretty mem hungry too, but you can't beat the price...
That isn't neccessarily a good thing... Would you want to ride into low earth orbit on top of hundreds of thousands of moving parts and tons of explosive chemicals assembled not only by the lowest bidder but by a profit-oriented lowest bidder with less internal supervision and more stakeholder driven profit incentive (i.e. greater incentive to reduce cost, even to materially inefficent extents)?
Not that NASA or their cronies have a great track record either, but still...
Re:Spelling/Grammer Nazis...
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Looking At Gobe
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· Score: 2, Insightful
<flame> Maybe if she used full featured word processors that have spelling and grammar correction in many languages, she wouldn't have that problem. </flame>
The problem is that a non-native speaker of language X wouldn't neccessarily know whether or not Word's grammer/spell checker was fucking up or not when editing language X. And yes, I've seen it fuck up a lot. Case in point, I've typed "e.g." before and had it complain that e and g should be capitalized as being the first words in a sentence, and that is a simple special case to check for.
Really though, doesn't that in-and-of-itself show why MS is still ahead with consumers for product popularity?
"They don't drink sand becuase they're thirsty. They drink sand becuase they don't know the difference." ~ Michael Douglas's character in _The American President_
But seriously, flaming someone for poor grammar in a language that's not their native one is really, really, really lame... English is my native language, and I'm sure my grammar and spelling leave somthing to be desired, but that's becuase I don't care enough to check everything. The reviewer is trying above and beyond the call of duty (ever tried to speak a foreign language? if you haven't, don't bother sharing your opinion) to be intelligible, and a such deserves to be applauded, not flamed.
I think it's certainly worth the $20, given that in addition to the "webby" plugins (QuickTime, Flash, Shockwave) it supports viewing of the common MS Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in your desktop (gnome/kde) environment and mail client. The second part is really valuable becuase here where I work (a consulting shop; we do mainly custom programming, sysnet admin, and graphic design; everybody but the designers wishes they had unix desktops), and I imagine this isn't an uncommon situation, the only thing keeping us tied to windows is clients sending us documents in MS Office format. Also consider that the average techie probably makes between 30 and 60 thousand US dollars a year (here in the States anyway). So $20 is maybe an hour or so of your time, compared to the continual annoyance of win32-specific file formats, that's not a bad tradeoff. The only thing stopping me from ordering it right away is that I'm oscillating between wanting linux (slackware) or openbsd for my workstation...
Yeah, the three way one where every body yells "SYN!" and "ACK!" at the right points.:-)
Re:maybe I've read alt.sex.stories(.*) too much...
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Windows XP Has Arrived
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· Score: 1
And that would be the sound of TWO points going over your head at high speed. Lighten up! I said it "SOUNDED LIKE" a tag, not that it "WAS A" tag. The post made at least one, maybe more, people laugh. Period, full stop. What more is a joke designed to do? If you take _humor_ too seriously (which you very obviously are doing), what else is wrong with your life? Now go say ten "penis birds" and stand on your head, it might help.
Re:maybe I've read alt.sex.stories(.*) too much...
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Windows XP Has Arrived
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· Score: 1
I didn't say it was a tag, I said it reminded me of one. You may find this link illuminative.
maybe I've read alt.sex.stories(.*) too much...
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Windows XP Has Arrived
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· Score: 2, Funny
but "XP" sounds like a story tag[0] for extreme watersports. Given the amount that Microsoft products usually piss me off, that's probably not a wholly inaccurate interpretation of the acronym.
[0] Story tags are those little letter codes in the subject line that the author uses (ideally) to indicate what sort of things the story contains, like "mffg bdsm nc" might mean a guy, two girls, a goat and nonconsensual bondage & pain infliction. Wheee!
for a free smalltalk implementation, check out
Squeak. But if they know C, throw Java at them. Free tools that work on most any platform, plenty of good books (c.f. Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, which you can read online in a variety of formats (scroll down some on that page)), and not a huge syntactic leap to get in the way of the OO concepts, yet enough of one that they can't just code "C in C++". I've always been fascinated by Obj-C but I've had little luck finding good intro material.
Simple, use ssh tunnelling to gain compression and encryption. Trivial setup. Also consider alternate encoding engines to improve vnc's bandwidth efficiency.
I mean, there are a ton of ways to program the little guys, and it's vaguely practical too. And of course people have used them to drive robots and stuff using their onboard serial/usb port. I picked up a handspring deluxe for <$100 a week ago at Fry's.
All of the above is free (beer & speech). LispMe you can actually hack code ON the pda. PocketC also allows you to hack code on the pda, but it is shareware (not _that_ expensive, about $18 iirc, the runtime is free). The java stuff you compile on your machine and HotSync across onto the target. And of course both Palm and Handspring have developer sections on their sites with tool stuff and doc sets you can nab for free.
Yeah, that's one of the big criticisms against Pg is that the docs that come with the package aren't really newbie friendly[1], and there weren't any other doc sources out there until very recently. Personally I don't really like the Bruce Momijian book, but there is one coming out from O'Reilly and one from New Riders coming out soon as well, like in the next month or two. I am very much looking forward to those texts...
Good luck with Postgres!
[1] you sort of have to read all four 'books', fool around for a bit, and then read all four books again to get a good grasp on the system; but once you do it is enlightening.
root@host# su - postgres
postgred@host$ createuser web
[create new databases?] [hit no]
[add new users] [hit no]
postgres@host$ createdb webdata
postgres@host$ psql
[add the db structure interactively or read it in from a file, see the man page for psql]
[use GRANT to selectively give 'web' and whoever else privledges on 'webdata' or the structures therein. this is stone standard sql, of course.]
postgres@host$ logout
then use this for your PHP connection string, roughly speaking:
'localhost:5432:webdata','web','' (no passwd)
the 5432 is the default port it runs on in tcp/ip mode. which is iirc the default in most cases.
if you wanted to give the 'web' user a password that isn't hard to do but the particulars have slipped out of my head at the moment. this assumes you're postgres owner user name is 'postgres' of course, and that you've started the postmaster daemon already. don't know if the debs do that, I don't run debian.
that should get you started. more info is the docs, try specifically the getting-started guide, and then like the administrator's guide. Postgresql is a _lot_ more flexible than mysql, the price you pay for that is a little more complexity.
Oh, and you don't need to su to postgres to connect to the database, but you DO have to have made a postgresql-user for $login to connect from $login. 'createuser' isn't hard to remember.:^)
I can have postgresql up in about 5 minutes too, if I use binary packages (I usually compile from src). It's just familiarity. For comparison, it takes me ages to remember the mysql-way to do the things I've described here, e.g. the "IDENTIFIED BY" is a new one on me.
the interview was in the july issue (as the bottom of each page in the linked article indicates). the interview itself could have taken place a month or two earlier than that. So likely he was still employed then.
Slashdot Mirror
the other posts about using an isa or pci extender are all good ideas, as is the idea of installing with a vid card then yanking it. Another option (more expensive but also potentially nicer) is the PC weasel: http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html This would be ideal if this machine you're planning on building will be in a place that's inconvenient to get to. Also, here's a place selling 8mb ati chipset low profile pci cards: http://www.c-source.com/csource/newsite/ttechnote. asp?part_no=500182 (searched pricewatch for "low profile vid").
OpenBSD is just a dream to work with for any sort of networking/security task. Working with (i)pf after ip(chains|tables) is like a religious epiphany. It might require a little gear shifting for a person whose previous experience was Linux only, but it's not that hard really (I'm no guru with obsd but I was up and running with a firewall in a couple of days).
electrical energy to thermal energy is not so much a "hot thing:cool thing" process as it is conversion of one form of energy to another (electric current being consumed, driving [substance] atoms into higher excited states, the atoms relax to lower states releasing energy, blah blah). no conversion is perfect, always some energy is lost in the conversion process. Sort of like money conversion, I could convert US$10 to X Mexican pesos, and X pesos back to dollars, but I wouldn't have $10 at the end of it all due to the transaction fees. (The dollars<->pesos conversion could be replaced of course by whatever currencies you like, I live in texas, so that conversion sprang to mind first.) If you want to know more than that, spend some time learning calculus and differential equations, then take a class on thermodynamics (specifically, look at things like the Carnot Cycle, entropy, etc.) [P.W. Atkins' _Physical Chemistry_ has a decent discussion of this area. I also really like McQuarrie's _Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach] (Or just read the latter book on your own, I'm not sure how well Atkins' book would hold up without an instructor.)
- You can't win.
- You can't break even.
- You have no choice about playing.
Any closed system ends up in the state of most disorder, and all systems are closed if you look at the boundaries carefully. No matter how hard you try, no matter what ingenous things you do, in the end, the dealer wins and everything is dust. Cold dust, at that. The more energy you expend enforcing order, the more chaos you cause. There are no wins in technology, only a prolonging of the inevitable loss. So while I'm sure this new doohickey is neat, somewhere, Carnot is laughing and his cycle is tapping you on the shoulder snickering to itself.i mean, an everything box might be cool, but if you're using more than 5 or 6 pci slots, you're probably hitting limitations in the pci bandwidth stream anyway. why not split the functionality out into discrete machines?
I seriously doubt that, unless IBM is astoundingly stupid, that they will advocate JBoss unless and until WebSphere (you know, that thing their banner ads on slashdot are always talking about, their $$$$$$$$$ java thingie) is not being sold anymore. IBM doesn't make any bucks off of AIX really (compared to the bucks they make on the hw anyway; c.f. solaris and sun), so they have no problems "replacing" it with Linux. Now, I can very much see Sun doing this, as they already support Tomcat as the official reference implementation of Servlet API foo and JSP API bar, and further they don't sell a java app server product that I'm aware of (if they do have one they're not exactly trumpeting it). [If sun started pushing JBoss with Tomcat, I imagine it wouldn't be much of a leap to advocate PostgreSQL as part of that solution. Yes, I am a hopelessly rabid Pg fan. ;-)]
IBM is a hardware and consulting company with occasional delusions of being a sw company, so sometimes they will have incentives to push open source and sometimes they will not (e.g. notice that they don't support any open source database projects, hmmm, db2?). Sun OTOH is much more of a pure-play hw company (which is why their stock is pretty hammered right now IMHO), so they have a greater incentive to push open source software.
why bother? the varia ISOs are for x86, which the vast majority of people use. to most people, the official CDs are pretty much worthless (now, folks that want to make an Amiga firewall or something, yeah, they need the official CDs).
I wish the OpenBSD guys had some sort of "pick-an-arch" system where you could get X number of arches for Y dollars (like $10 for an x86 cd, $10 for a macm68k/macppc cd, $10 for a combo of the smaller arches, or something like that).
This would provide the most utility/choice to the end users, and probably increase CD sales by lowering the cost barrier (I mean, $40 is enough for most folks to notice, $10 is almost an impulse buy). Also, a minor side effect, the cd insert could be (more extensively) tailored with installation hints for the arch in question (not a big issue because the instructions are on the cd, but sometimes it's nice to have paper to follow along with while you're typing).
which, I might add, I'd never heard of before doing a suitable google search. If you're curious, the NFILE rfc can be viewed at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1037. html. Basically, it sounds like some sort of strange FTP analog (from the glance I took @ the abstract). Publish date was '87, so this is a relatively old protocol, that from the sound of it hit the dustbin of history with a loud "thump!" ;-) (The 'any private ...' bit may be from NFILE's predecessor, QFILE?)
Not to detract from the rest of your argument, but the pharmaceutical factory in question was in Sudan (Khartoum iirc), not Somalia.
I notice the difference more with awt than swing.
Anyway, I was referring more to memory efficiency than drawing speed. I lay that somewhat at the feet of X11 and somewhat at the feet of the sun people not optimizing the native windowing calls like they can/do for win32. Supposedly one of the things 1.4 will bring is much better performance for AWT/Swing. (Sorry if my reply is a little sparse, I'm two sheets to the wind at the moment, unwinding from work %^) )
Netbeans also is not too shabby for JSP testing, given it's integrated servlet/jsp arch, which i think is tomcat (either that or it was real smart about working with the tomcat I had installed previously).
I find that netbeans depends really more on physical memory size than processor speed for how well it performs. I run it on a 450Mhz machine and it does fine (cel 300a->450), the kicker is I hav 256Mb of ram. I saw about a 40-60% performance improvement when I went from 128Mb to 256Mb. This is on win2k, so I'm sure it'd probably work even better on a Unix. ;-)
Oh, and let me second what another poster said about ArgoUML being a decent free UML tool. It's pretty mem hungry too, but you can't beat the price...
Happy hacking!
That isn't neccessarily a good thing... Would you want to ride into low earth orbit on top of hundreds of thousands of moving parts and tons of explosive chemicals assembled not only by the lowest bidder but by a profit-oriented lowest bidder with less internal supervision and more stakeholder driven profit incentive (i.e. greater incentive to reduce cost, even to materially inefficent extents)?
Not that NASA or their cronies have a great track record either, but still...
But seriously, flaming someone for poor grammar in a language that's not their native one is really, really, really lame... English is my native language, and I'm sure my grammar and spelling leave somthing to be desired, but that's becuase I don't care enough to check everything. The reviewer is trying above and beyond the call of duty (ever tried to speak a foreign language? if you haven't, don't bother sharing your opinion) to be intelligible, and a such deserves to be applauded, not flamed.
I think it's certainly worth the $20, given that in addition to the "webby" plugins (QuickTime, Flash, Shockwave) it supports viewing of the common MS Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in your desktop (gnome/kde) environment and mail client. The second part is really valuable becuase here where I work (a consulting shop; we do mainly custom programming, sysnet admin, and graphic design; everybody but the designers wishes they had unix desktops), and I imagine this isn't an uncommon situation, the only thing keeping us tied to windows is clients sending us documents in MS Office format. Also consider that the average techie probably makes between 30 and 60 thousand US dollars a year (here in the States anyway). So $20 is maybe an hour or so of your time, compared to the continual annoyance of win32-specific file formats, that's not a bad tradeoff. The only thing stopping me from ordering it right away is that I'm oscillating between wanting linux (slackware) or openbsd for my workstation...
Yeah, the three way one where every body yells "SYN!" and "ACK!" at the right points. :-)
And that would be the sound of TWO points going over your head at high speed. Lighten up! I said it "SOUNDED LIKE" a tag, not that it "WAS A" tag. The post made at least one, maybe more, people laugh. Period, full stop. What more is a joke designed to do? If you take _humor_ too seriously (which you very obviously are doing), what else is wrong with your life? Now go say ten "penis birds" and stand on your head, it might help.
I didn't say it was a tag, I said it reminded me of one. You may find this link illuminative.
but "XP" sounds like a story tag[0] for extreme watersports. Given the amount that Microsoft products usually piss me off, that's probably not a wholly inaccurate interpretation of the acronym.
[0] Story tags are those little letter codes in the subject line that the author uses (ideally) to indicate what sort of things the story contains, like "mffg bdsm nc" might mean a guy, two girls, a goat and nonconsensual bondage & pain infliction. Wheee!
in case anyone comes along curious, I'll save you the effort of searching for that big pdf randombit mentions:
a /O bjectiveC/ObjC.pdf
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Coco
for a free smalltalk implementation, check out Squeak. But if they know C, throw Java at them. Free tools that work on most any platform, plenty of good books (c.f. Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, which you can read online in a variety of formats (scroll down some on that page)), and not a huge syntactic leap to get in the way of the OO concepts, yet enough of one that they can't just code "C in C++". I've always been fascinated by Obj-C but I've had little luck finding good intro material.
:-)
HTH
Simple, use ssh tunnelling to gain compression and encryption. Trivial setup. Also consider alternate encoding engines to improve vnc's bandwidth efficiency.
I mean, there are a ton of ways to program the little guys, and it's vaguely practical too. And of course people have used them to drive robots and stuff using their onboard serial/usb port. I picked up a handspring deluxe for <$100 a week ago at Fry's.
:-)
:) ]
Here's some programming-palm linkage:
Lisp (scheme)
waba -- micro JVM (~71k), quite cool if you're into Java
extra classes and tools that work with waba, really nice data storage classes for example
a ui gen program for waba, written in waba
super waba, a bigger derivation of waba
waba community site
[yeah, I've been having lots of fun with waba
All of the above is free (beer & speech). LispMe you can actually hack code ON the pda. PocketC also allows you to hack code on the pda, but it is shareware (not _that_ expensive, about $18 iirc, the runtime is free). The java stuff you compile on your machine and HotSync across onto the target. And of course both Palm and Handspring have developer sections on their sites with tool stuff and doc sets you can nab for free.
Yeah, that's one of the big criticisms against Pg is that the docs that come with the package aren't really newbie friendly[1], and there weren't any other doc sources out there until very recently. Personally I don't really like the Bruce Momijian book, but there is one coming out from O'Reilly and one from New Riders coming out soon as well, like in the next month or two. I am very much looking forward to those texts...
Good luck with Postgres!
[1] you sort of have to read all four 'books', fool around for a bit, and then read all four books again to get a good grasp on the system; but once you do it is enlightening.
from memory:
:^)
root@host# su - postgres
postgred@host$ createuser web
[create new databases?] [hit no]
[add new users] [hit no]
postgres@host$ createdb webdata
postgres@host$ psql
[add the db structure interactively or read it in from a file, see the man page for psql]
[use GRANT to selectively give 'web' and whoever else privledges on 'webdata' or the structures therein. this is stone standard sql, of course.]
postgres@host$ logout
then use this for your PHP connection string, roughly speaking:
'localhost:5432:webdata','web','' (no passwd)
the 5432 is the default port it runs on in tcp/ip mode. which is iirc the default in most cases.
if you wanted to give the 'web' user a password that isn't hard to do but the particulars have slipped out of my head at the moment. this assumes you're postgres owner user name is 'postgres' of course, and that you've started the postmaster daemon already. don't know if the debs do that, I don't run debian.
that should get you started. more info is the docs, try specifically the getting-started guide, and then like the administrator's guide. Postgresql is a _lot_ more flexible than mysql, the price you pay for that is a little more complexity.
Oh, and you don't need to su to postgres to connect to the database, but you DO have to have made a postgresql-user for $login to connect from $login. 'createuser' isn't hard to remember.
I can have postgresql up in about 5 minutes too, if I use binary packages (I usually compile from src). It's just familiarity. For comparison, it takes me ages to remember the mysql-way to do the things I've described here, e.g. the "IDENTIFIED BY" is a new one on me.
HTH
the interview was in the july issue (as the bottom of each page in the linked article indicates). the interview itself could have taken place a month or two earlier than that. So likely he was still employed then.