The DRM management in both the Microsoft and Adobe Readers made it so annoying that it took days for me to be able to read what I purchased. A combination of buggy software and lousy online support ended my enthusiasm. In the end, I decided to go back to good, old-fashioned books.
This posting reminded me that I wanted to try downloading a book in audio electronic format sometime soon. My buddy lent it to me on tape but I would much rather have it in.OGG or.MP3 so I can listen to it at work when I'm already in "deep thought" mode so it sinks in better.
I could have just grabbed a walkman and some cables and ripped it, but I figured I'd be a nice guy and buy the CD copy.
Lo and behold they offer a downloadable version for less than the CD! Great googely moogely! Their matrix even says "MP3" in their quality vs size matrix. I can play MP3 on my Linux box -- this sounds good! They even say I can push it to my old-ass RIO 500 which supports mp3 and Windows Media -- and I'm pretty sure the DRM in something this old doesn't exist. We'll see.
Anyway, I get to the download area after doing a cursory check to make sure I don't see any flaming banners saying that you must be running Windows or a Mac to get their stuff. Apparently it requires custom software to download their proprietary format that only their stuff can play. My guess is if it gets to the Rio 500 it's in WMA and that's somehow DRMed.
I could have pirated it. Easily. If I bought the CD I would have ripped it into.OGG ASAP too. I gave them the benefit of the doubt though and now I'm getting reamed it seems. I just want the fscking audio file that I purchased from a site that boasts about how many different devices their stuff plays on.
So, how does this end up? I've now paid for an audio file that I cannot use w/out busting out Wintel machines (that I don't own) and trying to nab thins thing -- even though I have the tape sitting in my car. I can burn it to CD w/the Wintel platform even and then re-rip it into.OGG for my Linux listening pleasure but that's not going to satisfy me.
No, thank you very much but I'll try and hack a perl script up to nab your custom format from the web. After that I'll do my damnedest to get that format into something standardized so I can do this in an automated platform of my choice.
If they had just advertised up front (before CC information was even taken) that: "We think you're a criminal by nature so we're going to make you jump through hoops to actually get this shit into a playable format" I'd have just given up then.
Expect full disclosure postings about weak encryption sometime between beers 6-8 tonight. I'm on #2 and the hacking looks good.
While the parent poster has a nice idea, it's way off base. The original seeker of answers knows this, I'm sure, but I thought I'd point it out.
The printers in question are not normal printers. They do not understand that much and you really do not need to be trying to convert a PDF into a format that they can understand. The printers actually -know- how to print a barcode. You setup a field for it and give the printer some numbers and it'll put it where you want it in the format you want it.
Reportlab is great. I've used it for some stuff but this just isn't the case. If you wanted to shove barcodes into an inkjet printer that your native OS understood it'd be grand (assuming your printer can do a good barcode) but the Zerbra printers do not understand PDF and trying to cram one down a Zebra's throat would be a HUGE pain in the behind. A huge mistake too.
The printers are darned good at what they do -- don't make any more complex than it need be.
The barcode printers you're talking about are probably mind numbingly simple devices. I used to work with some of the Zebra and Monarch printers "back in the day". Somewhere around 1997 to 1998ish.
The software was rather cumbersome to even get simple tasks done. Opening the printing software, selecting the proper tag to print an 'On Sale for $X.XX' sticker and running through the menus to find the proper Print screen and typing in the price was too much time and energy for somebody who just wanted 300 tags quick.
So, I started dumping the printer's output to a file instead of the serial port. A little head scratching later and I knew where all the variables were.
Monarch was even better IIRC -- they actually published instruction codes for their stuff. Dumping to a file was sometimes easier than properly reading documentation too.
The actual tag layout instructions are probably mindnumbingly simple. The area that's really lacking (or at least it was in '97ish) was getting things hooked up to a proper database that wasn't inflexible as all get out. You could rig an ODBC driver up to an Access DB but it was crufty, and the tag designer software was a bear. It was always much easier to hack my own little job together.
Yes, they still use some of it to this day.
Personally an on-the-fly label designer never made a whole lot of sense to me for these products. It was nice if you wanted to dump a template out but using it to actually hook up to your data was never a good idea. On top of that you sometimes get people trying to design the labels that don't realize why they can't fit 2k of data into a 2x2 square. Maybe that was my just my boss though.
"Why can't you fit more than 30 characters in that box?"
"Physics."
"Oh, 'cmon, it has to be possible."
"Ok, here's a pen. Try and fit more than 30 letters in this space."
Thankfully it was my mother, I could get away with that.
I'll elaborate on this one given that I agree with the original poster but would further like to drive the point home:
I can tell a lot of readers have lived in/near big cities most of their lives. A.22 is a small caliber rifle, and lots of people have them. To give them the (marginal) benefit of the doubt, it was the probably older kid's and meant for hunting.
A.22 is barely meant for hunting. Rabbits, squirrels, little things like that and you're okay. Something like a woodchuck though and a.22 really doesn't have proper stopping power. You'll kill it, yeah, but I've seen my own father get frustrated with shooting woodchucks with a.22 rifle and having the suckers run off and hide in areas where he couldn't dispose of him. I offered my.223 AR-15 for such purposes but he hasn't taken me up on it.
Will a.22 kill a human? Yes, eventually. With a well placed shot you might achieve an immediate stop too. This doesn't excuse the juveniles actions in the least bit though. The first time I shot a.22 I was 8 years old and warned very very often that that bullet will carry for some distance. Anybody who's shot one should know that it -can- kill a human being. Using one to do so is foolish unless it's your only means of self defense.
I guess where I'm going with this is that a.22 shell isn't really that dangerous overall. Throwing fist sized rocks at cars could have killed somebody with as much efficiency. Neither are acceptable practices however.
As the original poster said, many who grew up in urban or non-gun environments might not understand just how pithy this weapon actually is. For the uninformed the.22 means it's.22 inches across in diamater. The actual charge behind it is also.22 inches around and is, oh, maybe a half or three quarters inch long. That isn't much powder and that bullet tip isn't very heavy. Maybe something like 20-25 grains? A common 9mm round is 115 grains in weight if that puts it into perspective with probably 8-10 times the powder behind it. That -still- is a small round.
I don't own a 22 nor do I find them that much fun to shoot. Perhaps somebody more in the know can clean up my facts on the round size. My weapons are in 9mm,.45 ACP,.223, 7.62x39, 7.62x54, and 12ga. Adding a.22 would be mostly pointless I think:)
It wouldn't be our current gubernatorial circus, would it?
Could somebody clear this sentiment up for me? We're offtopic here I guess, but hey, this is a political thread.
How is it a "circus"? Sure, there's a number of whackjobs out there making million to one shots at being governor, but from what I gather the biggest hoopla is all about Arnold running.
What, pray tell, is so damned terrible about a man who's taken a body building start and turned it into a multi million (if not billion) dollar business for himself, speaks something like 5 languages, has a degree in macro economics, married into one of the most political families in the USA and comes from a political family back in Austria (so I've heard) running for govenor of his home state in the USA?
He's the perfect candidate. Everybody knows his name; he's Republican but a very moderate Republican. California is in a finaicial crisis -- he apparently knows how to handle money and he's got a degree in the matter. He's not a career politician and that is a good thing. You'd have a hard time buying this man out too with special interest money. What does he stand more to gain from? Pocket change from a lobbyist or sticking to his ideals, picking California out of the ruins in 8 years or whatever and making more blockbuster movies with that added popularity of actually being the good guy in real life?
I hope he stomps all the other competition, makes huge inroads in California over the next 2 years, and that this gets Ted Nugent into the governor's race here in Michigan. There's a fella that I don't think I've ever heard say anything that didn't make sense to me, at least politically. You can't find a straighter shooter (no pun intended) than this guy.
Meh, I'm getting irked enough with politics lately that I think it's time I start running for offices and become a career politician or something. Seems that it's the only way to fix it.
If you watch Monday Night Football, you'll see a bright yellow line superimposed on the field representing the first-down line.
A couple of years back when I was living with two other guys myself and one other (both programmers) were trying to figure out just how they did this. What sort of algorithm is used to determine what to point over and what not to, how the cameras could be moving and the line staying stationary on the field, etc.
We shot ideas back and forth for about 10 minutes while watching the game. The third guy (a non-tech) just sat silently. After a while he finally came up with the solution for us. Looked at us both in disbeleif and said,
"What are you guys? Stupid? They do it with a computer!"
We started blankly for a good 2-3 seconds and just busted out in laughter.
I have ~ 15 years of technical experience and I would love an MBA. Why? So I could have a better idea what goes on in the mind of the CEO. I just don't get the thinking a lot of times.
You want to know what goes on in the mind of a CEO? Try this...
Take two monkeys -- about the same size. Put them somewhat near eachother and toss a banana way up into the air. Observe. Evaluate. Now you know how Daryl McBride works.
Funnily enough, I was just thinking about going back to school for an MBA in a year or two but wondered if it would be a bad idea for a person so interested in technical pursuits. But if Alan Cox can do it I don't see why I can't.
Thanks for the inspiration Alan.
I totally agree. Alan's an inspiration. In fact, I'm going to quit trimming my beard and grab me some sweet ass black shades.
Well, I'd like to at least, but once my beard gets to be 2 inches long (around 5cm for those of you outside the USA) I look Amish. Way Amish. Random people will see me and shout, "Yo! Jebidiah, whassup?!" across the road. Nobody would hire an Amish coder or admin. Maybe a job in QA would work, but the interviewer would probably be afraid that I'd try and turn the whole system into a horse/hampster powered contraption made of wood.
"Payroll will be out as soon as the vet clears the horse for running again." Yeah.... that wouldn't go over well.
How the fsck can somebody take over the 2.2 tree w/out the massive angry-Gnome like beard? It's not not fair. Curse my Irish heritage!
Oh yeah, that's the other one I get. Leprechaun look-alike. I bear a striking resemblence to the Notre Dame mascot. See here for an example.
I'm hosed. Who needs a professional butter churner? I'm in.
Understand the clause in the 1st ammendment.
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...
I'm going to take the orignal poster's sentiment (or what I would presume is their take on this issue) and run with it.
Read the above quote a few times and let it sink in if you have the notion of "seperation of church and state" burried into your head.
Word #1: Congress
Congress is the legislative body of the United States of America. This is not your school board. This is written to prvent the federal legislative branch from:
Words #2 - #10:
Making a law respecting an establishment of religion. Period. Hey this is pretty plain and simple -- there's no legal jargon here. So far we have a statement that says that Congress cannot make a law which states an offical religion of the land. Congress has never (to the best of my knowledge) even tried doing this nor have they ever succeeded. We piss on the Constitution frequently but this is one bullet point that's never been trampled on.
Words #11 - 16:... And they cannot make a law prohibiting your right to exercise your religion. Well, I don't think they've ever tried this either, and certainly not successfully. Some immature young lad out there probably wants to shoot back, "But I want to sacrifice virgins to the fire god!". Well, fine, but that's infriging on somebody else's right to live which flies directly in the face of any number of laws of the land and basically any law created by human civlization that I'm aware of.
Last I knew Congress never ordered prayers before football games, nor did they prohibit them. The judicial branch has taken the above statement though and turned it into "seperation of church and state" which is a horrible farce. The parent poster has stated, and this is true, that the founding fathers were openly religious. There is nothing wrong (morally or legally) with a representative in Congress, a senator, or a president from having and acting upon their religious beleifs unless they make it a law through the legislative branch. Period, end of story.
The 1st ammendment in no way, shape, or form can possibly be contrued from it's original writing to mean that there shall never be an intersection of religion and any "state" funded activity. The term "seperation of church and state" has always bugged me because the 1st ammendment specifically mentions a federal branch of the government and nowhere in the bill of rights are things actually prohibited to be done at the state level unless it trumps federal law.
As long as there is no law stating that there must be prayer at graudations, football games, or by a group of students before school: let them pray. Let them do it openly. Let them use community funds to it if that's what the community wants. The federal government shall make no law ever stating that it must be done or that it cannot be done.
If a Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or other community wishes to celebrate their religion on government owned property or during goverment sponsored events, FINE! Let them, I'll rejoice as an American that they have that right. Once you stomp on my communities freedom for a speaker at high school graduation to express his religious beleifs to the student body you've stomped on their rights though, and that just isn't kosher.
I don't know why I keep bringing up high school stuff -- it just seems the most prevalent in the news. It's municipal goverments of small communities were talking about here -- not federal laws. They can do what they want. The Bill of Rights is just that -- rights to citizens. Citizens make up communities. In their own little microcosims let them do what they want. Anything less is unconsitutional.
The judicial branch (and I forget when they did this) seems to have made great inroads with destroying clause #1 of the 1st ammendment. I'll never understand why Surpreme Cou
If Linux had 90% marketshare and was used mostly by people who don't patch, like Windows is, I fail to see how architectually Linux would be more immune to this type of attack than Windows is.
Yeah, that's probably why IIS has such a poor track record when compared to Apache. Who would try and 'sploit Apache on Linux? Nobody runs that crap.
Okay, #linuxhelp does not ban people just for asking questions. You have to either be repeating a question over and over regardless of somebody attempting to help you.. like you ask a question, somebody asks you a question because you need more info to help and they just post the same question again 2 minutes later. If this keeps up for a half an hour you'll get banned. Sorry.
People ignoring suggestions like they know better are banned. Sorry, we're here to help but if you don't take our help get the heck out of the way and make room for somebody that can.
People that are known problems get banned. When you're asking the same question for 5 days straight they get sick of it. You're hopeless at that point. Don't waste our time anymore.
Being impatient doesnt' help:
newbie: I need help getting my nVidia card to work. op: Well, what have you tried doing so far to make it work? newibe: I just want it to work damnit! op: Well, did you download the drivers from nVidia's site? newbie: How the hell was I supposed to know how to do that? Where are they? op: I don't know, but Google could tell you. I don't use the card personally. newbie: Well how the fuck do I find the drivers without X running?... this sometimes goes on for 15 minutes, the user gets flustered and just gets plain inflamatory and eventually booted. Sometimes after a half an hour of free help the opper will log off because they have something better do with their time and they get huffy with whoever picks up their "support contract".
It's hard to get baned from #linuxhelp, at least it was for the 3-4 yeras I frequented there in 1998-2001/2002. I still pop in occasinally as 'pi_rules'.
It's a good support chan. Questions like "How do I find out how much diskspace is free from the command line?" go over well. You get four-five friendly 'df' 'df -h' responses and things move on.
When you ask something like "How do I get two DSL connections connected to my machine to share the load on a web hosting comapny" we will assume you have basic networking knowledge and don't get huffy when we tell you that you're trying the impossible sometimes.
Now once you get into businesses and expensive hardware/software the support gets much better. You should also expect to at least $1000/year and usually much more than that.
That gets you good support? Who are your vendors? Ours suck.
I won't name names, but BEAing that we pay annual licenses feas so a vendor's software can BEA installed on some of our servers I would expect them to BEA offering a little more help when things crap out on us. Granted, than have BEAn attentive to any request I've made but they've never actually provided a solution to a problem. No, it doesn't help that we're running an old version, but why the hell are they charging us normal prices for an old version that they can't fix then? Annual cost of our support contract is well over a couple of thousand a year. Hell, we spend more time and money on actually getting licenses from them lately due to internal SNAFUs than we spend on the damned licenses themselves it seems. We're switching as soon as vendor #2's next release is ready which runs on Tomcat.
Vendor #2 is a whole 'nother story. This shit is just flagrant misconduct. Oh yes, our software performs in such an environment. It scales excellent across multiple machines, here's our performance numbers -- look how well it scales up across 24 seperate instances!
This was sold to us as a global solution, before I got into the company. Keyword here is 'global'. That would mean offices in the USA and in Europe one would preseume. Maybe even Australia! When they say their shit scales up to 24 different installs and performs great they benchmarked the shit on a 24-way SUN monster that ran 24 virtual domains. Hey ass clown -- the bandwidth you get across your box "emulating" different installs is a whole hell of a lot differnt than the latency we occur when jumping across ponds! It is not acceptable that the first user of a web application spends 8 minutes while the box across a 180ms latent link caching data for the system over an straight Oracle connection back to the good old US of A.
Oh, we can put a DB in Europe and on the USA you say and replicate betwwen them? That solves a lot of problems, we'll try that! Oh wait, your DB doesn't replicate natively in Oracle? We need half a million in software from your partner company to do this? What the fuck are you guys smoking over there? You let us try this without warning us upfront?
Submit a bug report/feature request. Basically the "feature request" is: "We'd like your application to be way less braindead on feature X." Sure thing says vendor, it'll be in a future version. One year later and 3 releases later the issue is flagged as "Open" and not slated for inclusion. Thanks, we paid how much to be treated like this?
Well, we've BEAgan plans to move off one vendor ASAP because it provides no benefit at all. Having tech support hasn't helped in the least bit. With the other vendor we're stuck and have been manded by corporate to improve our "vendor bitchslapping" skills to get their ship on board. We're on the 3rd version of software since deployment and it -still- isn't meeting the promises they gave us.
We routinely decomple vendor #2's software (It's Java) upon shipment to point out the braindamanges in it. Then we fix it up, recompile, and slap ourselves a better version into ours before delopyment and send the ideas back to the vendor only to have them never included.
Hell we're SELLING one of our solutions to them right now. They never though of doing some of the stuff we did in one area. The core product is still fucked beyond beleif though.
Sorry, I had a crappy day. I'm sick of being our vendor's quality assurance department. Time for a beer methinks.
Lay off the coffee, and learn the keyboard layout.
Excuse me? We did, back when they had 101 keys or less! Now every newfangled thing you pick up has these damned thing on there that are completely useless to plenty of us out there.
I have -just- become accustomed to them being on a keyboard. Two years ago I was still using a flathead screwdriver to pop them off in frustration of feeling a button that wasn't control where I thought control -could- be. I like my big control button. I don't even use my pinkies for it -- I just mash it with the base of my palm hand. That's the way I learned to use it back when it was big enough to do it that way. I can manage to do it again 100% of the time now that I'm accustomed to the smaller key.
When in the company of vi and emacs users stating "learn the keyboard layout" is really really insulting. We know how to type without looking at the keys thank you very much.
My biggest beef with Win2k usability is how often is just acts funny. I've never gotten entirely comfortable with it just because it's so damned touchy. Things that I can do on my Gnome/Linux machine here just plain suck sometimes on Win2k.
I sometimes have to map a large number of drives when I need to push/pull configuration files to machines. This is horrendously slow. I've got it scripted through a.bat file to mount and umount them all but some of these links are across a WAN and encouter 200ms ping times. I open up 'My computer' and -boom-! explorer.exe just halts while it pulls who knows WHAT back from these systems just to let me know that drives G-L are still working. I still have no idea what it's doing.
Doing anything with a "large" set of files just plain sucks. I tried moving 30MB of data (mostly 1k files) into a different directory today in Windows. I don't know why it took darned near 3 minutes to do. Cripes, you just relink the file -- it doesn't even have to do that much I/O. Something braindead going on there.
I just love clicking 'Start' and having it take 2-3 minutes to come up sometimes. I haven't the foggiest as to why this happens. It's usually over a Terminal Services session though.
Why the heck can't I right click -> properties on a directory and just turn off all the read-only bits? Seems like the folder itself has to be read only for the option to show up. It's just confusing. I usually drop to Cygwin and just do a chmod -R 777 on it. Works for me.
Oh, and the last time I actually did tell explorer to remove the read only flag from a large set of files it popped up a counter telling me it would take 5 minutes to complete. That damned box was there until my next reboot. That's usability.
Why the snot do minimized windows like to magically pop back up when I restore a -different- application? I see this more often than I care for. Restore Mozilla Firebird and, oh thanks Windows, I wanted to see that minmized My Documents folder! Thanks!
Why can't the OS read an ISO9660 image natively? It's not like it's that hard -- ISO 9660 is already in the OS for cds.
Of course we have the braindamaged idea that deleting an open file is impossible. Just unlink it. It's worked fine for years and years in other filesystems -- get with the program. I don't want to hunt down every process that might have something open when trying to trash a large directory. Just get rid of it.
Oh, and what's with "Preparing to Delete..." crap? That cancel button never works either on that little ditty. Do I cycle exploer.exe like an impatient little snot and jump into Cygwin to just get rid of it or let myself stew for 3 minutes at a dialog box that does nothing for me and refuses to go away nicely?
Every day I have to work with that pile of drivel I remember why I installed Linux for the first time 5 years ago.
Maybe he's drunk too much of the KoolAid -- but my experience tracks his. Think about it. Why would we care? If one of our gurus is more productive using XEmacs, that is at worst a data point for the Visual Studio folks.
Totally off topic, but hey, this jogged my memory.
Walk over to the VS development group sometime and smack them upside the head for not providing emacs and vi editor modes, mkay? Actually I just want a 'vi' mode. Make it hard to turn on or something so nobody accidentially slips into it I guess.
200 tambourine playing monkeys with a big rubber 'approved' stamp would work about as well and cost taxpayers a lot less money and expose the patent system for what it really is lately -- a big friggen joke.
If we give the monkeys actual ink to stamp with or let them use their fecal matter is of little concern to me. I think the fecal matter would just drive the point home a bit better though.
Don't get me wrong here -- in the event that you have a multi TB system keeping track of usage with 'du' really just isn't practical, but do you really even have to ASK the box where the data is?
Our backend storage system for my project is 1TB, or at least very close to it. I don't manage the box, but I do work with it. It holds three things:
1) It's OS (small) 2) It's Oracle Database files (300GB on disk, about 200GB used now) 3) Files. Word documents, CAD drawings, TIF, GIF, etc. A whole slew of them.
The admin knows what's using what. Under/oradata there's the database. It gets it's own space. When that gets full he doesn't do an 'rm' to clean things up -- He has to use Oracle tools to do that.
Under/filestores there's a giant mess of crap that nobody can make heads or tails of. They're hashed filename from a PDM system. He can't do anything to clean that out without -- you guessed it - using the PDM system. The filesystem itself has NO idea what's going in either of it's major usage sections. It's just "stuff" and to rm -rf a directory because you're running out of space would be foolish.
When filesystems can actually hold metadata regarding their contents then I'd give this question some though. We could have a whole new set of Unix tools to modify our everything-is-a-file-with-badass-meta-data system. Until then I don't see any way for filesystem maintence to be a huge issue on this multi TB systems. All you can really do with the FS is determine which system needs morespace and order more disks. You can't trim or manage it with the FS.
I'm wrong a lot though, but that's my take on the "issue".
Double click on the CA cert that you used to sign your own cert and import it into the right folder when it asks. I think it's 'Trusted Certificates'.
Or you start up 'mmc' and add the Certificate snap in and do it that way. Well, that's how you do it in a Win2k install. The 9x tools probably make this darned near impossible.
Just in case the British come back and we need to make another militia.
Quickly! Flash mob to the harbor! Bring 'em if you got 'em!
I tried being funny... honestly... but I just got woke up at 1am by a client who yanked the power cord of their mailserver accidentally and couldn't bring it back up: manual fsck required. Now I can't sleep. fsck me.
I say we start making a list of stupid things that we've done.
I submit: this mp3. Granted, I posted this as a one-off thing for a buddy so he'd get a laugh out of it and after such a postive response from him (and former coworkers) kept it online.
If I had a video if the dumb-assed look on my face as I had a half Stevie Wonder half 'Timmmay!' (South Park) look to me it'd be even funnier.
For a football game where the women played football and the men cheerleaded in high school I signed up. Twice, although the first was accidental. I got pressured by some friends who signed up to be part of the halftime show. We were all wrestlers, me being a lightweight so I was litterally -tossed- between groups for the show. Not safe, but a skinny guy going "gaaaahhaha!" through the air is hugely entertaining I guess.
The next year I signed up and got some buddies to do it with me. We all dressed up in something stupid -- I picked a wrestling signlet. A small one... cut like briefs... in 40 degree weather... can you say "turtle effect"? I hadn't counted on that one. Shoulda brought an extra sock. Or two. I've never said "Oh shutup -- it's cold" so many times in a night in my life.
I wore a 3 foot tall foam Guiness top had during a short stroll from my buddie's house to the beer store downtown in a decent sized town once. Somebody stuck their head out the window doing 25 to express their feelings with the word "Shithead" rather loudly. Not a fan of Guiness I guess.
Ventured out onto my balcony once to watch a thunderstorm. Chilled ou there for about a half an hour reveling in how insignificant I really am in comparsion with the One that can make stuff like that happen on command. I go to open the slider door and realize how insignificant I really am as the door has locked itself behind me. With my keys inside. With my cellphone. Oh, and I'm on the 2nd story -- and it's still raining. A 20 foot fall into some mushy ground and 20 minutes of walking later I'm using somebody's phone (who thankfully I knew) to call maintence and get back into my apartment.
Of course, standing around with a group of guys in high school chit chatting and interjecting, "yeah, I noticed that X has a huge friggen crank. Wouldn't have thought that" and then being informed that you completey misunderstood about 4 of the 6 words out of the last guys sentence really puts a crimp in our style. Hey, I'm not the smartest peanut in the turd. Try explaining -THAT- one off!
Got on a mechanical bull once drunk... well, three times in a night. 'Nuff said there.
My first jump out of a plane I was informed that me yelling "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" can be heard 3500 feet below. I've probably watched 100 people dump so far and I've never heard somebody yell loud enough to hear them. I think I got a record there.
Hopefully the 'Star Wars Kid', if he's reading this, doesn't feel so bad now. Personally, if he had developed a little more flexibility in his legs he coulda looked a whole lot cooler in some of those shots.
If you select the proper tools and decide in the future linux isn't for you, just recompile and move on.
A couple of years ago I worked on a website with a team of guys and we deployed on Linux/PostgreSQL/PHP. A similar project surfaced a while ago and my old buddy contracted me to help him finish this sucker off and get it out the door. This time: FreeBSD/MySQL/PHP. Big whoop -- we flip some database code around and the website side is fine. However there's one problem:
This thing ties into a "chatroom" type deal. I horked up an idea of using the Hybrid IRC daemon and slapped some mods into it to get it to dump critical info about it's status into a shared memory segment and whacked together a little command line program in C to read this data out for PHP to parse. Damn... new platform, this might be a pain to port over.
I yank my 2 year old code that worked on Linux and recompiled the Hybrid IRC daemon w/ my mods -- boom, zero errors. Fire it up, it works!
I yank my little shell program out and recompile it -- zero errors. Fire it up, it works! I was friggen amazed. I was planning on taking 4-6 hours to port over this little bit of SysV IPC code safely.. and it took absolutely nothing. Something to be said about sticking with old, and functional, technology I guess.
Oh, and the FreeBSD choice wasn't made becuase of any SCO crap either. It's just what the admin at this site prefers to work with -- same with the MySQL choice. He can admin it and work with it so we chose to just port it to a new DB.
Slashdot Mirror
This posting reminded me that I wanted to try downloading a book in audio electronic format sometime soon. My buddy lent it to me on tape but I would much rather have it in
I could have just grabbed a walkman and some cables and ripped it, but I figured I'd be a nice guy and buy the CD copy.
Lo and behold they offer a downloadable version for less than the CD! Great googely moogely! Their matrix even says "MP3" in their quality vs size matrix. I can play MP3 on my Linux box -- this sounds good! They even say I can push it to my old-ass RIO 500 which supports mp3 and Windows Media -- and I'm pretty sure the DRM in something this old doesn't exist. We'll see.
Anyway, I get to the download area after doing a cursory check to make sure I don't see any flaming banners saying that you must be running Windows or a Mac to get their stuff. Apparently it requires custom software to download their proprietary format that only their stuff can play. My guess is if it gets to the Rio 500 it's in WMA and that's somehow DRMed.
I could have pirated it. Easily. If I bought the CD I would have ripped it into
So, how does this end up? I've now paid for an audio file that I cannot use w/out busting out Wintel machines (that I don't own) and trying to nab thins thing -- even though I have the tape sitting in my car. I can burn it to CD w/the Wintel platform even and then re-rip it into
No, thank you very much but I'll try and hack a perl script up to nab your custom format from the web. After that I'll do my damnedest to get that format into something standardized so I can do this in an automated platform of my choice.
If they had just advertised up front (before CC information was even taken) that: "We think you're a criminal by nature so we're going to make you jump through hoops to actually get this shit into a playable format" I'd have just given up then.
Expect full disclosure postings about weak encryption sometime between beers 6-8 tonight. I'm on #2 and the hacking looks good.
While the parent poster has a nice idea, it's way off base. The original seeker of answers knows this, I'm sure, but I thought I'd point it out.
The printers in question are not normal printers. They do not understand that much and you really do not need to be trying to convert a PDF into a format that they can understand. The printers actually -know- how to print a barcode. You setup a field for it and give the printer some numbers and it'll put it where you want it in the format you want it.
Reportlab is great. I've used it for some stuff but this just isn't the case. If you wanted to shove barcodes into an inkjet printer that your native OS understood it'd be grand (assuming your printer can do a good barcode) but the Zerbra printers do not understand PDF and trying to cram one down a Zebra's throat would be a HUGE pain in the behind. A huge mistake too.
The printers are darned good at what they do -- don't make any more complex than it need be.
The barcode printers you're talking about are probably mind numbingly simple devices. I used to work with some of the Zebra and Monarch printers "back in the day". Somewhere around 1997 to 1998ish.
The software was rather cumbersome to even get simple tasks done. Opening the printing software, selecting the proper tag to print an 'On Sale for $X.XX' sticker and running through the menus to find the proper Print screen and typing in the price was too much time and energy for somebody who just wanted 300 tags quick.
So, I started dumping the printer's output to a file instead of the serial port. A little head scratching later and I knew where all the variables were.
Monarch was even better IIRC -- they actually published instruction codes for their stuff. Dumping to a file was sometimes easier than properly reading documentation too.
The actual tag layout instructions are probably mindnumbingly simple. The area that's really lacking (or at least it was in '97ish) was getting things hooked up to a proper database that wasn't inflexible as all get out. You could rig an ODBC driver up to an Access DB but it was crufty, and the tag designer software was a bear. It was always much easier to hack my own little job together.
Yes, they still use some of it to this day.
Personally an on-the-fly label designer never made a whole lot of sense to me for these products. It was nice if you wanted to dump a template out but using it to actually hook up to your data was never a good idea. On top of that you sometimes get people trying to design the labels that don't realize why they can't fit 2k of data into a 2x2 square. Maybe that was my just my boss though.
"Why can't you fit more than 30 characters in that box?"
"Physics."
"Oh, 'cmon, it has to be possible."
"Ok, here's a pen. Try and fit more than 30 letters in this space."
Thankfully it was my mother, I could get away with that.
A
Will a
I guess where I'm going with this is that a
As the original poster said, many who grew up in urban or non-gun environments might not understand just how pithy this weapon actually is. For the uninformed the
I don't own a 22 nor do I find them that much fun to shoot. Perhaps somebody more in the know can clean up my facts on the round size. My weapons are in 9mm,
Could somebody clear this sentiment up for me? We're offtopic here I guess, but hey, this is a political thread.
How is it a "circus"? Sure, there's a number of whackjobs out there making million to one shots at being governor, but from what I gather the biggest hoopla is all about Arnold running.
What, pray tell, is so damned terrible about a man who's taken a body building start and turned it into a multi million (if not billion) dollar business for himself, speaks something like 5 languages, has a degree in macro economics, married into one of the most political families in the USA and comes from a political family back in Austria (so I've heard) running for govenor of his home state in the USA?
He's the perfect candidate. Everybody knows his name; he's Republican but a very moderate Republican. California is in a finaicial crisis -- he apparently knows how to handle money and he's got a degree in the matter. He's not a career politician and that is a good thing. You'd have a hard time buying this man out too with special interest money. What does he stand more to gain from? Pocket change from a lobbyist or sticking to his ideals, picking California out of the ruins in 8 years or whatever and making more blockbuster movies with that added popularity of actually being the good guy in real life?
I hope he stomps all the other competition, makes huge inroads in California over the next 2 years, and that this gets Ted Nugent into the governor's race here in Michigan. There's a fella that I don't think I've ever heard say anything that didn't make sense to me, at least politically. You can't find a straighter shooter (no pun intended) than this guy.
Meh, I'm getting irked enough with politics lately that I think it's time I start running for offices and become a career politician or something. Seems that it's the only way to fix it.
A couple of years back when I was living with two other guys myself and one other (both programmers) were trying to figure out just how they did this. What sort of algorithm is used to determine what to point over and what not to, how the cameras could be moving and the line staying stationary on the field, etc.
We shot ideas back and forth for about 10 minutes while watching the game. The third guy (a non-tech) just sat silently. After a while he finally came up with the solution for us. Looked at us both in disbeleif and said,
"What are you guys? Stupid? They do it with a computer!"
We started blankly for a good 2-3 seconds and just busted out in laughter.
You want to know what goes on in the mind of a CEO? Try this...
Take two monkeys -- about the same size. Put them somewhat near eachother and toss a banana way up into the air. Observe. Evaluate. Now you know how Daryl McBride works.
I totally agree. Alan's an inspiration. In fact, I'm going to quit trimming my beard and grab me some sweet ass black shades.
Well, I'd like to at least, but once my beard gets to be 2 inches long (around 5cm for those of you outside the USA) I look Amish. Way Amish. Random people will see me and shout, "Yo! Jebidiah, whassup?!" across the road. Nobody would hire an Amish coder or admin. Maybe a job in QA would work, but the interviewer would probably be afraid that I'd try and turn the whole system into a horse/hampster powered contraption made of wood.
"Payroll will be out as soon as the vet clears the horse for running again." Yeah.... that wouldn't go over well.
How the fsck can somebody take over the 2.2 tree w/out the massive angry-Gnome like beard? It's not not fair. Curse my Irish heritage!
Oh yeah, that's the other one I get. Leprechaun look-alike. I bear a striking resemblence to the Notre Dame mascot. See here for an example.
I'm hosed. Who needs a professional butter churner? I'm in.
I'm going to take the orignal poster's sentiment (or what I would presume is their take on this issue) and run with it.
... And they cannot make a law prohibiting your right to exercise your religion. Well, I don't think they've ever tried this either, and certainly not successfully. Some immature young lad out there probably wants to shoot back, "But I want to sacrifice virgins to the fire god!". Well, fine, but that's infriging on somebody else's right to live which flies directly in the face of any number of laws of the land and basically any law created by human civlization that I'm aware of.
Read the above quote a few times and let it sink in if you have the notion of "seperation of church and state" burried into your head.
Word #1: Congress
Congress is the legislative body of the United States of America. This is not your school board. This is written to prvent the federal legislative branch from:
Words #2 - #10:
Making a law respecting an establishment of religion. Period. Hey this is pretty plain and simple -- there's no legal jargon here. So far we have a statement that says that Congress cannot make a law which states an offical religion of the land. Congress has never (to the best of my knowledge) even tried doing this nor have they ever succeeded. We piss on the Constitution frequently but this is one bullet point that's never been trampled on.
Words #11 - 16:
Last I knew Congress never ordered prayers before football games, nor did they prohibit them. The judicial branch has taken the above statement though and turned it into "seperation of church and state" which is a horrible farce. The parent poster has stated, and this is true, that the founding fathers were openly religious. There is nothing wrong (morally or legally) with a representative in Congress, a senator, or a president from having and acting upon their religious beleifs unless they make it a law through the legislative branch. Period, end of story.
The 1st ammendment in no way, shape, or form can possibly be contrued from it's original writing to mean that there shall never be an intersection of religion and any "state" funded activity. The term "seperation of church and state" has always bugged me because the 1st ammendment specifically mentions a federal branch of the government and nowhere in the bill of rights are things actually prohibited to be done at the state level unless it trumps federal law.
As long as there is no law stating that there must be prayer at graudations, football games, or by a group of students before school: let them pray. Let them do it openly. Let them use community funds to it if that's what the community wants. The federal government shall make no law ever stating that it must be done or that it cannot be done.
If a Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or other community wishes to celebrate their religion on government owned property or during goverment sponsored events, FINE! Let them, I'll rejoice as an American that they have that right. Once you stomp on my communities freedom for a speaker at high school graduation to express his religious beleifs to the student body you've stomped on their rights though, and that just isn't kosher.
I don't know why I keep bringing up high school stuff -- it just seems the most prevalent in the news. It's municipal goverments of small communities were talking about here -- not federal laws. They can do what they want. The Bill of Rights is just that -- rights to citizens. Citizens make up communities. In their own little microcosims let them do what they want. Anything less is unconsitutional.
The judicial branch (and I forget when they did this) seems to have made great inroads with destroying clause #1 of the 1st ammendment. I'll never understand why Surpreme Cou
'Cmon now -- slashdotters in Vegas? Good luck keeping them out of the brothels.
Yeah, that's probably why IIS has such a poor track record when compared to Apache. Who would try and 'sploit Apache on Linux? Nobody runs that crap.
Okay, #linuxhelp does not ban people just for asking questions. You have to either be repeating a question over and over regardless of somebody attempting to help you.. like you ask a question, somebody asks you a question because you need more info to help and they just post the same question again 2 minutes later. If this keeps up for a half an hour you'll get banned. Sorry.
... this sometimes goes on for 15 minutes, the user gets flustered and just gets plain inflamatory and eventually booted. Sometimes after a half an hour of free help the opper will log off because they have something better do with their time and they get huffy with whoever picks up their "support contract".
People ignoring suggestions like they know better are banned. Sorry, we're here to help but if you don't take our help get the heck out of the way and make room for somebody that can.
People that are known problems get banned. When you're asking the same question for 5 days straight they get sick of it. You're hopeless at that point. Don't waste our time anymore.
Being impatient doesnt' help:
newbie: I need help getting my nVidia card to work.
op: Well, what have you tried doing so far to make it work?
newibe: I just want it to work damnit!
op: Well, did you download the drivers from nVidia's site?
newbie: How the hell was I supposed to know how to do that? Where are they?
op: I don't know, but Google could tell you. I don't use the card personally.
newbie: Well how the fuck do I find the drivers without X running?
It's hard to get baned from #linuxhelp, at least it was for the 3-4 yeras I frequented there in 1998-2001/2002. I still pop in occasinally as 'pi_rules'.
It's a good support chan. Questions like "How do I find out how much diskspace is free from the command line?" go over well. You get four-five friendly 'df' 'df -h' responses and things move on.
When you ask something like "How do I get two DSL connections connected to my machine to share the load on a web hosting comapny" we will assume you have basic networking knowledge and don't get huffy when we tell you that you're trying the impossible sometimes.
That gets you good support? Who are your vendors? Ours suck.
I won't name names, but BEAing that we pay annual licenses feas so a vendor's software can BEA installed on some of our servers I would expect them to BEA offering a little more help when things crap out on us. Granted, than have BEAn attentive to any request I've made but they've never actually provided a solution to a problem. No, it doesn't help that we're running an old version, but why the hell are they charging us normal prices for an old version that they can't fix then? Annual cost of our support contract is well over a couple of thousand a year. Hell, we spend more time and money on actually getting licenses from them lately due to internal SNAFUs than we spend on the damned licenses themselves it seems. We're switching as soon as vendor #2's next release is ready which runs on Tomcat.
Vendor #2 is a whole 'nother story. This shit is just flagrant misconduct. Oh yes, our software performs in such an environment. It scales excellent across multiple machines, here's our performance numbers -- look how well it scales up across 24 seperate instances!
This was sold to us as a global solution, before I got into the company. Keyword here is 'global'. That would mean offices in the USA and in Europe one would preseume. Maybe even Australia! When they say their shit scales up to 24 different installs and performs great they benchmarked the shit on a 24-way SUN monster that ran 24 virtual domains. Hey ass clown -- the bandwidth you get across your box "emulating" different installs is a whole hell of a lot differnt than the latency we occur when jumping across ponds! It is not acceptable that the first user of a web application spends 8 minutes while the box across a 180ms latent link caching data for the system over an straight Oracle connection back to the good old US of A.
Oh, we can put a DB in Europe and on the USA you say and replicate betwwen them? That solves a lot of problems, we'll try that! Oh wait, your DB doesn't replicate natively in Oracle? We need half a million in software from your partner company to do this? What the fuck are you guys smoking over there? You let us try this without warning us upfront?
Submit a bug report/feature request. Basically the "feature request" is: "We'd like your application to be way less braindead on feature X." Sure thing says vendor, it'll be in a future version. One year later and 3 releases later the issue is flagged as "Open" and not slated for inclusion. Thanks, we paid how much to be treated like this?
Well, we've BEAgan plans to move off one vendor ASAP because it provides no benefit at all. Having tech support hasn't helped in the least bit. With the other vendor we're stuck and have been manded by corporate to improve our "vendor bitchslapping" skills to get their ship on board. We're on the 3rd version of software since deployment and it -still- isn't meeting the promises they gave us.
We routinely decomple vendor #2's software (It's Java) upon shipment to point out the braindamanges in it. Then we fix it up, recompile, and slap ourselves a better version into ours before delopyment and send the ideas back to the vendor only to have them never included.
Hell we're SELLING one of our solutions to them right now. They never though of doing some of the stuff we did in one area. The core product is still fucked beyond beleif though.
Sorry, I had a crappy day. I'm sick of being our vendor's quality assurance department. Time for a beer methinks.
Excuse me? We did, back when they had 101 keys or less! Now every newfangled thing you pick up has these damned thing on there that are completely useless to plenty of us out there.
I have -just- become accustomed to them being on a keyboard. Two years ago I was still using a flathead screwdriver to pop them off in frustration of feeling a button that wasn't control where I thought control -could- be. I like my big control button. I don't even use my pinkies for it -- I just mash it with the base of my palm hand. That's the way I learned to use it back when it was big enough to do it that way. I can manage to do it again 100% of the time now that I'm accustomed to the smaller key.
When in the company of vi and emacs users stating "learn the keyboard layout" is really really insulting. We know how to type without looking at the keys thank you very much.
My biggest beef with Win2k usability is how often is just acts funny. I've never gotten entirely comfortable with it just because it's so damned touchy. Things that I can do on my Gnome/Linux machine here just plain suck sometimes on Win2k.
.bat file to mount and umount them all but some of these links are across a WAN and encouter 200ms ping times. I open up 'My computer' and -boom-! explorer.exe just halts while it pulls who knows WHAT back from these systems just to let me know that drives G-L are still working. I still have no idea what it's doing.
I sometimes have to map a large number of drives when I need to push/pull configuration files to machines. This is horrendously slow. I've got it scripted through a
Doing anything with a "large" set of files just plain sucks. I tried moving 30MB of data (mostly 1k files) into a different directory today in Windows. I don't know why it took darned near 3 minutes to do. Cripes, you just relink the file -- it doesn't even have to do that much I/O. Something braindead going on there.
I just love clicking 'Start' and having it take 2-3 minutes to come up sometimes. I haven't the foggiest as to why this happens. It's usually over a Terminal Services session though.
Why the heck can't I right click -> properties on a directory and just turn off all the read-only bits? Seems like the folder itself has to be read only for the option to show up. It's just confusing. I usually drop to Cygwin and just do a chmod -R 777 on it. Works for me.
Oh, and the last time I actually did tell explorer to remove the read only flag from a large set of files it popped up a counter telling me it would take 5 minutes to complete. That damned box was there until my next reboot. That's usability.
Why the snot do minimized windows like to magically pop back up when I restore a -different- application? I see this more often than I care for. Restore Mozilla Firebird and, oh thanks Windows, I wanted to see that minmized My Documents folder! Thanks!
Why can't the OS read an ISO9660 image natively? It's not like it's that hard -- ISO 9660 is already in the OS for cds.
Of course we have the braindamaged idea that deleting an open file is impossible. Just unlink it. It's worked fine for years and years in other filesystems -- get with the program. I don't want to hunt down every process that might have something open when trying to trash a large directory. Just get rid of it.
Oh, and what's with "Preparing to Delete..." crap? That cancel button never works either on that little ditty. Do I cycle exploer.exe like an impatient little snot and jump into Cygwin to just get rid of it or let myself stew for 3 minutes at a dialog box that does nothing for me and refuses to go away nicely?
Every day I have to work with that pile of drivel I remember why I installed Linux for the first time 5 years ago.
Totally off topic, but hey, this jogged my memory.
Walk over to the VS development group sometime and smack them upside the head for not providing emacs and vi editor modes, mkay? Actually I just want a 'vi' mode. Make it hard to turn on or something so nobody accidentially slips into it I guess.
<woman-voice>Ohh.. I bet he can put up with me for years!</woman-voice>
200 tambourine playing monkeys with a big rubber 'approved' stamp would work about as well and cost taxpayers a lot less money and expose the patent system for what it really is lately -- a big friggen joke.
If we give the monkeys actual ink to stamp with or let them use their fecal matter is of little concern to me. I think the fecal matter would just drive the point home a bit better though.
Don't get me wrong here -- in the event that you have a multi TB system keeping track of usage with 'du' really just isn't practical, but do you really even have to ASK the box where the data is?
/oradata there's the database. It gets it's own space. When that gets full he doesn't do an 'rm' to clean things up -- He has to use Oracle tools to do that.
/filestores there's a giant mess of crap that nobody can make heads or tails of. They're hashed filename from a PDM system. He can't do anything to clean that out without -- you guessed it - using the PDM system. The filesystem itself has NO idea what's going in either of it's major usage sections. It's just "stuff" and to rm -rf a directory because you're running out of space would be foolish.
Our backend storage system for my project is 1TB, or at least very close to it. I don't manage the box, but I do work with it. It holds three things:
1) It's OS (small)
2) It's Oracle Database files (300GB on disk, about 200GB used now)
3) Files. Word documents, CAD drawings, TIF, GIF, etc. A whole slew of them.
The admin knows what's using what. Under
Under
When filesystems can actually hold metadata regarding their contents then I'd give this question some though. We could have a whole new set of Unix tools to modify our everything-is-a-file-with-badass-meta-data system. Until then I don't see any way for filesystem maintence to be a huge issue on this multi TB systems. All you can really do with the FS is determine which system needs morespace and order more disks. You can't trim or manage it with the FS.
I'm wrong a lot though, but that's my take on the "issue".
Double click on the CA cert that you used to sign your own cert and import it into the right folder when it asks. I think it's 'Trusted Certificates'.
Or you start up 'mmc' and add the Certificate snap in and do it that way. Well, that's how you do it in a Win2k install. The 9x tools probably make this darned near impossible.
Just in case the British come back and we need to make another militia.
Quickly! Flash mob to the harbor! Bring 'em if you got 'em!
I tried being funny... honestly... but I just got woke up at 1am by a client who yanked the power cord of their mailserver accidentally and couldn't bring it back up: manual fsck required. Now I can't sleep. fsck me.
I say we start making a list of stupid things that we've done.
I submit: this mp3. Granted, I posted this as a one-off thing for a buddy so he'd get a laugh out of it and after such a postive response from him (and former coworkers) kept it online.
If I had a video if the dumb-assed look on my face as I had a half Stevie Wonder half 'Timmmay!' (South Park) look to me it'd be even funnier.
For a football game where the women played football and the men cheerleaded in high school I signed up. Twice, although the first was accidental. I got pressured by some friends who signed up to be part of the halftime show. We were all wrestlers, me being a lightweight so I was litterally -tossed- between groups for the show. Not safe, but a skinny guy going "gaaaahhaha!" through the air is hugely entertaining I guess.
The next year I signed up and got some buddies to do it with me. We all dressed up in something stupid -- I picked a wrestling signlet. A small one... cut like briefs... in 40 degree weather... can you say "turtle effect"? I hadn't counted on that one. Shoulda brought an extra sock. Or two. I've never said "Oh shutup -- it's cold" so many times in a night in my life.
I wore a 3 foot tall foam Guiness top had during a short stroll from my buddie's house to the beer store downtown in a decent sized town once. Somebody stuck their head out the window doing 25 to express their feelings with the word "Shithead" rather loudly. Not a fan of Guiness I guess.
Ventured out onto my balcony once to watch a thunderstorm. Chilled ou there for about a half an hour reveling in how insignificant I really am in comparsion with the One that can make stuff like that happen on command. I go to open the slider door and realize how insignificant I really am as the door has locked itself behind me. With my keys inside. With my cellphone. Oh, and I'm on the 2nd story -- and it's still raining. A 20 foot fall into some mushy ground and 20 minutes of walking later I'm using somebody's phone (who thankfully I knew) to call maintence and get back into my apartment.
Of course, standing around with a group of guys in high school chit chatting and interjecting, "yeah, I noticed that X has a huge friggen crank. Wouldn't have thought that" and then being informed that you completey misunderstood about 4 of the 6 words out of the last guys sentence really puts a crimp in our style. Hey, I'm not the smartest peanut in the turd. Try explaining -THAT- one off!
Got on a mechanical bull once drunk... well, three times in a night. 'Nuff said there.
My first jump out of a plane I was informed that me yelling "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" can be heard 3500 feet below. I've probably watched 100 people dump so far and I've never heard somebody yell loud enough to hear them. I think I got a record there.
Hopefully the 'Star Wars Kid', if he's reading this, doesn't feel so bad now. Personally, if he had developed a little more flexibility in his legs he coulda looked a whole lot cooler in some of those shots.
A couple of years ago I worked on a website with a team of guys and we deployed on Linux/PostgreSQL/PHP. A similar project surfaced a while ago and my old buddy contracted me to help him finish this sucker off and get it out the door. This time: FreeBSD/MySQL/PHP. Big whoop -- we flip some database code around and the website side is fine. However there's one problem:
This thing ties into a "chatroom" type deal. I horked up an idea of using the Hybrid IRC daemon and slapped some mods into it to get it to dump critical info about it's status into a shared memory segment and whacked together a little command line program in C to read this data out for PHP to parse. Damn... new platform, this might be a pain to port over.
I yank my 2 year old code that worked on Linux and recompiled the Hybrid IRC daemon w/ my mods -- boom, zero errors. Fire it up, it works!
I yank my little shell program out and recompile it -- zero errors. Fire it up, it works! I was friggen amazed. I was planning on taking 4-6 hours to port over this little bit of SysV IPC code safely.. and it took absolutely nothing. Something to be said about sticking with old, and functional, technology I guess.
Oh, and the FreeBSD choice wasn't made becuase of any SCO crap either. It's just what the admin at this site prefers to work with -- same with the MySQL choice. He can admin it and work with it so we chose to just port it to a new DB.
Not to be combative... but I already do.
We did. Who the hell let you in here?