I've been interested in investing. Would you tell me a little more about your strategy? Do you have any recommended reading? I've been looking at The Motley Fool's site, which seems to have a pretty common-sense approach to investing. Any others you'd recommend?
Does any one now what that chalk is? I'm not able to read the box, as I don't speak Chinese, so I've just called it "Chinese Death Chalk". It really kills the hell out of the ants, and they don't cross the chalk line for a few months. Really, it's the best thing I've found for controlling ants.
I heard the gov't busts vendors every once in a while for selling it. I've just wondered what's it made of and if there are any long term consequences from using it. Does any one know?
I'm not really big on the open shelves thing for wood working so I'm putting in drawers. The drawers on my table saw base are going to be more like a machinists chest, with a couple of 1"--1 1/2" deep drawers at the top, gradually getting larger further down. Once it's fully built, I'll post something to rec.woodworking.
As for the bench, I think that a rolling base is going to make cleaning up shaving and other junk a lot easier! I can just roll the whole thing to the side and grab the shop vac!
I like the idea of a fold-down top, but then, where to mount my vise...
I recently split up my workshop. I do all the woodworking and metalwork in the garage, an I just moved my electronics bench into my office in the house. Wood, cars and metal work can generate a _lot_ of mess, but electronics is quite and "clean" and can be done in the house w/o too much trouble.
For the electronics bench I'm using a hollow-core door and two trestles from Ikea. It's cheap and I can adjust the height to where I like it. (I'm tall, so I like most table tops higher than average.) I don't really pound on things when I'm doing electronics work, so the hollow-core door is more than strong enough.
I have my oscilloscope on a plastic roller tray with 5 or so drawers in it. The rollers are kind of cheap, but it lets me stash the o-scope at the end of the table, and roll it out when I need it, as well as a little extra storage. (I think it was from the container store. You said you were into woodworking, so you go that route, you should be able to make your own rolling chest or tray.)
I have a rally-style tool chest, with sliding drawers and all my hand tools go in there. All the loose components go into a little plastic chest with thirty or so sliding drawers (like what people use to organize screws and stuff). I've been fairly happy with that, but, for resistors and capacitors, I think I'm going to change to 4"x4" plastic bags that I can stick in a drawer. That way I can add resistors, for example, and easily keep them in sequence w/o re-organizing the whole thing.
As for woodworking, I'm converting my shop so that all the fixed-base equipment are on rolling bases. Well, almost everything--I have a 14" Logan metal lathe that will stay put. But I do a lot in the garage--between brewing beer & mead, metalworking, woodworking and my '65 Dodge Dart, there is no longer a whole bunch of room in my two car garage. The rolling bases will help a lot...
The first conversion, my table saw, will be built into a 5' long 22.5" deep table, on casters so I can roll it *under* my main work table, out of the way when I'm not using it. The idea is similar to the "Mobile BT3000 cabinet" at http://www.bt3central.com/, but I've made a couple of additions to it such as a pipe clamp end-vise. The idea for rolling it under the main table came from a recent wood working magazine. I forgot the name, but it might still be out in the book stores.
I agree, UNIX Power Tools is one of the best Unix books ever written. For a new user this should be in the top two or three books (maybe after "Running Linux" and "Essential System Administration"), and almost everyone who uses Unix tools should have it.
It covers hundreds of tips for using a wide variety of command line tools, such as bash, sed, awk, even lowly ed, as well as editors like vi and Emacs. It covers all these tools while talking about what makes Unix special (flexibly combining tools). It's a great book whether your an admin, a regular user, or a developer.
Even if you use MS Windows with Cygwin (as I do at work) this book will show you how you save time and can get a _lot_ more use out of your system.
It's from Linux 0.96 (IIRC), during the many kernal panics I caused learning to set up Linux on a 386 with a whopping 2 (or was it 4) megs of RAM and a 40 Meg MFM hard drive that would take three or four hours to format.
First, I'd like to say thanks for making the post, jaxn. It's good that you're honest and open.
Your story hits home for me--I really believe that addiction can happen to anyone. I've had a lot of good friends that were addicts. And they are great people (as long as they don't use drugs).
While some people are much more susceptible, anyone can become an addict. It might not be drugs--it can be an addiction to shopping, to eating, to sex, to sports, to the Internet, to computers... It's worth taking a long hard look at yourself to see if you are addicted to anything. Honestly, I think that "positive addictions" are damaging too (just not as much or in the same way). Anything that drives you, that come in between being fully conscious and aware of your actions is ultimately going to cause pain and suffering.
Having an "addictive personality" isn't very far from having an "obsessive personality", and I'm sure a lot of people here can relate. "Obsessive" certainly describes me. I'm not obsessive about everything, or all the time, but it's an issue. It's a bigger problem when I get tired or stressed out. I've know that I'm fairly obsessive-compulsive, but it hasn't been until recently that I've really started to look at the impact of it in my life. And it's made a huge impact.
The best treatment for me is to exercise a bit and, most importantly, to meditate regularly. I've been into meditation since I was about 12 years old, but I didn't start to really practice until I was about 18. Even then, I didn't do it regularly or consistently enough. Recently I've gone through a divorce and that motivated me to take a good hard look at myself and my life so far. One of the results of that is I've begun a much more regular meditation practice.
(For those of you who are interested in such things, the best teacher I've found is Shinzen Young. He used to teach at a college, and does the best job I've heard translating esoteric eastern spiritual philosophy into something I can understand. He also one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. He has some talks freely available on his web site, some cassettes you can buy, and, if you can get Kpfk (90.7 FM, in Los Angeles, CA), they usually play his talks on Thursday night after midnight (Kpfk also has a web cast). I highly recommend checking him out. If anyone would like more info re: Shinzen, please mail me.)
Meditation also has some great health and pain management aspects. Shinzen's "Break Through Pain" set is perhaps the best thing I've found to help deal with physical pain. And formal sitting can be good for your back.
Python is a great language with a great user community! Please, do yourself a favor, download Python and gve it a try. I let the whitespace issue keep me from using Python for using Python, but my curiosity got me to try it. I'm glad I did.
THere is a non-zero sum game if I ever heard one. It's all about how well one can play a role. It's about hanging out with friends and acting. The best D&D games I've ever been a part of were all about the interaction between the DM and the characters.
I used Cybercash and had nothing but problems. Their processing services kept crashing, around 15-25 times a month over this last Christmas season. We finally switched to Signio and we didn't have a single problem with their services. Any time someone asks me I suggest Signio. They are fast, cheap and reliable. What more could you want? P.S. I don't work for them or own any stock. I just had great luck with them.
IBM's San Francisco: http://www.ibm.com/stories/1997/07/iw3.html http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-320747.html ?tag=
Also, If Java is "useless" why is there so much work being done on integrating Java with Apache? Chack out java.apache.org. What are all these Java application server vendors doing? They have to be using Java for something.
It would be good to have a simple language independent method of using components in Linux. There are others component architectures, like CORBA (too complex & orb's oftin aren't compatible), JavaBeans (too restrictive of a license, and considering Sun's recent shenanigans with setting up a standard, I don't think it's a good bet Java will be arond for a long time). There is a version of COM under development for Linux called GCOM( www.armored.net/gcom/summary, it's basicly COM with all of the Microsoft-ism's stripped out. The site is worth checking out. I just found out about it--I haven't had a chance to try anything with GCOM, but I really like the idea and I think it would be a great addition to Linux.
The Promise cards doesn't sound that good, on further thought. I can put two different uDMA's on my current motherboard, each on a different chain, and set up one for all the data and the other for swap. I'm not sure how different that would be, performance wise, from an uDMA "Raid".
Dang! It looks like the current card, the uDMA one, is plug-and-pray. I think it _could_ work, but booting from a pnp device could be a real drag. I guess if you used a boot floppy. . .
Promise Technologyy ( http://www.promise.com) makes a Raid controller for Ultra DMA drives. I've been looking at these for a while, but just haven't had a good enough reason to go out and buy one. Not yet, at least. (I was planning on getting one for my _next_ computer.) It seems like a great way to get a lot of performance out of cheap drives. I think it is all done "in the hardware" -- it looks like a single drive to the os and so It _should_ work with linux, but don't quote me on that one.
The price is good, about $125 (US), and four Ultra DMA drives to fill this up would be much, much less expensive than four equivalent SCSI drives. Granted, an uIDE Raid array will be different than SCSI-based array, but it should be close enough for a meaningful compairison, I think.
I don't know about anyone else, but if a bad CD will bring down NT server I can't buy their line about HA servers. Maybe a bad CD would bring down Linux, too, but it's never happened to me. I can't think I've ever had a severe problem with a bad CD on any os other than MS's.
I have found Access to be a pretty good solution for what we do. We run the standard MS desktop app's, and Word, Excell and Access are company standards, so we can get some of our clients to do a lot of the inputing. . . it is compatible, and for lightly loaded, small db's it is really a good solution. The interface _is_ really nice. Not perfect, but for development, it allows for a quick turn-around and gives us a way to talk with our clients about the design. But for a "production quality enterprise app" I wouldn't fool myself for a second that it is suitable. Not even close. The ODBC drivers leak memory. It crashes far too easliy under any kind of real load. But for development, where you are going to have a few iterations of a design, it is a good lightweight solution.
My experience has shown Oracle to be really fast, really solid and _really_ expensive. As long as you are willing to put a lot of time into the set-up and initial tuning, run it on a really expensive machine, and put a little time into maintenance it is a rock-solid solution. But it is rather ugly if you need to make any changes to the schema or data types. If we want to make any changes, we have to go through the DBA, which is a real pain in the ass. He's a nice guy and all, but extremely overworked.
Actually, we just started using Oracle 8, Personal Edition on our desktops. That might be a good solution, too. If anyone is interested in how well it works, let me know and I'll keep you updated updated
Where I work we have been Suing Oracle for a lot of internal apps, but nothing realy high-load. In fact 80% of out apps are simple enough and low-use enough that they work on M$ Access. Of course it's a really big bummer if there is a lot of demand on an Access DB, as it'll take down the server. . .
We have this Oracle DBA who is pushing for _everything_ to be done on Oracle. I would love to hear more about the problems you've had with Oracle and web apps. What is the "best" DB you've used for the web? What kind of problems have you had with Oracle?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been interested in investing. Would you tell me a little more about your strategy? Do you have any recommended reading? I've been looking at The Motley Fool's site, which seems to have a pretty common-sense approach to investing. Any others you'd recommend?
Octopi is a perfectly cromulent word: http://www.langmaker.com/db/eng_cromulent.htm
Does any one now what that chalk is? I'm not able to read the box, as I don't speak Chinese, so I've just called it "Chinese Death Chalk". It really kills the hell out of the ants, and they don't cross the chalk line for a few months. Really, it's the best thing I've found for controlling ants.
I heard the gov't busts vendors every once in a while for selling it. I've just wondered what's it made of and if there are any long term consequences from using it. Does any one know?
I'm not really big on the open shelves thing for wood working so I'm putting in drawers. The drawers on my table saw base are going to be more like a machinists chest, with a couple of 1"--1 1/2" deep drawers at the top, gradually getting larger further down. Once it's fully built, I'll post something to rec.woodworking.
As for the bench, I think that a rolling base is going to make cleaning up shaving and other junk a lot easier! I can just roll the whole thing to the side and grab the shop vac!
I like the idea of a fold-down top, but then, where to mount my vise...
I recently split up my workshop. I do all the woodworking and metalwork in the garage, an I just moved my electronics bench into my office in the house. Wood, cars and metal work can generate a _lot_ of mess, but electronics is quite and "clean" and can be done in the house w/o too much trouble.
For the electronics bench I'm using a hollow-core door and two trestles from Ikea. It's cheap and I can adjust the height to where I like it. (I'm tall, so I like most table tops higher than average.) I don't really pound on things when I'm doing electronics work, so the hollow-core door is more than strong enough.
I have my oscilloscope on a plastic roller tray with 5 or so drawers in it. The rollers are kind of cheap, but it lets me stash the o-scope at the end of the table, and roll it out when I need it, as well as a little extra storage. (I think it was from the container store. You said you were into woodworking, so you go that route, you should be able to make your own rolling chest or tray.)
I have a rally-style tool chest, with sliding drawers and all my hand tools go in there. All the loose components go into a little plastic chest with thirty or so sliding drawers (like what people use to organize screws and stuff). I've been fairly happy with that, but, for resistors and capacitors, I think I'm going to change to 4"x4" plastic bags that I can stick in a drawer. That way I can add resistors, for example, and easily keep them in sequence w/o re-organizing the whole thing.
As for woodworking, I'm converting my shop so that all the fixed-base equipment are on rolling bases. Well, almost everything--I have a 14" Logan metal lathe that will stay put. But I do a lot in the garage--between brewing beer & mead, metalworking, woodworking and my '65 Dodge Dart, there is no longer a whole bunch of room in my two car garage. The rolling bases will help a lot...
The first conversion, my table saw, will be built into a 5' long 22.5" deep table, on casters so I can roll it *under* my main work table, out of the way when I'm not using it. The idea is similar to the "Mobile BT3000 cabinet" at http://www.bt3central.com/, but I've made a couple of additions to it such as a pipe clamp end-vise. The idea for rolling it under the main table came from a recent wood working magazine. I forgot the name, but it might still be out in the book stores.
I agree, UNIX Power Tools is one of the best Unix books ever written. For a new user this should be in the top two or three books (maybe after "Running Linux" and "Essential System Administration"), and almost everyone who uses Unix tools should have it.
It covers hundreds of tips for using a wide variety of command line tools, such as bash, sed, awk, even lowly ed, as well as editors like vi and Emacs. It covers all these tools while talking about what makes Unix special (flexibly combining tools). It's a great book whether your an admin, a regular user, or a developer.
Even if you use MS Windows with Cygwin (as I do at work) this book will show you how you save time and can get a _lot_ more use out of your system.
Another good error message was: "You're screwed". I found it in some source code I was maintaining...
It's from Linux 0.96 (IIRC), during the many kernal panics I caused learning to set up Linux on a 386 with a whopping 2 (or was it 4) megs of RAM and a 40 Meg MFM hard drive that would take three or four hours to format.
It was a lot of fun!
First, I'd like to say thanks for making the post, jaxn. It's good that you're honest and open.
Your story hits home for me--I really believe that addiction can happen to anyone. I've had a lot of good friends that were addicts. And they are great people (as long as they don't use drugs).
While some people are much more susceptible, anyone can become an addict. It might not be drugs--it can be an addiction to shopping, to eating, to sex, to sports, to the Internet, to computers... It's worth taking a long hard look at yourself to see if you are addicted to anything. Honestly, I think that "positive addictions" are damaging too (just not as much or in the same way). Anything that drives you, that come in between being fully conscious and aware of your actions is ultimately going to cause pain and suffering.
Having an "addictive personality" isn't very far from having an "obsessive personality", and I'm sure a lot of people here can relate. "Obsessive" certainly describes me. I'm not obsessive about everything, or all the time, but it's an issue. It's a bigger problem when I get tired or stressed out. I've know that I'm fairly obsessive-compulsive, but it hasn't been until recently that I've really started to look at the impact of it in my life. And it's made a huge impact.
The best treatment for me is to exercise a bit and, most importantly, to meditate regularly. I've been into meditation since I was about 12 years old, but I didn't start to really practice until I was about 18. Even then, I didn't do it regularly or consistently enough. Recently I've gone through a divorce and that motivated me to take a good hard look at myself and my life so far. One of the results of that is I've begun a much more regular meditation practice.
(For those of you who are interested in such things, the best teacher I've found is Shinzen Young. He used to teach at a college, and does the best job I've heard translating esoteric eastern spiritual philosophy into something I can understand. He also one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. He has some talks freely available on his web site, some cassettes you can buy, and, if you can get Kpfk (90.7 FM, in Los Angeles, CA), they usually play his talks on Thursday night after midnight (Kpfk also has a web cast). I highly recommend checking him out. If anyone would like more info re: Shinzen, please mail me.)
Meditation also has some great health and pain management aspects. Shinzen's "Break Through Pain" set is perhaps the best thing I've found to help deal with physical pain. And formal sitting can be good for your back.
Python is a great language with a great user community! Please, do yourself a favor, download Python and gve it a try. I let the whitespace issue keep me from using Python for using Python, but my curiosity got me to try it. I'm glad I did.
THere is a non-zero sum game if I ever heard one. It's all about how well one can play a role. It's about hanging out with friends and acting. The best D&D games I've ever been a part of were all about the interaction between the DM and the characters.
Really, I haven't seen the results yet.
I used Cybercash and had nothing but problems. Their processing services kept crashing, around 15-25 times a month over this last Christmas season. We finally switched to Signio and we didn't have a single problem with their services. Any time someone asks me I suggest Signio. They are fast, cheap and reliable. What more could you want? P.S. I don't work for them or own any stock. I just had great luck with them.
Enhydra is an Open-source Java app-server:
http://www.lutris.com/EnhydraQuotes.html
I don't know exactly what they have built, but it's using Java.
IBM's San Francisco:l ?tag=
http://www.ibm.com/stories/1997/07/iw3.html
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-320747.htm
Also, If Java is "useless" why is there so much work being done on integrating Java with Apache? Chack out java.apache.org. What are all these Java application server vendors doing? They have to be using Java for something.
It would be good to have a simple language independent method of using components in Linux. There are others component architectures, like CORBA (too complex & orb's oftin aren't compatible), JavaBeans (too restrictive of a license, and considering Sun's recent shenanigans with setting up a standard, I don't think it's a good bet Java will be arond for a long time). There is a version of COM under development for Linux called GCOM( www.armored.net/gcom/summary, it's basicly COM with all of the Microsoft-ism's stripped out. The site is worth checking out. I just found out about it--I haven't had a chance to try anything with GCOM, but I really like the idea and I think it would be a great addition to Linux.
Not quite a "us" ending word, but close!
The Promise cards doesn't sound that good, on further thought. I can put two different uDMA's on my current motherboard, each on a different chain, and set up one for all the data and the other for swap. I'm not sure how different that would be, performance wise, from an uDMA "Raid".
Dang! It looks like the current card, the uDMA one, is plug-and-pray. I think it _could_ work, but booting from a pnp device could be a real drag. I guess if you used a boot floppy. . .
Promise Technologyy ( http://www.promise.com) makes a Raid controller for Ultra DMA drives. I've been looking at these for a while, but just haven't had a good enough reason to go out and buy one. Not yet, at least. (I was planning on getting one for my _next_ computer.) It seems like a great way to get a lot of performance out of cheap drives. I think it is all done "in the hardware" -- it looks like a single drive to the os and so It _should_ work with linux, but don't quote me on that one.
The price is good, about $125 (US), and four Ultra DMA drives to fill this up would be much, much less expensive than four equivalent SCSI drives. Granted, an uIDE Raid array will be different than SCSI-based array, but it should be close enough for a meaningful compairison, I think.
Has anyone used uDAM Raids? Heard Any reviews?
I don't know about anyone else, but if a bad CD will bring down NT server I can't buy their line about HA servers. Maybe a bad CD would bring down Linux, too, but it's never happened to me. I can't think I've ever had a severe problem with a bad CD on any os other than MS's.
Just a thougt. . .
I have found Access to be a pretty good solution for what we do. We run the standard MS desktop app's, and Word, Excell and Access are company standards, so we can get some of our clients to do a lot of the inputing. . . it is compatible, and for lightly loaded, small db's it is really a good solution. The interface _is_ really nice. Not perfect, but for development, it allows for a quick turn-around and gives us a way to talk with our clients about the design. But for a "production quality enterprise app" I wouldn't fool myself for a second that it is suitable. Not even close. The ODBC drivers leak memory. It crashes far too easliy under any kind of real load. But for development, where you are going to have a few iterations of a design, it is a good lightweight solution.
My experience has shown Oracle to be really fast, really solid and _really_ expensive. As long as you are willing to put a lot of time into the set-up and initial tuning, run it on a really expensive machine, and put a little time into maintenance it is a rock-solid solution. But it is rather ugly if you need to make any changes to the schema or data types. If we want to make any changes, we have to go through the DBA, which is a real pain in the ass. He's a nice guy and all, but extremely overworked.
Actually, we just started using Oracle 8, Personal Edition on our desktops. That might be a good solution, too. If anyone is interested in how well it works, let me know and I'll keep you updated updated
Jeff
nrrd@earthlink.net
I work for a fourtune 500 company. . . money is not a big issue for a lot of stuff, just the approval process is amazingly unwieldy.
And the pay is really _crap_. It reminds me of one of Southpark episode where Cartman gets abducted... "Sory about your ass, dude."
Where I work we have been Suing Oracle for a lot of internal apps, but nothing realy high-load. In fact 80% of out apps are simple enough and low-use enough that they work on M$ Access. Of course it's a really big bummer if there is a lot of demand on an Access DB, as it'll take down the server. . .
We have this Oracle DBA who is pushing for _everything_ to be done on Oracle. I would love to hear more about the problems you've had with Oracle and web apps. What is the "best" DB you've used for the web? What kind of problems have you had with Oracle?
One of the best descriptions of file paging is here. It give a fairly solid, humorous description. Long live the Thing King!