I wish I could shake your hand... In my company, we have monthly production outages during which system maintenance is performed and new code is deployed. During the last one, we also upgraded the production database server to a new 16-core 128GB RAM SAN-attached IBM server running SQL Server 2005. Big ol' nasty machine, new database engine, updated DB statistics. Sunday morning, as systems were brought back online and the "world" was beginning to reconnect to the database, Perfmon began to show high CPU utilization. This continued until all 16 cores were pegged at 98-99%. We're all tired, crabby, disappointed, and now management level folks are waking up and beginning to panic.
The problem turned out to be a new table/stored procedure combo that was part of the new code deployment. The table was missing a critical index. A simple 40-second CREATE INDEX statement produced a near-vertical drop of the CPU metric in PerfMon, from 98% to less than 10%, where it has remained most of the week. Faster hardware is not always the answer!!!!
Yeah, I know stuff can be made to run under Wine, but that falls under my "right tool for the job" argument. I'm not arguing for or against either platform with that statement. If I need to paint my house, I'm not going to blow paint through a straw and call it a paint sprayer - I'm going to go buy a real paint sprayer. Likewise, if I need/want to run a Windows apps, why not just run Windows?
I've tried off and on for the past 8 years to dump Windows in favor of Linux at home, and for various reasons, keep coming back to MS. I've got Gentoo running for my mail/web/file server needs, and it works great. The desktops, however, are a different story. Some big "issues":
- personal finance. Yeah, I tried Gnucash, multiple versions, and it's simply not on the same playing field as Microsoft Money. At the end of the day, I want to be able to launch the app, click a few buttons, and have my daily transactions downloaded and my bill payments transmitted. Being able to forecast my account balance 60 or 90 days out is extremely useful as well.
- kids. At first it was Jumpstart games, now it's Civ4, NWN, and iTunes. With two teenagers in the house who just want have the same stuff their friends have, Frozen Bubble is not an acceptable answer to "Linux needs games". An iTunes, yeah, it's DRM, but I can dump $10/month into each of their "allowance" accounts, and they can buy what they want, and I don't worry about the RIAA coming to the door.
- photos. My wife loves her digital camera, photo printer, and scrapbooking software. Being able to plug the camera in and have a wizard walk her through importing the photos and organizing them is HUGE.
- time. I'm a DBA, and I work with computers all day long, both MS and Linux. After 9 hours, I've had enough. I don't want to go home and have to tinker with more "stuff". Automatic Update keeps my OS patched. AVG downloads its own updates. The AdBlock plugin keeps my browsing pleasant. I can sit down and USE my computer, not fuss with config files or spend hours compiling source code.
I love Linux, but it's not ready to be running on every desktop out there. Using the right tool makes the job easier, and Linux just isn't the right tool for every job... Yet...
I'm in Minnesota as well, and have CFL "flood light" bulbs on the outdoor lights behind my house, and the long "shop light" bulbs in my garage. The CFL's outside come on instantly, and are at full brightness within a few seconds (even these past few nights!). The shop lights DO flicker badly for about a minute, but after that they're fine.
I downloaded and installed Vista from MSDN over the weekend, I've only tried two games so far. On the exact same machine, under XP, I could run Civ4 and Neverwinter Nights with full graphic details enabled, no problems. After installing Vista (fresh install, reformat, etc), Civ4 continues to run (you have to download the latest patch) without issue. Neverwinter Nights, on the other hand, is EXTREMELY choppy, even at the bottom end of the graphics settings.
Overall, I'm not greatly impressed. Lots of shiny stuff, and it "feels" new, but I just really don't see any improvement over XP.
Here in the US, the reaction to a sign stating "Right lane closed ahead" would be two-fold:
- 25% of the drivers seeing the sign would be confused, coming to a near stop on the freeway while they ponder the meaning
- 25% would dive to the breakdown lane, accelerating around everyone so that they can be the first on in line at the merge point
- 25% will do nothing, staying in the right lane until they reach the closure point, then will sit there with a turn signal blinking, waiting for someone to let them over.
- 25% will sit there frustrated, watching all of this take place, wishing they had some sort of mini-nuke system with which to dispatch the other 75%
Boy, those bastards at Nintendo really screwed up. I mean, come on, they radically changed the interface for no good reason, there was nothing wrong with the old one.
I've not used the new Office yet, but give it a chance. It might actually be BETTER than what you're used to. Change is good.
Apparently you haven't been to Minnesota yet this year. This winter SUCKS!!! It's 6:53am in JANUARY, and it's friggin 35 degrees outside... Damned El Nino...
The 2" clearance and the 3/4" thresholds will be a problem. Chair and table legs, not a problem, at least not on a smooth floor. My Roomba has no problem cleaning under the dining room table. It happily spins itself in various directions until it finds a way through the chair legs.
I'm not sure I'd make such a generalization... The company I work for (major provider of certification exams) employs 20,000 people, so I'd consider this a "large corporation". I'm in the office at 6:30am, out by 3:30, Monday-Friday. We have one outage per month, during which new code is moved into our production environments, maintenance is done, etc. Myself and three other production DBA's rotate through these outages, so I am "on call" one weekend every 4 months to support these outages. Aside from that, I RARELY work outside of the M-F 6:30-3:30 window....
I had to transfer funds into the Paypal account to bring the balance up to zero. When that cleared, I just removed all of the credit card and bank accounts that were linked. On the profile page, there is a link to "Close Account". It wouldn't let me close it until the balance was zero and there were no pending transactions.
No point. For the $30 that they stole from me, it's not worth my time to spend an hour or more talking to some drone who can't help me anyway. Getting that money back wouldn't change the fact that they decided to stomp on a long-time customer with no explanation whatsoever. I understand fraud happens and disputes come up, but they asked me for specific pieces of information, information which I freely provided to them. The delivery of the merchandise was confirmed, the buyer says he is satisfied and did not initiate a dispute, nor did he receive this supposed refund that Paypal claims to have made. I fulfilled my obligations as the seller, and yet they took it upon themselves to decide that fraud had occurred, and took my money. I was given no explanation as to why that decision was made, or exactly what the problem might have been, they simply acted as judge, jury, and executioner, sorry Mr. Customer, but screw you. There's simply no way Paypal is going to keep me as a customer now.
Up until 2 weeks ago, I would have said the same thing. I've used Paypal for about 4 years, bought/sold hundreds of items on eBay, paying exclusively through Paypal. I even had the debit card, which I used to take advantage of their cash-back for Visa purchases.
In July, I sold an item on eBay, got paid for it, life went on. Second week of September, I get an email from Paypal saying that they had reason to believe this item was paid for with fraudulent funds, and asked me to provide tracking info, etc., for the item sold. I did, gave them everything they asked for.
Two weeks later, I get another email from them, stating: "We have conducted a review of a payment that you received. In this case, returning the funds to the sender was determined to be the appropriate action, and we have completed a reversal of the payment. Good selling practices, like trackable shipping, prompt shipment, and communication between buyer and seller help prevent disputes."
Huh? I provided them with a tracking number, delivery was confirmed, item was shipped the same day payment was received. I contacted the buyer (this person has purchased multiple items from me, I have no reason to not trust them), asked them if they knew anything more than I did. They have not received any refund from Paypal, and in fact didn't even know there was a problem.
So, who was my money "returned" to? Repeated emails to Paypal have been ignored, so I've closed my account, I'll never use Paypal again.
It's interesting to see this topic posted now, because this weekend I made the switch to using Google's services exclusively. For the past 5 years, I've been running my own proxy server (Squid) that I used from home and work, content filtering with Dansguardian (2 kids at home), my own private Jabber server (MSN, AIM, and Yahoo transports), my own email server (family domain name registered and hosted), my own webmail page (Squirrelmail), my own calendar page, etc.. It's become increasingly difficult to find the time to keep up with patches, spam filtering, firewall rules, watching for SSH attacks. It used to be fun running my own servers, but now it's just another chore, one that has become less and less appealing. Combine that with the increasing cost of electricity, it's hard to justify the hassle anymore. Therefore, I decided to just dump it all in favor of Google. I created GMail accounts for myself, my wife, and both kids, purchased web/mail hosting, setup mail forwarding to send anything addressed to our old domain to GMail. GAIM now talks to talk.google.com, my Jabber server has been shut down. Google Calendar is much more powerful, and visually appealing, than the calendar app I was using. For a proxy server, I decided I just don't care anymore. The kids are old enough now that I don't need the content filtering provided by Dansguardian.
I know some of you on here are going to bring up Big Brother, the NSA, "whatever spy we're afraid of this week", and that's fine. Maybe I'm suffering from an extreme case of apathy, but I truly just don't care anymore. I fight with security and performance issues all day at work, I just don't have the ambition to do the same at home anymore. I now have a whole new set of integrated tools to use, they look better than the old ones, work better than the old ones, and are just as accessible from anywhere I need to use them.
NASCAR is a motor sport, just like F1, or IRL/Cart, or the Rolex series, all of which I am a fan. There are plenty of "furriners and Frenchie-sounding names" in all of those, and there is in fact a black driver in NASCAR, Bill Lester.
I'll back that up. On January 17th, my boss and I "had words" and I quit my job as Senior DBA. I agreed to stay until the 24th to document some processes and transfer knowledge to one of the junior DBA's. I did three interviews on the 25th, was offered two of those positions on the 26th, accepted one, got a counter-offer from the other, then a counter-counter-offer from the first, started work there on the 30th, again as a Senior SQL DBA. I don't think it would have been this easy a year ago.
1. About a year ago, my boss was looking at options for bug tracking/issue tracking software. Knowing I could save the company some money, and implement a great product, I recommended Bugzilla. I even installed it and let other people in I.T. take it for a spin. Mr. Boss didn't even LOOK at it, and we ended up spending $15K on a commercial product that uses an ActiveX control as a front-end, forcing us (i.e. ME) to use Internet Explorer. Choice between an excellent, free, browser-based product that we could modify to suit our needs, or a commercial, closed, platform-specific and expensive product - we go with the expensive product.
2. A few months ago, we as a group decided that we needed a better way to centralize documentation and information, some way to make it easy for us and our users to find and maintain documentation. Perfect use for a wiki! I installed and configured TWiki, showed a few people how to use it, and we started populating it. Everybody loved it! Two weeks ago, Mr. Boss announces that we're installing Sharepoint and migrating all of our documentation there. Reason? He saw it used at a Great Plains conference that he attended. The wiki is running on a retired 350Mhz desktop machine, serving content to approximately 40 users. Think Sharepoint will run on such a machine?
3. In response to our users' increasing complaints about SPAM, we decided that we needed to implement a server-based filtering mechanism. My recommendation - stick a Linux box in front of Exchange, running Exim, Spamassassin, and ClamAV, the same combination that makes me very happy at home. Nope, we spent money on a commercial content filter (can't remember the product name). Our email admin is adding FROM addresses to the blacklist on that thing every day. Explaining that this is an exercise in futility, because FROM addresses are forged and random, passes cleanly above his head, and he merrily continues adding addresses to the blacklist.
It just goes on and on and on. The mentality that money must be spent to solve these problems astounds me.
Why do I care? I care because I have to work with these products as part of my job. I care because I see it as useless spending on the part of my employer. I care because these products are NOT the best solution to the problem, but we're happy to throw money away on them. It is EXTREMELY frustrating to sit back and watch, but trying to argue the point gets you labelled a zealot.
I see NOTHING in Firefox, or IE for that matter. According to my proxy server logs, the combination of SquidGuard and Dansguardian are preventing these things from even reaching my browsers. Shucks...
I'm the lead programmer in a group of five, doing primarily internal SQL Server, ASP, and PHP development. We don't use a formal check-in/out system. We use Twiki, with a series of perl scripts that are run from cron jobs, to monitor all of our SQL databases and ASP/PHP pages. The SQL objects are monitoring using a "snapshot" of the sysobjects tables, comparing that to the current sysobjects table - any objects that are different get scripted off and published into Twiki. ASP/PHP files are compared using simple file compare, and published to Twiki if changes are detected. Twiki handles all the versioning and diff functionality for us, along with giving us the ability to do keyword searches. Want to know how many places the field named "vchCustomerName" is reference? Just do a keyword search in Twiki, and you see every stored proc, PHP page, trigger, etc.
Setup a Linux box, connect your webcam, and install a package called "motion" (http://motion.sourceforge.net/). You'll have motion-sensing webcam system that will give you your monitoring capabilities. Also works great as a DIY security system.
Ditch the Benadryl, pick up an herbal supplement called Valerian - take one or two when you need it, about an hour before bedtime, you'll sleep like a log and won't wake up drowsy.
Actually, I AM using Jabber. My entire family, and most of my friends, all use my private Jabber server. Combine that with Gaim, and I've not had to suffer through the MSN client for quite some time. Life is good...
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could shake your hand... In my company, we have monthly production outages during which system maintenance is performed and new code is deployed. During the last one, we also upgraded the production database server to a new 16-core 128GB RAM SAN-attached IBM server running SQL Server 2005. Big ol' nasty machine, new database engine, updated DB statistics. Sunday morning, as systems were brought back online and the "world" was beginning to reconnect to the database, Perfmon began to show high CPU utilization. This continued until all 16 cores were pegged at 98-99%. We're all tired, crabby, disappointed, and now management level folks are waking up and beginning to panic.
The problem turned out to be a new table/stored procedure combo that was part of the new code deployment. The table was missing a critical index. A simple 40-second CREATE INDEX statement produced a near-vertical drop of the CPU metric in PerfMon, from 98% to less than 10%, where it has remained most of the week. Faster hardware is not always the answer!!!!
Yeah, I know stuff can be made to run under Wine, but that falls under my "right tool for the job" argument. I'm not arguing for or against either platform with that statement. If I need to paint my house, I'm not going to blow paint through a straw and call it a paint sprayer - I'm going to go buy a real paint sprayer. Likewise, if I need/want to run a Windows apps, why not just run Windows?
I've tried off and on for the past 8 years to dump Windows in favor of Linux at home, and for various reasons, keep coming back to MS. I've got Gentoo running for my mail/web/file server needs, and it works great. The desktops, however, are a different story. Some big "issues":
- personal finance. Yeah, I tried Gnucash, multiple versions, and it's simply not on the same playing field as Microsoft Money. At the end of the day, I want to be able to launch the app, click a few buttons, and have my daily transactions downloaded and my bill payments transmitted. Being able to forecast my account balance 60 or 90 days out is extremely useful as well.
- kids. At first it was Jumpstart games, now it's Civ4, NWN, and iTunes. With two teenagers in the house who just want have the same stuff their friends have, Frozen Bubble is not an acceptable answer to "Linux needs games". An iTunes, yeah, it's DRM, but I can dump $10/month into each of their "allowance" accounts, and they can buy what they want, and I don't worry about the RIAA coming to the door.
- photos. My wife loves her digital camera, photo printer, and scrapbooking software. Being able to plug the camera in and have a wizard walk her through importing the photos and organizing them is HUGE.
- time. I'm a DBA, and I work with computers all day long, both MS and Linux. After 9 hours, I've had enough. I don't want to go home and have to tinker with more "stuff". Automatic Update keeps my OS patched. AVG downloads its own updates. The AdBlock plugin keeps my browsing pleasant. I can sit down and USE my computer, not fuss with config files or spend hours compiling source code.
I love Linux, but it's not ready to be running on every desktop out there. Using the right tool makes the job easier, and Linux just isn't the right tool for every job... Yet...
I'm in Minnesota as well, and have CFL "flood light" bulbs on the outdoor lights behind my house, and the long "shop light" bulbs in my garage. The CFL's outside come on instantly, and are at full brightness within a few seconds (even these past few nights!). The shop lights DO flicker badly for about a minute, but after that they're fine.
I downloaded and installed Vista from MSDN over the weekend, I've only tried two games so far. On the exact same machine, under XP, I could run Civ4 and Neverwinter Nights with full graphic details enabled, no problems. After installing Vista (fresh install, reformat, etc), Civ4 continues to run (you have to download the latest patch) without issue. Neverwinter Nights, on the other hand, is EXTREMELY choppy, even at the bottom end of the graphics settings.
Overall, I'm not greatly impressed. Lots of shiny stuff, and it "feels" new, but I just really don't see any improvement over XP.
You bought the UniBomber's shack?
Here in the US, the reaction to a sign stating "Right lane closed ahead" would be two-fold:
- 25% of the drivers seeing the sign would be confused, coming to a near stop on the freeway while they ponder the meaning
- 25% would dive to the breakdown lane, accelerating around everyone so that they can be the first on in line at the merge point
- 25% will do nothing, staying in the right lane until they reach the closure point, then will sit there with a turn signal blinking, waiting for someone to let them over.
- 25% will sit there frustrated, watching all of this take place, wishing they had some sort of mini-nuke system with which to dispatch the other 75%
Boy, those bastards at Nintendo really screwed up. I mean, come on, they radically changed the interface for no good reason, there was nothing wrong with the old one.
I've not used the new Office yet, but give it a chance. It might actually be BETTER than what you're used to. Change is good.
Apparently you haven't been to Minnesota yet this year. This winter SUCKS!!! It's 6:53am in JANUARY, and it's friggin 35 degrees outside... Damned El Nino...
The 2" clearance and the 3/4" thresholds will be a problem. Chair and table legs, not a problem, at least not on a smooth floor. My Roomba has no problem cleaning under the dining room table. It happily spins itself in various directions until it finds a way through the chair legs.
I'm not sure I'd make such a generalization... The company I work for (major provider of certification exams) employs 20,000 people, so I'd consider this a "large corporation". I'm in the office at 6:30am, out by 3:30, Monday-Friday. We have one outage per month, during which new code is moved into our production environments, maintenance is done, etc. Myself and three other production DBA's rotate through these outages, so I am "on call" one weekend every 4 months to support these outages. Aside from that, I RARELY work outside of the M-F 6:30-3:30 window....
I had to transfer funds into the Paypal account to bring the balance up to zero. When that cleared, I just removed all of the credit card and bank accounts that were linked. On the profile page, there is a link to "Close Account". It wouldn't let me close it until the balance was zero and there were no pending transactions.
No point. For the $30 that they stole from me, it's not worth my time to spend an hour or more talking to some drone who can't help me anyway. Getting that money back wouldn't change the fact that they decided to stomp on a long-time customer with no explanation whatsoever. I understand fraud happens and disputes come up, but they asked me for specific pieces of information, information which I freely provided to them. The delivery of the merchandise was confirmed, the buyer says he is satisfied and did not initiate a dispute, nor did he receive this supposed refund that Paypal claims to have made. I fulfilled my obligations as the seller, and yet they took it upon themselves to decide that fraud had occurred, and took my money. I was given no explanation as to why that decision was made, or exactly what the problem might have been, they simply acted as judge, jury, and executioner, sorry Mr. Customer, but screw you. There's simply no way Paypal is going to keep me as a customer now.
Up until 2 weeks ago, I would have said the same thing. I've used Paypal for about 4 years, bought/sold hundreds of items on eBay, paying exclusively through Paypal. I even had the debit card, which I used to take advantage of their cash-back for Visa purchases.
In July, I sold an item on eBay, got paid for it, life went on. Second week of September, I get an email from Paypal saying that they had reason to believe this item was paid for with fraudulent funds, and asked me to provide tracking info, etc., for the item sold. I did, gave them everything they asked for.
Two weeks later, I get another email from them, stating:
"We have conducted a review of a payment that you received. In this case, returning the funds to the sender was determined to be the appropriate action, and we have completed a reversal of the payment. Good selling practices, like trackable shipping, prompt shipment, and communication between buyer and seller help prevent disputes."
Huh? I provided them with a tracking number, delivery was confirmed, item was shipped the same day payment was received. I contacted the buyer (this person has purchased multiple items from me, I have no reason to not trust them), asked them if they knew anything more than I did. They have not received any refund from Paypal, and in fact didn't even know there was a problem.
So, who was my money "returned" to? Repeated emails to Paypal have been ignored, so I've closed my account, I'll never use Paypal again.
Damn, I was going to mention The Relic...
It's interesting to see this topic posted now, because this weekend I made the switch to using Google's services exclusively. For the past 5 years, I've been running my own proxy server (Squid) that I used from home and work, content filtering with Dansguardian (2 kids at home), my own private Jabber server (MSN, AIM, and Yahoo transports), my own email server (family domain name registered and hosted), my own webmail page (Squirrelmail), my own calendar page, etc.. It's become increasingly difficult to find the time to keep up with patches, spam filtering, firewall rules, watching for SSH attacks. It used to be fun running my own servers, but now it's just another chore, one that has become less and less appealing. Combine that with the increasing cost of electricity, it's hard to justify the hassle anymore. Therefore, I decided to just dump it all in favor of Google. I created GMail accounts for myself, my wife, and both kids, purchased web/mail hosting, setup mail forwarding to send anything addressed to our old domain to GMail. GAIM now talks to talk.google.com, my Jabber server has been shut down. Google Calendar is much more powerful, and visually appealing, than the calendar app I was using. For a proxy server, I decided I just don't care anymore. The kids are old enough now that I don't need the content filtering provided by Dansguardian.
I know some of you on here are going to bring up Big Brother, the NSA, "whatever spy we're afraid of this week", and that's fine. Maybe I'm suffering from an extreme case of apathy, but I truly just don't care anymore. I fight with security and performance issues all day at work, I just don't have the ambition to do the same at home anymore. I now have a whole new set of integrated tools to use, they look better than the old ones, work better than the old ones, and are just as accessible from anywhere I need to use them.
Then how do you explain this?s s.nbc.dateline/index.html
http://www.nascar.com/2006/news/opinion/04/06/cro
NASCAR is a motor sport, just like F1, or IRL/Cart, or the Rolex series, all of which I am a fan. There are plenty of "furriners and Frenchie-sounding names" in all of those, and there is in fact a black driver in NASCAR, Bill Lester.
I'll back that up. On January 17th, my boss and I "had words" and I quit my job as Senior DBA. I agreed to stay until the 24th to document some processes and transfer knowledge to one of the junior DBA's. I did three interviews on the 25th, was offered two of those positions on the 26th, accepted one, got a counter-offer from the other, then a counter-counter-offer from the first, started work there on the 30th, again as a Senior SQL DBA. I don't think it would have been this easy a year ago.
Let's see, where to start...
1. About a year ago, my boss was looking at options for bug tracking/issue tracking software. Knowing I could save the company some money, and implement a great product, I recommended Bugzilla. I even installed it and let other people in I.T. take it for a spin. Mr. Boss didn't even LOOK at it, and we ended up spending $15K on a commercial product that uses an ActiveX control as a front-end, forcing us (i.e. ME) to use Internet Explorer. Choice between an excellent, free, browser-based product that we could modify to suit our needs, or a commercial, closed, platform-specific and expensive product - we go with the expensive product.
2. A few months ago, we as a group decided that we needed a better way to centralize documentation and information, some way to make it easy for us and our users to find and maintain documentation. Perfect use for a wiki! I installed and configured TWiki, showed a few people how to use it, and we started populating it. Everybody loved it! Two weeks ago, Mr. Boss announces that we're installing Sharepoint and migrating all of our documentation there. Reason? He saw it used at a Great Plains conference that he attended. The wiki is running on a retired 350Mhz desktop machine, serving content to approximately 40 users. Think Sharepoint will run on such a machine?
3. In response to our users' increasing complaints about SPAM, we decided that we needed to implement a server-based filtering mechanism. My recommendation - stick a Linux box in front of Exchange, running Exim, Spamassassin, and ClamAV, the same combination that makes me very happy at home. Nope, we spent money on a commercial content filter (can't remember the product name). Our email admin is adding FROM addresses to the blacklist on that thing every day. Explaining that this is an exercise in futility, because FROM addresses are forged and random, passes cleanly above his head, and he merrily continues adding addresses to the blacklist.
It just goes on and on and on. The mentality that money must be spent to solve these problems astounds me.
Why do I care? I care because I have to work with these products as part of my job. I care because I see it as useless spending on the part of my employer. I care because these products are NOT the best solution to the problem, but we're happy to throw money away on them. It is EXTREMELY frustrating to sit back and watch, but trying to argue the point gets you labelled a zealot.
AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!
I see NOTHING in Firefox, or IE for that matter. According to my proxy server logs, the combination of SquidGuard and Dansguardian are preventing these things from even reaching my browsers. Shucks...
I'm the lead programmer in a group of five, doing primarily internal SQL Server, ASP, and PHP development. We don't use a formal check-in/out system. We use Twiki, with a series of perl scripts that are run from cron jobs, to monitor all of our SQL databases and ASP/PHP pages. The SQL objects are monitoring using a "snapshot" of the sysobjects tables, comparing that to the current sysobjects table - any objects that are different get scripted off and published into Twiki. ASP/PHP files are compared using simple file compare, and published to Twiki if changes are detected. Twiki handles all the versioning and diff functionality for us, along with giving us the ability to do keyword searches. Want to know how many places the field named "vchCustomerName" is reference? Just do a keyword search in Twiki, and you see every stored proc, PHP page, trigger, etc.
Setup a Linux box, connect your webcam, and install a package called "motion" (http://motion.sourceforge.net/). You'll have motion-sensing webcam system that will give you your monitoring capabilities. Also works great as a DIY security system.
Ditch the Benadryl, pick up an herbal supplement called Valerian - take one or two when you need it, about an hour before bedtime, you'll sleep like a log and won't wake up drowsy.
Actually, I AM using Jabber. My entire family, and most of my friends, all use my private Jabber server. Combine that with Gaim, and I've not had to suffer through the MSN client for quite some time. Life is good...
http://clamav.elektrapro.com/
Work for me, has for several months now...