Category: Geek

birdhouse hosting has been in slow-growth, word-of-mouth mode for six months now and I’ve learned a few lessons, found out where my target audience is, and narrowed down the focus of the business. Time to crank it up a notch. Just got a business license and a birdhouse bank account, and made the decision to invest in a faster, beefier server, to be located in a data center with redundant connections, power supplies, hardware monitoring, etc.

In the midst of research, realized that it made more sense to lease a server and bandwidth together. Over the next few weeks I’ll be migrating accounts and systems over to a new 1.7GHz P4 blade running RedHat 9 at Sonic.net. I’ve been pretty committed to OS X hosting, but the lease I’m getting through Sonic is too good to pass up, and most of the hosting software in ISP-land is specifically geared toward Linux. In the future, when the business is fully self-sustaining, I’ll want to own the server, and at that point will likely switch back to an XServe, but for now it just makes sense for birdhouse to go this route.

Power outage? Hah!

Our power plant facilities consist of utility power backed by a 24 liter V-12 twin turbocharged Detroit Diesel generator, which generates 1024 horsepower and 750,000 watts of power.

Unhappy with your DSL speed? Physically separate your LinkSys router from the modem by 2-3 feet and power cycle. Amazingly, we got 50% more speed this way. Apparently, there is some kind of body chemistry between LinkSys routers and some modems (ours is Zyxel) – an EMF bleed that interoperates in just the wrong way. We’ve always stacked these things before, no problem. But no longer. Amazing.

The trouble with a job where you serve 35 masters is that each master thinks their priorities are more important than everybody else’s. My task list is carefully prioritized in a queue that stretches out approximately two years into the future (and you wondered why the J-School homepage looks as stylistically embarrassing today as it did the day I started).

Some needs are long term, while others are urgent/sudden, come out of nowhere, and have to trump other tasks in the queue. Case in point: A recent request from the Admissions dept to put a database-backed survey online for our alumni. Dozens of questions in mixed input types, thousands of respondents expected, immediate result tabulation required.

Oh, and I had 48 hours to get it online. Knew I wouldn’t be building this one from scratch. Surfed around and found dozens of survey systems, but it seemed like all the really good ones were in the $200-$300 range. I don’t have that kind of money to spend. I don’t have any money to spend. It had to be free.

The tedious part of making this sort of selection is that you have to spend real time with a system before you understand it well enough to reject or accept it. And you have to be confident enough in its longevity that you want to deploy it long-term (so you don’t end up with mixed CMSs, or mixed survey systems, etc.)

Finally landed phpESP via SourceForge. Its back-end is a bit finicky (not to mention ugly), but it’s very flexible and powerful. Mix essay questions with multiple choice, radio, combo, text field answers. Single page or multi-page. CSS-based styling. No limits. Very core. So good, in fact, now I’m considering replacing my home-brew quiz system with ESP. eWeek reviews ESP.

Once again, the hard work of total strangers saves the day.

Gadget lust strikes: SlimDevices have seriously updated the SliMP3 and renamed it “SqueezeBox” (apologies to The Who?) Now it’s got built-in Wi-Fi, digital outputs (coax and optical) and plays uncompressed WAV/AIFF). Hrmm… on the other hand, we haven’t hooked up the SliMP3 since we moved, which has encouraged us back into CDs and LPs — their own reward. Have to rethink the meaning of “essential upgrade.”

Slim is donating 10% of profits to the EFF – can’t argue with that. On a similar note, received an offer tonight, buried among the seemingly bottomless pile of credit card offers, to get a LinuxFund credit card; a portion of each purchase would go to funding open source programming efforts. At first I laughed. Seemed like hearing a Led Zeppelin song as soundtrack for a Cadillac commercial. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like Aikido; turning capitalist momentum against itself. Hrmm… the APR is same as mainstream cards, why not switch?

Just getting up to speed on the recent broadcast flag ruling, and it’s as depressing as I had feared. Nutshell version: Devices capable of handling HDTV streams or signals must incorporate an FCC-approved encryption module by July 2005. In other words, government-mandated and controlled PC and television design.

“the order “totally eliminates the ability to send that (HDTV) data over a PCI bus to a Firewire port or to a digital VHS recorder–except in analog format.”

This means you can’t use something like a Hauppauge card to record a digital TV stream to your hard drive — that would be giving the consumer way too much flexibility in the way they work with media.

And if you don’t care about HDTV, remember that this is a slippery slope. The consumer’s ability to work with recorded media is now regulated by the government, and enforced by hardware vendors. HDTV first, anything the entertainment lobbies want regulated next.

The question is, what exactly will happen to media in the presence of the broadcast flag? As I understand it, you’ll still be able to record, but that recording will only be playable on the same device that did the recording. That means no taping Trigger-Happy TV and lending the tape to a friend. You get the picture.

Get your HDTV receiver or capture card now, before they’re gubmint-crippled.

bIPlog has more.

Next version of Windows previewed to developers. Executive summary: Copy Apple, copy Apple. Copy Be, copy Apple. Easy peasy!