EGOPOLY

Kodak has gold CD-R and DVD-R media that will last a long time and not degrade.

Worth looking at for the digital family photo album.

More support, here from Om Malik, for my “single purpose gadgets are always way (way way) better” position.

If I could find counter examples, I would post them. Really!

Apple has rolled out intel processors on consumer desktops (Mac Mini and iMac), and on the pro notebook line (MacBook Pro). It seems pretty clear that the consumer notebook will be called “macbook.”

What will the professional desktop line be called? This is the successor to the Power Mac G5.

It can’t be called G6, or “Power” anything because it’s not a PowerPC chip.

My guesses:

• Mac Pro
• Macintosh Pro
• Macintosh
• Mac Maxi (haha!)

Dell used to be my favorite computer brand, since about 1994. They had cheap stuff, without all the stupid “enhancements” (read: BIOS additions that slow down boot-up and need special drivers in the OS) that Compaq, HP and IBM loved so much.

But in the past two years, the love has turned to hate. We bought a lot of Dells for work, both for people’s desks and for our servers. The desktop machines have been croaking left and right: out of a total of maybe 30 machines, we’ve had at least 10 catastrophic hardware failures, either motherboards, power supplies or disks in two years. To me, that’s horrible.

The servers have been a little more reliable (only 3-4 failures among 80 servers), but the recent new servers we got (1850 series) are unbelievable power and heat hogs, compared to the previous generation 1750 series. In a data-center class machine, power and heat are the two most important specs you care about: it’s typical of Dell these days to not understand the customer needs.

Then there’s the crapware, if you buy a Dell with Windows on it. Come on guys, I want a computer not an advertising platform for stuff I will never buy.

Finally, there is the web site. Dell was a pioneer in letting customers self-configure exactly what they want. But now there are so many different entry points, it’s very difficult to create the same system twice in a row. Then there is the home user, small business, large business, etc. You can get significantly different prices depending on how you identify yourself. It telegraphs to me that Dell is pretty much out to trick me into paying too much, and I have to waste a lot of time digging for a better deal. I almost hate to bring it up, but Apple manages to allow customized configs that are easy to reproduce.

So, later Dell. At work, we’re probably switching to HP or generic boxes for people’s desktops. We have RFPs out to server vendors for blade servers or whatever. Rackable looks pretty good to me, DC power with 88 servers per rack. Or we might just go with no-name boxes for them, too.

YouTube appears to be down, and apparently has been all morning. That’s the downside of outrageous success and traffic growth: when something goes wrong, everybody notices. And they all keep pounding on your site as you try to bring it back up. I hope they bring it back soon, I need to see the latest episode of ask a ninja.

This has nothing to do with anything. Just the odometer reading from my car the other morning.

I have a generally vanilla FC3 system. I wanted to update to PHP 5 because of security issues in PHP. These are the extra things I had to do to get it to work.

First, my configure line is this:

./configure –with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs –with-mysql

Problems:

I had to make links for libjpeg and libpng:

cd /usr/lib

ln -s libjpeg.so.6 libjpeg.so

ln -s libpng.so.3 libpng.so

These are packages I needed to add:

yum -y install libpng-devel

yum -y install freetype-devel

yum -y install libc-client-devel

yum -y install unixODBC-devel

yum -y install aspell-devel

I actually had some trouble with postgresSQL connector, so I turned it off. I don’t use it myself, so that doesn’t really matter.

I tried to replicate the configure line from my php4. Big mistake. All I got were segfaults and link errors. I re-configured with the minimalist line above. Now everything is happy.

I got a Belkin Pre-N (MIMO) wireless router a few months ago. I wanted something that would have better range; my house is old and I guess they used some kind of super-dense lead-infused plaster back then. Because my old router couldn’t even reach more than one room away.

Ever since then, I haven’t been able to do video iChat with my sister (from my house), or with my kids (when they are at home and I am at work.)

Also, when I would play the on-line computer game Counter-Strike, it would be all stuttering and horrible. I couldn’t even play it.

Eventually I figured out that the router has an integrated firewall that prevents flooding and denial-of-service attacks. That was causing both problems. The router saw “too many” UDP packets coming at it, and kept throttling the connection, which is not cool for a video feed or a game. You have to disable this feature on the administration UI, and then you have to power-cycle the router.

Now everything is fine.

Spotlight, Apple’s answer to Google Desktop (or possibly Apple’s answer to Longhorn’s Vista’s never-completed über file system), just doesn’t work. It’s garbage. It eats up my system’s memory and CPU at random intervals. It chugs along super-slowly and can’t even find anything most of the time.

Often, I will be looking for a file, and I can with my human eyes and hands find it faster than spotlight. Which is easy because a lot of times spotlight can find it like NEVER. Seriously.

Maybe it’s just me; maybe because I have 30,000 files adding up to 115GB, Spotlight goes non-linear.

So don’t run out and buy Tiger because you believed Jobs’ demo of it. The reality distortion field still works.