Despite the fact that Intel has the server market practically sown up (in the x86 space), the Pentium 4 architecture is inefficient and inelegant. So, when it came to buying a pair of new servers for infrastructure services, I decided to investigate the AMD-based offerings. From the Tier 1 vendors Dell, IBM, and HP all now have Opteron-based offerings.
Amazon posted that Nintendo’s Wii console could be pre-ordered from today at 9am. The product wasn’t actually listed until about 9:40, at which point it sold out within, literally, seconds. In the time it took to mis-enter my email address once (d’oh!) and then re-enter it correctly, all units had been sold.
I wonder what the size of Amazon’s allocation was?
Here’s a weird thing: I’ve always thought Apple’s hardware design was excellent. Up until now, all of my laptops have been from Sony (first an SR11k, then a Z1RSP – both from before everyone realised how evil Sony actually are) whose design quality is generally very high (and with excellent keyboards on the models I bought) – so the bar is set very high.
But I don’t think that’s it: It’s Apple’s fault.
So, after months of prevaricating, I finally bit the bullet and ordered myself a shiny new MacBook Pro direct from Apple.
So, you’ve encoded all of your CDs (still illegal in the UK) onto your computer, or even a storage array, and you realise that the filenames don’t always match the track title.
Who says you never read anything useful on slashdot…
Back before everyone left Zeus, Vivek and I had an ongoing bet to see if either of us could find the components on eBay to build a terabyte storage array for less than £1000.
At about the same time, I saw a review of the Buffalo TeraStation – which looked like a great product, but was priced at around £800 at the time. With the falling cost of storage, it’s now available for just over £500. I had decided that I wanted a terabyte storage array of my own, and I wanted one that ran Linux so that I could add additional services and install my own programs.
There’s a bugette in TWA that leads to cosmetic display problem on Mozilla:
If the post is longer than 100 lines, the remainder should be replaced with “[...]“, which is fine. However, if the post length is less than that, “undefined” is instead displayed, which is confusing.
Possibly the greatest problem of using UNIX-like systems all the time, is that it’s a little bit jarring to perform the context-switch into the Windows-like world of graphical browsers and suchlike.
Sometimes, though, the muscle-memory of the fingers outpace the, possibly temporarily distracted (hey, it’s been known to happen… occasionally), thought processes of the author. This is generally not a problem unless after, say, typing a significant amount of text for a long post, you realise just a fraction of a second too late that ctrl+w does not erase the word under the cursor in Mozilla 🙁
Indeed, even the excellent Tabbrowser Extentions‘ “Undo Close Tab” feature didn’t save me – as it successfully re-opened a virgin “Write Post” page.
I would encourage every WordPress user to quickly surf over to twilightuniverse.com and download the AutoSave plugin. Right now. What are you waiting for? Shoo!
As I mentioned before, I recently started playing with a Slim Devices Squeezebox and the SlimServer software that goes with it.
This I’m hugely impressed with – not only because it’s written in platform-neutral perl (and thus, just worked out of the box with my IRIX64 Octane. The IRIX O2 that I’m running it from now took a little hacking – but that’s perl’s fault rather than Slim Devices).