RouseWorld | Main -- May 2003 Archives

The flip side of prosumer

The flip side of the "prosumer problem," is easy -- BSD. Apple's use of BSD makes each Mac a true general purpose computer, not an appliance.

P.S. I love you America

Spam is getting pretty inventive, I almost filed the following email under the "paranoia" category — but then I got two of them. Still, good work from the industry ... except I wonder who would really reply to this "Vendor Needed" request:

The first casualty of work is free time

Not too many entries lately, I've been bogged down with a project for my day job — a little PHP page that makes LDAP calls to a directory of Johnston County, NC phone numbers.

There is still some dicey CSS issues I have to deal with — the page is a wreck under Safari, for example — but I'm happy with the speed. The first prototype (done in Perl, instead of PHP) look nearly 30 seconds to complete a lookup, now the page load should be the bottleneck for most users.

It really shouldn't have taken me this long to finish this, but I was hung up with sorting multidimensional arrays. LDAP returns results in the form of a three-dimensional array, and I didn't have a clear idea of how I was going to sort something like that. I looked for example code (of course) but got sidetracked by a few examples that proved to be bad examples (at least for me, someone better at PHP or Perl would have probably been fine).

Anyway, I'd appreciate some feedback on the look of the page ... if anyone has some free time.

The back catalogue

I've gone back and put all the old-old RouseWorld entries into the MT system. I'm also planning to change the look of the pages a bit, if nothing else to move the archives list down to the bottom since it is so long now.

Working late

It is always a struggle for me to keep updating regularly. I don't like talking about myself, and if I'm too busy at work to look for things to write about and links to share ... well there isn't much else to say.

So anyway, right now I'm staging a server, setting up a new machine to replace an existing server that is a bit on the slow side. The 'new' machine is actually our old main file server, abandoned after we went to the new Apple Xserves for most of our file serving. The 'new' machine, and the machine it replaces, are both Sun boxes -- the other standard choice for servers here at work.

I have to say, Sun's are harder to setup than XServes -- and I'm starting to think that that isn't cool. Continue reading "Working late"

re: Working Late

Looking back on the "Working late" post, it seems like I'm a big pro-GUI dude, and that really isn't true. So let's bash Sun again and talk about GUIs that aren't better than the command line (and a few that are).

And that means going back to directory services.