Angus Thinks

Category: Internet Stuff

  • SF publisher Jim Baen passed away

    I read today that Jim Baen of Baen books fame has passed away.

    I think I have more Baen SF books on my shelf than any other single publisher and to a great extent Baen Books the publisher was always strongly connected to Jim Baen the man. Baen have published some of my all time favourite books (including Bujold and Weber) and their approach to electronic publishing is by far the most rational, sensible and intelligent of any publisher.

    Although I never met him online or off; I feel, somehow, that reading the books that his company published changed the way that I think, and to a certain extent who I am.

    My sympathies are with his family and friends and my hope is that the spirit he brought to Baen Books will continue long into the future.

    [David Drake on Jim Baen]
    [Baen Books]

  • Searching for an Oracle

    Recently I’ve been trying to set up a box to run Oracle again. There are enough SQLEditor users that Oracle support is important.

    Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.

    So the next step was to download and install a copy.

    First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.

    Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).

    My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.

    Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.

    Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.

    Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).

    Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).

    Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.

    The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.

  • 3g umts router

    A Review of the
    Cisco-Linksys & Vodafone 3G/UMTS Wireless LAN Router

    It’s a 3g router, so now you can connect a small network to the internet anywhere you can get vodafone 3g connectivity.

    Total price = 150 GBP + about 50 GBP/month which allows 1GB.

    It’s hideously expensive still but if you need this kind of thing you can now get it 🙂

  • Poetry and RFC968

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc968.txt

    An RFC in rhyme 🙂

    See also the complete collection of April 1st RFCs (at wikipedia)

  • PHP, trim and the non breaking space

    An odd thing occurred today, I was trying to do trim($string) on a string in php, but I kept getting strings back that appeared to have a space at the beginning, the exact thing that trim is supposed to remove. I carefully checked and the space was definitely found when I copied the result out to TextWrangler. Finally I tried substr($string,1) and then I got the answer, the new string started nbsp; the string I was trimming had  , a non-breaking space at the beginning, which trim doesn’t remove. A quick switch to str_replace and now my string doesn’t have a space at the beginning. 🙂

  • SQLEditor 1.1b3 & softpedia

    Today I released SQLEditor 1.1b3. I think this could very well be the last beta version before 1.1 final release.
    My first minor point release application!! (x.1)

    Originally I hadn’t intended to update all of the websites today, but they discovered it automatically so I uploaded the details onto the others so that everything was consistent.

    However one thing really stood out today: Softpedia. The people at Softpedia not only grabbed all of the details, they also created some screen shots and gave me a nice “No Spyware, adware or viruses certified” logo. And it wasn’t just a quick screen shot either, they must have spent some time using the application as can be seen on the screenshot page.

    I was amazed 🙂

    Obviously I should have some screenshots of my own to distribute and they should arrive with the new manual, but still, I was really suprised by this.

    And very grateful.

  • What the Orcs think of Multi-player

    http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-06-10&res=l

    From Penny-Arcade 🙂

  • Debian Sarge

    I realized that I’d managed to update to Sarge (v 3.1) mostly without noticing. I should have pinned my packages to woody (3.0) but didn’t realize, which meant that I went through the update process without actually noticing. This led to a number of odd problems. In particular I hadn’t disabled a number of backports, which led to difficulties with apache, php, mysql and postgresql. This happened because the ports were set up to target woody (3.0) rather than Sarge (3.1).

    However I have now properly upgraded to Sarge on marilac. Hopefully this will be a suitably satisfactory release and will provide many hours of happy uptime. 🙂

  • Forum for malcolmhardie.com

    Following the suggestions in this article, I’ve been considering forum software recently to offer customers (and others) somewhere to discuss SQLEditor.

    Currently I’m considering PunBB, because it seems to be simple, fast and well received by reviewers and users.

    PhpBB seems a popular choice but is probably a bit more than I actually need for this project.

  • No Osborne Effect?

    The Register has a new article up about the Osborne effect, a supposed problem that means that if you excessively pre-announce products then nobody buys the stuff that you’re selling right now. The article suggests that the whole idea is rubbish and that osborne was actually suffering from a totally different problem, Managment failure. Supposedly an executive found some old parts and spent a vast amount of money trying to put them into products, in the process wasting far more than the value of parts.

    Yet again Management failure causes a company to fail.

    [Article]