Archive for the 'Commentary' Category

Words to Live By

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 7, 2008
in Commentary and Daily Grind
. 0 Comments

Late to bed and late to wake will keep you long on money and short on mistakes.
- Aaron McGruder

I think too many people lack a proper understanding of the kind of totally-focused attention that can be devoted to a task in the calm of night.

Then again if everyone did it, it would be just like daytime hours, wouldn’t it? Ok, scratch that… night sucks, go to bed early!

AT&T TXT via Email Address

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 26, 2008
in Announcements, Commentary, Daily Grind, Internet and Techno-Babble
. 2 Comments

Just in case anyone else is wondering how to send an SMS text message to their AT&T wireless phone via email, the address apparently has changed through their recent acquisitions. Googling around only revealed the prior (non-working) domains, so I had to resort to the AT&T support page.

Horribly worded and a bit confusing as to which category you fall under, if you’ve signed up to “the new at&t” (as opposed to the prior AT&T, Cingular, etc.), your address is 10digitphonenumber@txt.att.net.

Happy texting!

Rockstar Games on Steam

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 8, 2008
in Commentary, Cool and Daily Grind
. 1 Comment

This only makes me slightly less happy than my last post!

Rockstar Games on Steam

Year-End Browser Stats

Published
by
Chris Meller
on December 31, 2007
in Commentary, Incoherent Code, Internet, Microsoft, Techno-Babble and Windows
. 1 Comment

Ed Bott published fresh browser stats this morning, and I thought I would comment on some aspects…

The point that Ed makes about the lack of increase in Firefox’s market share is disappointing, but are we really surprised? I’ve said for quite some time that Firefox is geared towards the tech enthusiasts among us and that it really offers no hard benefits for your average every-day user.

Back when Mozilla was competing only with IE6 (we’ll continue ignoring Opera and Safari), it offered great benefits like tabbed browsing and native popup blocking, etc. Unfortunately, by the time it caught any ground, Microsoft had already usurped a great deal of its momentum by releasing the most-needed features in IE7. Sure, Firefox’s amazing extension support offers a lot of flexibility to those of us who consider ourselves power users on the web, but does the average person who only has one computer need 10 different bookmark syncing extensions or the inspection capabilities of Firebug? No…

The most interesting thing I see in these stats is the market penetration of IE7.

I run some basic stats on all our sites at work (mainly to let me know what cool stuff I can and cannot use), and IE6 still has an 80% lead over IE7 in our user base. Since we’re getting traffic from totally technically inept users, that’s a somewhat unfortunate statistic. Even more distressing is that IE has a 95% lead over all other browsers combined.

Clearly both Mozilla and Microsoft have done a fair job marketing their newer products to technical users who keep up with such things, but they’ve failed miserably at extolling the virtues to the average user — and that’s something that needs to change.

How do we do that? I haven’t a clue… I develop the stuff, I don’t market it.

The really interesting question, given the recent announcement that IE8 has passed the ACID2 test, is whether this will matter in a year. If all browsers follow standards properly, do we care which browser anyone uses? Of course if IE8 doesn’t drastically improve upon the market adoption of IE7 thus far, it may take another 10 years before everyone is seeing the web as it was intended to be seen…

Kernel Madness

Published
by
Chris Meller
on December 27, 2007
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Internet, Techno-Babble and Work
. 1 Comment

I upgraded Zend Core for Oracle on our soon-to-be production webserver at work tonight so it was running the latest build of PHP 5.2, and while I was at it I decided to make sure all its other packages were current.

It was quite sad, but the kernel was over a year out of date, so I had to kill our glorious 385 day uptime to restart the machine. While I was checking the latest version installed, I found this:


[root@web ~]# rpm -qa | grep kernel-
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.2.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.0.2.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.0.6.EL
kernel-utils-2.4-13.1.105
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.EL
kernel-2.6.9-67.EL
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.0.2.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.0.6.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL
kernel-hugemem-devel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.6.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL
kernel-doc-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
kernel-smp-devel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-67.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL
[root@web ~]#

I could be wrong, but I think that may be a bit excessive… By my count, that’s 9 individual kernel versions, each with their respective dependent packages. Wow…