May
23
2006
This Pure Ruby Sparklines implementation got my attention – unlike other Ruby graphics packages, it does not need RMagick, and thus not ImageMagick, sparing the installer considerable effort and misery. The source of that misery is the long list of dependencies; now of course a great positive of the open source world is that [...]
May
17
2006
Background
In a project we have here at Oasis Digital, our customer relies on the log shipping feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to keep some secondary databases, reporting databases, up to date in almost-real-time: every few minutes a transaction log backup runs, then at a slightly longer interval, every 5-15 minutes, a restore of those [...]
May
17
2006
I’ve recently been working on having fewer accounts, at fewer banks, fewer lines of credit, etc. This is in an attempt to reduce the accidental complexity of my life, as well as reduce the likelihood of the identity theft.
Imagine my joy, in reading Will Shipley’s E-TRADE nightmare, that one of my former accounts that got [...]
May
15
2006
This is a very late post. Back in January 2003, I got a major PC upgrade: two 19″ LCD monitors and a dual-DVI video card to drive them. This was somewhat less common (and much more expensive) in 2003 than today. The monitors are “Samsung SyncMaster 191T”. I took this photo at [...]
May
13
2006
A while back, Weiqi posted about Eric Burke’s comments about Wikis; one point being that “WikiWordLooksStupidAndAreNotNormal”. I mostly agree with that, and the Wiki tool we’ve been using recently, MediaWiki, supports non-WikiWords trivially. Eric is working on new Wiki software that sounds quite compelling.
The notion of needing some new software with which to [...]
May
12
2006
I’m going to RailsConf 2006 in Chicago next month:
The interesting thing about this is that I signed up before I knew how popular it would be – it sold out in a few days, so the pent-up demand must have been remarkable. More remarkable is that it sold out long before the full [...]