Tom's Insights - Week of 1/7/02

Week of January 7th, 2002

Most Recent : January 11/02
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Tuesday January 08, 2002

Amazing. Utterly amazing. It snows in Atlanta, the Florida panhandle experiences sub-zero temperatures, it snows in Greece and Turkey, and yesterday it was 7º C here in Saskatoon (that's about 47-48º F. for those uninitiated in the ways of Celcius).

No, I'm not going to use the "neon green" theme on my new web site. It's in place right now because I'm trying to learn how the author created certain effects and table spacings. I will likely use the theme I had up last week with some modifications. When am I shifting my site over? On the sage advice of my friend Moshe, when PHPNuke 5.4 is released. It's in closed beta at the moment, and should be released to the public in a few days. When I feel it's stable enough and feature complete, I'll shift things over. I suspect about a month. Which will give me plenty of time to experiment and dabble "under the hood". Why wait for 5.4? Because Moshe tells me that one of the drawbacks to PHPNuke (at least so far) is that upgrading your data across versions has some serious pitfalls. And if some of the back-room reports I've read are accurate, 5.4 will be worth waiting for; lots of changes and improvements.

Lemme see now... what else is new...

Ahhh. Happy Birthday Samba -- the product is 10 years old today! Congrats to Mr. Tridgell and all the other hardworking developers involved in the Samba Project.

And here's an excellent *NIX resource to bookmark for all you multi-OS system admins. Print out for your wall (I did!). It's published by UNIXguide.net. A treasure if you have to translate commands to an unfamiliar OS.

Speaking of URL's, here's a giggle for you -- everyone needs a giggle now and then, and this should do it. The original reference came to me through a mailing list. Here's the followed link: You Know You're a Geek When...

Chau.

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Friday January 11, 2002

I'm having a "been there, done that" kinda week. Nothing new, nothing terribly interesting, and most definitely nothing exciting. Just a week. And I don't mind telling you, it's almost impossible to find the motivation to put something up here when I have a week like this one. Hopefully the weekend will also bring some inspiration...

I stumbled across a fascinating two-part article today in my travels. It's called Virtual case study: How an airline can find efficiency with Unix. Some of the content is waayyy over my head, but it's a compelling read nonetheless -- at least it was for me. The author creates a virtual case study that involves creating a complete IT infrastructure for a [fictitious] startup airline. Some of the numbers cited are nothing short of breathtaking. Did you know it costs about $25 a minute to own a Boeing 757? And once you own it, it takes a staff of over 100 per airplane to operate -- just the airplane; that doesn't include luggage handlers, ticket agents, etc. And when said airplane is in the air, it drinks fuel at the rate of $2000 an hour. Yikes. Anyway, it's a good story, and the way the author puts all the pieces of the puzzle together is interesting. The articles are long, though, so don't sit down with them unless you have some time to spare.

The next release of Samba (2.2.3) is very close to fruitation. I'm guessing early next week. Don't let the point-release aspect deceive you -- major sections of code have been re-written over the last three or four months. In particular, the PDC functionality and the LDAP hooks. I'm running Wednesday's CVS branch on Phoenix right now, and it looks clean. I haven't toyed with the PDC stuff yet, but I will be next week.

Last but not least, PHP-Nuke beta 5.4 was released today. I'll be taking it for a spin this weekend. I'm going to try an upgrade just to see what breaks and what survives. Look for a report here on Sunday.

Cheers, and if you can't be good, be careful.

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