February 2007 Archives

Further Tales of the Weekend Warriors

Friday night my neighbor and I decided to head off for some camping. Our destination was just above the town of Ophir a small village that once was a booming mining town on the west side of the Oquirrh Mountains.

My house is at the north base of the lake mountains, with a great view of the Wasatch front and the Oquirrh Mountains. Many times have I sat in my yard, longing to climb these peaks that are so temptingly close. To this end my neighbor and I have begun to set up plans for how to best access this area.

Continued
Photos
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Local Geek Chalain has a great Vista Review, entitled So Beautiful, So Disturbing

One of the better reads I've had about it recently. A teaser of this great writeup follows:

She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night. She seems to know this, and smiles at me again, but apparently she's serious about making breakfast. She turns and strides confidently from the room. As she does, I see for the first time the large Microsoft logo splayed across her back. My stomach lurches as I suddenly remember everything.

Windows Vista. I bought a new computer yesterday... and it came with Windows Vista.

Go ahead, read the rest

And now that I've presented on a lot of the included features of Freeside It's nice to show the latest version is now announced stable. Read the changelog here

Now I can work on getting a few more commits in. If you've been using 1.5.8 or earlier, you should seriously look at the great features that 1.7 can offer.
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So many of us have at some point wanted to reverse map a database schema. As I was fighting with DOT syntax last week I decided to look around for a way to slurp in my Postgres schema into Omni Graffle on my mac. Why? Because Omni Graffle is a really really nice looking application.

Well, I finally found DBGraffle4 .

Pros:
* Free
* Works

Cons:
* Slow as a dog (probably mostly applescript's fault)
* Default does not allow password based auth (had to edit the python, ugh)
* Had to install pygres
* You need to have the UML stencils selected for it to work
* You cannot click away from Omni Graffle, it'll die (applescript loses focus)

In the process of looking, I also found a copy somebody made that works with MySQL, which could come in handy.

It's simple, has it's warts, but it worked, and was the only tool of it's kind I could find. So I figured it might help others here.
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Following Phil's post figured I'd chime in and show why I have always:

• Used a nick (Jayce^)
• Have had trouble getting my name as a tld
• Gave my kids a little more unique names
  • Garion - 0
  • Kayla - 153
  • Brynn - 6

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 1,986 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Not sure who did this one, but chalk up another one for Jay Maynard (isn't it just crazy that I knew that guys name, and yet I can't remember the actors names that play PC and Mac?)..

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For this weeks PLUG meeting, I'll be presenting on Understanding and Extending Freeside

Freeside is an Open Source Billing system originally written for ISP's. While it does an excellent job at its stated task, I'll show you what you need to know to extend Freeside into a custom billing application and provisioning system for ASP's and other markets.

*Come learn about the nuances you need in a mature billing system
*Hear buzzwords such as Sarbox, PCI compliance, and more
*Why you should avoid reinventing the wheel
*How easy it is to plug into the Free-side.

Time: 7:30
Date: 2/14/07
Location: United Online Web Services (see plug.org for map)

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Have you ever wondered what people do between rounds at a paintball event? Wonder no longer as you witness the atrocities that can happen.

Watch as 'Danger Dan' on my team takes a grenade from a super slingshot at point blank range .

Yes, we're that crazy. Today's insanity brought to you courtesy of Team DesertEdge, and SpecOps Paintball.
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Just saw this post by Steve Jobs on DRM

It's nice to see somebody like him promoting DRM-free music. iTunes DRM is an annoyance that many of us geeks view as just another evil to avoid. With that, I loved his quote:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat

While I'm sure many of his opinions have been encouraged by recent events, such as European nations blocking iTunes DRM, I think he does a good job of raising the concerns iTunes has had to deal with to get the licensing rights.

For a company well known for locking in who can use their applications/os/music, it's nice to hear them talk about the desire to embrace a DRM free market.
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Richard Stiennon has two wonderful pictures over on his blog about Why Windows is less secure than Linux

The two pictures demonstrate the system calls needed for the web server to serve a single static html page, with a single picture. (Apache on Linux, IIS on Windows).

The Windows map gives me the willies.