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Had to go back to this and found this little limerick in the article that just made me laugh.
There once was a CEO named Steve,
Who threw chairs at employees for reprieve,
He shot lasers from his eyes
To bury other guys,
And he'll Fucking KillIt took us over a year to finally get ours. The wife had been looking multiple times a day at several places (Walmart, Dell, etc) to see if anyone had any. One day, she was looking on Dell's website and they had some. She asked me if we could get it and of course, I said “Hells Yeah!”
Current Wii Status:
Wii Console
Two Wiimotes with stock(now) protective sleeves (which I have to say are awesome, because they are really well made).
Two Wheels for the Wii
One Classic Controller
Two Nunchuck attachments for the Wiimote
Games:
Wii Sports (came with the console)
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Guitar Hero Aerosmith
Super Mario Kart Wii (which has been the most played game so far)Since we bought the system, we've invested more money in it than I even care to admit. Feels nice having a console again tho.
Ok, so sometimes the comments on Slashdot are better than the actual article. I came across this in an article where Microsoft is supposedly allowing Vista users to downgrade to XP for another six months. This was one of the comments that just made me laugh like a little girl.
Glad to see another member of the “We'd tried Vista and guess what? It sucks.” club. Meetings are on Thursday,coffee and donuts are in the back. I have a nice little repair shop,therefore I try to keep up with the “latest and greatest” from MSFT because I know I'm going to have to work on them. I have run Vista Beta,Vista RTM,and Vista SP1. Here is my impressions:
SLOW,Jeebus Tap Dancing Christ is this pile slow! Sure if you run it on a dual core with 4Gb of RAM it boots okay(still slow,just not as slow) but lets be honest here:It is an OPERATING SYSTEM. Anybody remember that word? It means it should give programs access to your hardware and get the f*ck out of the way. Nobody buys the OS to stare at the desktop. When a 3GHz with 2Gb of RAM is not enough horse to keep the OS from being slow,you know there is a problem.
Networking: I have 5 machines on my home network-2 XP,1 Win98SE,1 Win2K,and the machine that was running Vista(now XP,Thank the Gods). Can you guess which one would “lose” the network? Which one that would have the network just “die” and refuse to connect without a hard reboot? Give you a hint,it wasn't the Win98SE. And don't even get me started on file transfers through the LAN. A file that would take Win2K a few minutes? Go get some coffee and start working on the crossword buddy.
I could go on and on with how many ways Vista sucked,but thankfully I don't have to. You know why? Because the folks bringing their Vista machines to me DON'T want Vista fixed. Nope. They want it gone. As in “I hate this thing,please get it off before I throw it out a window AAARRGGH!”. I know a guy who actually did that with his laptop after Vista seized and ate a document he had been working on for hours. Whizzed it out a 3rd story window,whipped out his CC,and went down the street and bought the nicest Macbook pro he could find.
For those that doubt go to CompUSA or Bestbuy and buy whatever Vista machine is on sale(like 90% of the public does),take it home,do NOT add any RAM or other upgrades,and see how quick you want to pull your hair out. I'm guessing it'll be like my average customer,that is 3 days. Sure you can build a tricked out multicore rig with sh*tloads of RAM and make it run Vista okay. But why the hell you you NEED to? It is an OS people! You know you have problems when I tell my customers Vista is an option on new builds and I get a loud “EEEEWWW!”,like I let a raunchy fart in front of them. Or when people bring in their machines and say “I hate my new machine,can you fix it?” and I say “You got Vista'd,didn't you.” and they hang their head and go “Yep. REAL hard. Please put XP on it,please!”.
So the few of you that got lucky and the moon and the stars were aligned and you did the Ballmer monkey dance and all the drivers worked beautifully,be happy. Believe me,you are the exception,NOT the rule. And sorry about the length,it is hard to put the offal of Vista into words without adding length. Otherwise you get “Liar! Vista is beautiful and you should do the Ballmer monkey dance of joy!” trolls coming out of the wordwork. Just put any of the problems I had with Vista into Google and you'll find I'm far from alone.
Another thing to mention here is verification of your backups. Its one thing to implement a backup strategy. However, it is INCREDIBLY important that you check your backups often to make sure you're getting a good backup.
About a month ago, we had a customer who lost power as a result of Hurricane Ike (if you didnt read about it, the resulting low pressure snuck around to hit most of the mideastern part of the country, knocking out power to many states including Ohio and its neighbors.). They were without power for several days. When the power came back on, they found they couldnt get into the software. After some research, I found that the database server installation had become corrupt. “Thats easy, just reinstall then restore from backups”, I said to myself and to my boss. Well, the database server installation wasnt the only piece that was broke. A bit more research found that the physical data files had torn pages as a result of losing power. The Friday before this customer lost power, I had made a change to the backup plan to resolve some disk space issues. The change I made worked one night, but not the following night. The only good backup we had was a day older than what we would have liked. I spent two days attempting to recover as much data as I could, but the end result was that I was not able to recover everything, and the customer had to re-key some data.
There are two lessons to be learned from this.
1) Make sure that your backups are working as expected. If you need to have an up to date copy, check your backups often and report problems with the backup as soon as you see them, especially with automated backup plans. Chances are, if caught soon enough, a manual backup can be taken and then the problem can be resolved.2) On mission critical systems, always make sure you have a battery backup device connected to your server. Also make sure that it is configured to shut down the system whenever it finds itself using the battery for power, instead of the electrical outlet. This will allow the system to power down normally, preventing any kind of loss of data. Once the system has shut down, UNPLUG it. Leaving the system plugged in can also sometimes result in a surge of power that the system doesnt expect, causing hardware failure.
If there is any one particular thing I hate about working in IT, its data recovery on a failed system. Backups make the job a lot easier. Had the power went out before the backups ran, there wouldnt have been anything I could have done other than what I did. However, had the battery backup been configured to work as suggested above, none of this would have happened.
IT LIVES!!!!!!!!!!! Nice to see you back.
The forum definitely needs some livening up. We're kinda at a standstill at the moment.
We are definitely working on some new stuff, so stay tuned for that. Right now Im working on an idea that we've had FOREVER and its just now starting to take shape. Ive got some sweet layouts done for the new project and am getting ready to start some serious coding to get the project completed. As we get closer to completion, I'll be happy to divulge the details, but until then, its hush hush.
Ok, so I didnt get as much done as I wanted to….mostly due to lack of motivation. However, the categories and static content seems to be working. I still have a few things to do with Static Content, but the overall concept is there.
Have fun with it.
The podcast isnt actually my project…just a project started by some friends of mine. Seems like they're doing a good job so far. Just thought I'd spread the word.
Sorry to hear about what happened at Savannah…always a bunch of crap with those universities seems like.
Yeah, its been rather dead around here. No one seems to have any time to do anything. I know Greg and I have been swamped at work recently. And this is supposed to be our slow season….
I hope he's paying you for it. Usually, graphic designers get paid a good chunk for that sort of stuff.
Anyone alive out there? I know everyone's busy, but havent seen a post to the forum since we started talking about the CMS. Just wondering what everyone's up to?
As far as me, things have been incredibly busy with getting this release out the door and moving buildings at work. Since we obtained a lease for our new building, Ive been concentrating a lot of evenings and weekends to installing a new network from scratch. We ran new wire, installed new jacks and wall plates and just yesterday I finished installing a patch panel. All in all, we ran about 86 wires, installed 86 jacks and punched down 86 ports in the patch panel. So far, everything seems to be working there. Now I can concentrate on finishing the scripting that needs done for this release, get the QA fixes done, and get that damn thing out the door. Hopefully after that's done, I can get back into the CMS a bit. Im itching to get something together for that.
We coders call that an 'Easter Egg.' Almost all software has them and interestingly enough, the sterotype of coders being anti-social doesnt necessarily mean that we dont have a sense of humor. Ours has the President of the Company when you double click our company logo.
See previous post about Google Moon for other Easter Eggs.
Well, interestingly enough, apparently PHP doesnt like URL includes. Im trying to include a file from a website and it seems to not want to use the file. However, if I use a relative path on the same server, it works fine. So for the time being, the client part of the CMS tool is only going to work if the site using the client end is on the same server as the server pieces of the CMS. Im going to have to spend some time figuring this out, since it really bugs me that its not working right now.
I think it will be once its done. Right now, Im struggling with some PHP related items as far as passing parameters around and whatnot, but the overall structure of what I have so far looks pretty good. Just have to keep plugging away at it.
Hopefully sometime next week I'll have enough done to demo.
Just an update here.
I started rethinking the structure a little bit and Ive decided to make a small change to how the update tool works.
The update tool uses a dropdown list to determine what site is being updated. Im planning on making this more dynamic by allowing entry of new sites, along with the URL, so I know where to redirect. I may even take the redirection out as Ive included the update tool as part of an administrative section. I'll try to upload something this evening, but chances are, I wont finish it tonight. Once I have something that qualifies for viewing, I'll upload it. I will not be changing the current update tool until I at least get the user login stuff to work.
Im also toying with an idea on how to improve integration. The really sweet thing about this is that once the user login is available, we could add sites to the CMS for updating that are in no way involved with the CMS. All you would have to do is register as a user, add your site, post an update and add the integration piece and voila, dynamic updates. Now obviously, there would need to be some control so that not just anyone could register, as the amount of data would become huge very quick, but for subsites, this would be incredibly handy. Essentially, what I would do, as far as integration, would be to have users modify their main page HTML to include a call that would have one function call, like echo getUpdates('site source', 'number of updates to display') or something like that. The only downside is that anything hardcoded w/ index.html (which people shouldnt be doing anyway) would now change to 'index.php' because of the php code necessary to make it work. This could be a very cool tool later on. Just have to get the user section done first. That could take awhile as there's a lot involved with accepting users.
Currently, there is no user login. I will be adding that as soon as I finish what Ive got going now.
I hear that. What the hell happened? And its not supposed to get warm again til next week sometime. April is supposed to be warm and rainy.
My suggestion there, since the fact that putting the computer to sleep has always been an annoyance, even in XP, is to turn that setting off. These settings have not changed much. If you go into the Power Options in the Control Panel, you can set the system to never go to sleep. Even though its supposed to save on electricity or whatnot, I find it to be an annoyance, especially on a desktop that should be constantly on. I do agree that its an issue that needs to be addressed. Im wondering, what version of Vista? Im running Vista Business here at home. Im wondering if its just an issue with the home versions or with all versions of Vista.
