I had to jump through a couple of hoops to make this work.

First, I had to use Safari because Firefox uses SOCKS very, very stupidly. Firefox does the name lookups locally and demands SOCKS connect to an IP address, it doesn't just hand SOCKS a hostname, even though SOCKS5 allows this. Additionally, current versions of Firefox are very confused when trying to forward IPv6 connections through SOCKS at all.

Second, I had to restart my DNS server, lookup the AAAA record for ipv6.he.net and then set up a firewall restriction so that no DNS servers could be contacted. That step was required because openssh is stupid and if you try to forward through SOCKS to a server with both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address it will try to connect to the IPv4 address in preference to the IPv6 address. So I had to fool it into thinking the server only had an IPv6 address.

But, after I did that, everything else was a piece of CAKE. I already had everything set up. :-) Except, I can't get Sage level certification because that requires cooperation from my registrar to set up IPv6 glue records for my DNS server.

I just read the news that PC Magazine is being canceled. It’s not exactly a shock, given the state of technical magazines right now. I haven’t read one of those in years, since they turned to be more of a consumer than a technical publication.

But I hope I am not the only one out there that remembers PC Magazine from the mid to late 1980s. I had two favorite parts in each issue: the programming example, and the “Abort, Retry, Fail” page at the back of the magazine.

The programming example was usually some sort of DOS (or, on occasion, OS/2) utility. It was usually written in assembly, and would be accompanied by a BASIC program you could type in to get the resulting binary, as assemblers weren’t readily available. The BASIC program was line after line of decimal numbers that would decode them and write out the resulting binary — sort of a primitive uuencode for paper. Trying to type those in gave me some serious eyestrain on more than one occasion. By now, I forget what most of those utilities did, but I remember one: BatchMan. It was a collection of tools for use in DOS batch files, and could do things like display output in color or even — yes — play monophonic music. It came with an example that displayed some lyrics about batch programming on-screen, set to what I later realized was the Batman theme. Geek nirvana, right?

But Batchman was too big to publish the source code, or the BASIC decoder, in print. It might have been one of those things that eventually led me to a CompuServe account. PC Magazine had some deal with CompuServe that you could get their utilities for free, or reduced cost — I forget. CompuServe was probably where I sent my first email, from my account which was 71510,1421 — comma and all. In later years, you could pay a small fee to send email to the Internet, and I had the amazingly attractive email address of 71510.1421@cis.compuserve.com. Take that, gmail.

PC Magazine eventually stopped running utilities that taught people about assembly or batch programming and shifted more to the genre of Windows screensavers. They stopped their articles about how hard disks work and what SCSI is all about, and instead have cover stories like “Vista made easy!” I am, sadly, not making this up. Gone are the days of investigating alternative operating systems like OS/2.

It appears that “Abort, Retry, Fail” is gone, too. It was a one-page thing at the back of each magazine that featured braindead error messages and funny stories about people that did things like FAX an image of a floppy disk to a remote office — before such stories were cliche. Sort of like DailyWTF these days. The sad truth is that the people that would FAX an image of a floppy are probably the ones that are reading PC Magazine today.

I still have a bunch of PC Magazine issues — the good ones — in my parents’ basement. I also still have my floppies with the utilities on them somewhere. One day, when I get some time — I’m estimating this will be about when Jacob goes to college — I’ll go back and take another look at them.

A few weeks ago, I saw this interesting complaint about distributed revision control advocacy:
But really, to read some of these articles, you'd think 99.9% of OSS contributions come from people who live on planes, only get 10% uptime on their broadband at home, and are incapable of spending the five minutes required to install something like Subversion locally for use with side projects. This particular complaint resonated with me because I've always had a slight feeling that all this talk of airplanes and intermittent online access is missing the point.

I think what would help these discussions is to introduce the idea that there are really two ways to be disconnected: the involuntary way that most people talk about, and the voluntary way which is the really interesting one.

To be involuntarily disconnected is to be literally or technically offline. The universe prevents you from phoning home because it broke your wifi card or plunked you deep in an Amazonian rain forest. True, a distributed revision control system lets you continue hacking in the face of such adversity; but this fact isn't very convincing to some folks who are used to centralised revision control. How often in today's world are you really involuntarily offline? The trick is that sometimes your disconnectedness is entirely voluntarily. I don't really mean that in the sense of unplugging your cable modem and calling a moratorium on network access for the day. The minute you want to commit to a server and can't because of missing network access, you are offline involuntarily, even if this came as the result of a voluntary decision.

What I mean is that distributed revision control allows you to have pockets of deliberate disconnectedness from your peers. You want to work on something in little bits and pieces, you want to version control your work in progress, but you don't want to inflict your uncompleted work on your friends. A distributed VCS gives you a chance to step back for a moment and continue working with the benefit of version control. There are two alternatives to stepping back, neither of which are really acceptable. The first is to go ahead and commit your stuff with wild abandon, the consequences of which being that you pollute the change history with unfinished work and make life potentially difficult for your friends. The second alternative is NOT to commit your stuff at all, the consequences of which being that you lose the ability to track and log your your work as you go along.

A distributed revision control system gives you the choice of iterative committing. It doesn't really matter if you are online or offline actually. Sometimes you just want to commit something for your own sake and only later decide if the commits should be shared with the main repository or not. In the meantime you can choose to go back, undo a commit, redo a commit, undo all your intermediary commits and lump them all into one big commit, update from the main repository and then rework your commit in the new context. These are the choices that a distributed revision control system offers.

It's heartening to see that the idea of using a distributed VCS is catching on, that people are starting to adopt the likes of darcs, git, mercurial and bzr for their work. It means that the joy of iterative committing is spreading. Of course, I am partial to one of these systems in particular (darcs). Perhaps in a future article, I can describe what I think is the essential difference between darcs and our estimable competitors. I think I will call it iterative merging.

Happy committing in the meantime!

Let’s start with a photo:

That’s Jacob over at the pumpkin patch near us. He found something to inspect, and spent awhile doing it. As he does.

He’s taken a liking to our cat, Nash. Jacob calls him “cat Nash”. Never just “Nash”. When we get home from somewhere, if the cat is around, Jacob will say, “Hi cat Nash! Hi cat Nash!” Then he’ll bend over, touch his head to Nash’s back, and try to give him a hug. Nash, surprisingly, doesn’t mind this.

Jacob enjoys being a part of — well, everything. He will repeat back new words and phrases, trying to learn how to say them, even if he doesn’t understand what they mean yet. His favorite recent outdoor discovery is that grain silos are all over the place. He’ll point them out excitedly as we drive down the road. I had never noticed just how many there are.

One day, he pointed at a water tower and said “SILO!” I understood why he said that, but I told him it was a water tower. He remembered that, and learned to tell them apart in a day or two. Then one morning he surprised me with, “Water tower. Water inside.” How he figured that out, I don’t know.

There’s another photo of him at the pumpkin patch.

The other day, I accidentally triggered our smoke alarms while checking one for a battery. After that, Jacob loved to say “BEEP! BEEP!” Sometimes followed by “Smoke larm. Hurt ears.” We learned how to say BEEP BEEP loud and also quiet.

He’s certainly a lot of fun at this age.

Times are exciting. Our book, Real World Haskell, is now available in a number of venues. But before I get to that, I’ve got to talk about what a thrill this project has been.

I created our internal Darcs repository in May, 2007. Since then, the three of us has made 1324 commits — and that doesn’t count work done by copyeditors and others at O’Reilly.

We made available early drafts of the book online for commenting, which served as our tech review process. By the time we finished writing the book, about 800 people had submitted over 7,500 comments. I’ve never seen anything like it, and really appreciate all those that commented about it.

As for availability, RWH is available:

• For immediate purchase with electronic delivery, from O’Reilly’s page
• For immediate viewing on Safari Books Online, at its book page
• Paper editing timing is still tentative, but we’re estimating arrival in bookstores the week of December 8.

People are talking about it on blogs, twitter, etc. We’re excited!

Some of you might recall that I’ve been bicycling to work, about 10 miles each way.

Over the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to ride much because it’s been too muddy. Today I rode to work.

It was about 25F-30F out there, so this was my first below-freezing bicycle ride. It went OK, though I was somewhat on the cool side — I’ll add more layers next time.

Today, I wore wool socks, bicycling shorts, tights over that, my short sleeve shirt, a long-sleeve shirt over it, full gloves, and a balaclava. I should have worn probably one more layer everywhere, but I survived and I’m not frozen.

You may now commence speculation about whether or not I am crazy.

There are a lot of companies out there that do web design work that looks fabulous.

Unfortunately, a lot of these sites look fabulous only when viewed in IE6 build xxxx, with a 75dpi monitor, fonts set to the expected size, running on Windows XP SP2, with JavaScript enabled. Try looking at the site through Safari, Firefox, with larger-than-expected fonts, and things break down: text boxes overlap each other, buttons that should work don’t, and it becomes a mess.

So, if your employer wanted a web design company that has a good grasp of Web standards and the appropriate use of them, where would you look? A company that can write good HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and still make the site look appealing? A company that has heard of Apache and gets the appropriate nausea when someone mentions ColdFusion or Frontpage?

So far, I’ve seen these places mentioned by others:

WebDevStudios.com
Happy Cog
Crowd Favorite

It occurs to me that all approaches we have to dealing with infectious agents involve destroying the agents. Why don't we ever examine methods of tranforming them into either symbionts or at least relatively harmless parasites.

For example, I'm reading these SciAm articles about HIV. The real problem appears to be that viral replication kills off immune system cells. What if we investigated therapies that were focused on keeping infected cells alive?

Eventually I suspect the immune system would then find its own way to eliminate the virus, or at least control replication.

Anyway, it's just a thought. We are so focused on classifying things as foriegn or enemy that we neglect to look for ways to co-opt 'bad' behavior (like infecting cells) and/or encourage good behavior (like keaving them functional).

I have been using Serendipity on my blog for some time now. Overall, I’ve been pleased with it, but the conversion was a pain.

Serendipity is a simple blog engine, and has a wonderful built-in plugin system. It can detect what plugins need upgrading, and install those upgrades, all from directly within the management interface. There’s no unzipping stuff in install directories as with WordPress.

On the other hand, Serendipity has had some long-standing issues. #1 in the list is spam protection. I’ve been using the Captha system, but as some others have commented on here periodically, it can be a hassle for legitimate humans. The Serendipity implementation in particular, I mean.

Another issue was with the plugins themselves. Because the software does updates itself, and plugins tend to write things in the install directory, your Serendipity install directory has to be writable by the webserver. Morever, it is difficult to keep track of local changes — forcing me to use git on the tree, and even then, it’s difficult.

Finally, there has been some long-standing weirdness with the RSS feeds.

I switched to WordPress over the weekend. It doesn’t solve everything, but it is a nice improvement. It has a ton of themes available, though many of them are not as high-quality as the themes in Serendipity, and it is hard to pick out the good ones quickly.

WordPress has a larger development community and seems to be getting new features and improvements at a more rapid rate than Serendipity. I particularly like how it automatically saves drafts as I’m typing. That is a wonderful feature. I can’t tell how many draft posts I’ve lost by accidentally clicking on the wrong thing.

Serendipity has a ton of plugins as well. I looked for Twitter plugins today. There are maybe a dozen of them. But there is no central tracking of them, so I have no idea which ones might be nicely peer-reviewed and which ones might rm -rf / on my server. Also, I don’t know which ones are going to be supported and upgraded over time.

I’m happy with the way most WordPress themes work nicely with widgets. Though I am baffled that some WP themes hard-code in things like the calendar or archives when they could just let people insert a widget for it.

The Conversion Process

This was a real pain. I started with a Serendipity to WordPress converter. But alas, it only supports Serendipity databases in MySQL and mine’s in PostgreSQL. I used SQuirreL SQL with the DBCopy plugin to convert it. This worked… sorta. A few tables didn’t convert, but I didn’t need those. Some others had indexes that wouldn’t convert, and after re-trying it enough times, it went.

Then I ran the converter. Alas it had some bugs and had to be fixed up with current table names and some things like that. Also I hacked it to preserve ID numbers. So eventually this migrated over the posts and categories.

It did not preserve the category hierarchy. It also didn’t recognize when nl2br was disabled, and munge the post appropriately. And it didn’t migrate over tags, so I wrote a Haskell program to do that.

Then it was a matter of crafting a bunch of RedirectPermanent and RewriteRule entries for Apache to try to redirect the old article pages and RSS feeds to their new locations as much as possible.

Final Thoughts

I’m glad I did it, and I don’t plan to do this again for a long time.

One of the speakers at OSCon this year -- I forget which one -- made a point that ran something like this, heavily paraphrased:

Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn't about having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly, the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite -- those that could afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of it.

What a powerful statement, and it rings true to me. I remember in high school, when people from the local liberal arts college would come and talk. They'd talk about the value throughout a lifetime of knowledge in a broad range of disciplines: English, history, political science, religion, science, and the arts. They'd talk about how their graduates went on to lead distinguished lives, how this broad core of knowledge serves a person well through life. I guess I didn't believe them, because due to their lack of a computer science major, I went elsewhere.

That local school may not have been the best choice for me for other reasons, but as I look back on it, I think they had a much stronger message than I realized back then. Here I am, just two math classes, one computer science class, and one biology class away from a degree. Yet I have had not one class covering the history of east Asia, not one class on different world cultures or religions, and only a very basic understanding of one foreign language (German).

This hits me in the face almost every day. Yesterday I was wondering about the history of slavery and racism in Europe. Today I'm curious about China's history as an economic powerhouse. Last week I was curious about Roman law and daily life.

The fact is, everything from philosophy to calculus is screamingly relevant to daily, modern life. We hear talk of "an American revolution" in Washington, of a shift of power in the Senate. It seems we forget that the notion of a Senate is considerably older than the United States is -- and that we have such a thing because our founders were aware of this. Macroeconomic theory is thrust in our faces on an almost daily basis these days, yet I've never had a class on economics at all.

We might feel fear of terrorist attacks, or see our fellow citizens lash out at "the Arabs." Our own short memories fail to remind us of the light in which we are seen, fail to put the really quite minor terrorist threat in context of what London or Dresden endured in World War II. We demand our government to make us safer, and our government responds by making us less safe but making us *feel* safer at airports.

In my own field, I see some universities buckling to pressure from Business to turn out large numbers of mediocre programmers that know the Java or .NET standard library well, but have no sense of the theory behind computer science, and would be utterly lost if asked to, say, write a recursive QuickSort. I find myself almost completely baffled that some companies that want to hire the world's best programmers are only looking for people that are already fluent in $LANGUAGE -- not ones that are good programmers, and so well-versed in computer science that they can easily pick up any language.

I think there is a lot to the argument that a good, broad, classical education can serve a person well in any career. I wish I had realized that a little earlier.

In horse race betting there's a concept called 'steam'. A once-popular way of scamming a local off track betting place was to go to an actual horserace, bet big on a guaranteed loser horse, then go to an off track betting place and place a yet even bigger bet on the horse which was likely to win. Because off track betting placed didn't used to routinely use the same pool as at the track, they'd simply mimic the odds add the track, and by using steam you could induce them to place an extremely unfavorable bet.

What does this have to do with the mortgage market? Well, as it happens the credit default swap market is many times the size of the actual mortgage market. How'd that happen? Well, overzealous investors ran out of actual mortgages to invest in, so they simply started placing side bets on how the mortgage market would do, totally many times how big the actual market underneath is. AIG is in a position of being the biggest insurer of the garbage. These two facts put together make for an interesting possible scenario. Since the amount of money on the line is greater than the actual size of the underlying market, AIG could potentially agree to cover every mortgage company's loss in any short sale (a short sale is where the mortgage company agrees to forgive part of a loan to make a sale happen, as a way of avoiding forecloser). That would immediately result in the number of foreclosures being near zero, and AIG would magically have made it so it didn't have to pay out on any of its side bets.

Chances are that the numbers don't work out for this to be a winning proposition. Maybe the CDO insurance industry as a whole, rather than just the largest player, could manage to get away with it. In any case, it sure would be funny.

One of the speakers at OSCon this year — I forget which one — made a point that ran something like this, heavily paraphrased:

Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn’t about having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly, the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite — those that could afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of it.

What a powerful statement, and it rings true to me. I remember in high school, when people from the local liberal arts college would come and talk. They’d talk about the value throughout a lifetime of knowledge in a broad range of disciplines: English, history, political science, religion, science, and the arts. They’d talk about how their graduates went on to lead distinguished lives, how this broad core of knowledge serves a person well through life. I guess I didn’t believe them, because due to their lack of a computer science major, I went elsewhere.

That local school may not have been the best choice for me for other reasons, but as I look back on it, I think they had a much stronger message than I realized back then. Here I am, just two math classes, one computer science class, and one biology class away from a degree. Yet I have had not one class covering the history of east Asia, not one class on different world cultures or religions, and only a very basic understanding of one foreign language (German).

This hits me in the face almost every day. Yesterday I was wondering about the history of slavery and racism in Europe. Today I’m curious about China’s history as an economic powerhouse. Last week I was curious about Roman law and daily life.

The fact is, everything from philosophy to calculus is screamingly relevant to daily, modern life. We hear talk of “an American revolution” in Washington, of a shift of power in the Senate. It seems we forget that the notion of a Senate is considerably older than the United States is — and that we have such a thing because our founders were aware of this. Macroeconomic theory is thrust in our faces on an almost daily basis these days, yet I’ve never had a class on economics at all.

We might feel fear of terrorist attacks, or see our fellow citizens lash out at “the Arabs.” Our own short memories fail to remind us of the light in which we are seen, fail to put the really quite minor terrorist threat in context of what London or Dresden endured in World War II. We demand our government to make us safer, and our government responds by making us less safe but making us *feel* safer at airports.

In my own field, I see some universities buckling to pressure from Business to turn out large numbers of mediocre programmers that know the Java or .NET standard library well, but have no sense of the theory behind computer science, and would be utterly lost if asked to, say, write a recursive QuickSort. I find myself almost completely baffled that some companies that want to hire the world’s best programmers are only looking for people that are already fluent in $LANGUAGE — not ones that are good programmers, and so well-versed in computer science that they can easily pick up any language.

I think there is a lot to the argument that a good, broad, classical education can serve a person well in any career. I wish I had realized that a little earlier.

It's close! In the township where we live, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 15 votes!

I guess I should mention that the victory margin was 166 to 151. So it's not like it was 15 votes out of millions.

In all, 333 people in our township cast ballots, or about a third of the total population of our township.

Just to give you a sense of scale, there are an average of 29 people per square mile out here.

And the nutty jail expansion was defeated 3:1. Our county commissioners will just have to figure out some other way to house the county's prison population (around six inmates) for awhile longer.

It’s close! In the township where we live, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 15 votes!

I guess I should mention that the victory margin was 166 to 151. So it’s not like it was 15 votes out of millions.

In all, 333 people in our township cast ballots, or about a third of the total population of our township.

Just to give you a sense of scale, there are an average of 29 people per square mile out here.

And the nutty jail expansion was defeated 3:1. Our county commissioners will just have to figure out some other way to house the county’s prison population (around six inmates) for awhile longer.

This puzzle is based on an original mechanical concept I've never seen or heard of anywhere else, three gears all of which mesh at the same point and cycle through which gear goes through the center rather than alternating between two gears as regular gears do. It was designed by me and Oskar van Deventer, and is now available for purchase in a 3d printed form from puzzle palace.

After some hilariously frightening reactions from Dell support to simple problems, and HP becoming aggressively competitive on price, we've been using HP servers for a few years now. The hardware is good, and the support, while reasonable, always... pauses... when I mention that we're running Debian. I try not to let it slip if I don't have to.

We put in some HP blades a couple of years ago, and I was annoyed to discover that they have discontinued that enclosure and all the blades in it. I decided this was a good time to look at their newer options, as well as at other companies.

Back in July, I had noticed a Silicon Mechanics booth at OSCon. I noticed their slogan "experts included." That sounds great; we've got software experts here, but not hardware experts, and I'd enjoy dealing with a company that knows more about their hardware than I do. I went up to their booth and asked what they'd say about us running Debian on their hardware. "That would be just fine." "So you'd fully support it when I'm running Debian?" "Sure." "What about management software - do you have any of that which I'd find annoying to port to Debian?" "Our servers don't need any management software other than what comes with your kernel." Good answers.

So, when it came time for us to decide what to do about getting a new server in here, I figured I'd call up Silicon Mechanics and see what they'd recommend. They put me on a conference call with a sales rep and an IT engineer, and wound up recommending a 1U server for us to start with, and an iSCSI storage device to address some of the storage needs we have (both for that server and others). I had heard of iSCSI only vaguely, and asked how it worked, and what the performance would be like compared to our 2Gb FC SAN. I got back intelligent (and correct) answers.

They probably spent 2 hours with me on the phone before we placed an order. I was incredibly happy with their service, level of expertise, and helpfulness. They even did a webinar to demo the management interface on the storage unit for me.

Today, the 1U server arrived. I unboxed it and set it on my desk to configure. First item: set an IP address for the IPMI card. That's the device that lets me connect to it over a web browser and interact with the console, power cycle it, etc. as if I was there. I set an IP, but somehow couldn't seem to figure out the username and password for the web interface.

So I called Silicon Mechanics support at the number that was included on the fridge magnet (!) that came with the shipment. Phone rang once. Then a live, capable American answered. No menus, no fuss. I asked my question. He apologized, saying, "I should know that, but I'll have to look it up... hold on just a bit." I had my answer about 90 seconds later. He offered to send me the full docs for the IPMI card if I wanted as well.

So I've been very impressed with them so far. From what I've heard, their iSCSI enclosure ought to be quite something as well. They even helped us spec out a switch that supports trunking for use with it.

I'll give them a "highly recommended".

It is amazing how much mirth has been generated by exposing people at work to the word 'widdershins'.

After some hilariously frightening reactions from Dell support to simple problems, and HP becoming aggressively competitive on price, we’ve been using HP servers for a few years now. The hardware is good, and the support, while reasonable, always… pauses… when I mention that we’re running Debian. I try not to let it slip if I don’t have to.

We put in some HP blades a couple of years ago, and I was annoyed to discover that they have discontinued that enclosure and all the blades in it. I decided this was a good time to look at their newer options, as well as at other companies.

Back in July, I had noticed a Silicon Mechanics booth at OSCon. I noticed their slogan “experts included.” That sounds great; we’ve got software experts here, but not hardware experts, and I’d enjoy dealing with a company that knows more about their hardware than I do. I went up to their booth and asked what they’d say about us running Debian on their hardware. “That would be just fine.” “So you’d fully support it when I’m running Debian?” “Sure.” “What about management software - do you have any of that which I’d find annoying to port to Debian?” “Our servers don’t need any management software other than what comes with your kernel.” Good answers.

So, when it came time for us to decide what to do about getting a new server in here, I figured I’d call up Silicon Mechanics and see what they’d recommend. They put me on a conference call with a sales rep and an IT engineer, and wound up recommending a 1U server for us to start with, and an iSCSI storage device to address some of the storage needs we have (both for that server and others). I had heard of iSCSI only vaguely, and asked how it worked, and what the performance would be like compared to our 2Gb FC SAN. I got back intelligent (and correct) answers.

They probably spent 2 hours with me on the phone before we placed an order. I was incredibly happy with their service, level of expertise, and helpfulness. They even did a webinar to demo the management interface on the storage unit for me.

Today, the 1U server arrived. I unboxed it and set it on my desk to configure. First item: set an IP address for the IPMI card. That’s the device that lets me connect to it over a web browser and interact with the console, power cycle it, etc. as if I was there. I set an IP, but somehow couldn’t seem to figure out the username and password for the web interface.

So I called Silicon Mechanics support at the number that was included on the fridge magnet (!) that came with the shipment. Phone rang once. Then a live, capable American answered. No menus, no fuss. I asked my question. He apologized, saying, “I should know that, but I’ll have to look it up… hold on just a bit.” I had my answer about 90 seconds later. He offered to send me the full docs for the IPMI card if I wanted as well.

So I’ve been very impressed with them so far. From what I’ve heard, their iSCSI enclosure ought to be quite something as well. They even helped us spec out a switch that supports trunking for use with it.

I’ll give them a “highly recommended”.

I've hosted this blog on three different platforms: Drupal, Wordpress, and at present, Serendipity.

Back in 2006, I rejected Wordpress, noting that most of its plugins were incompatible with the current version, its main anti-spam software wasn't Free, there was no central plugin directory. And, while Wordpress supported PostgreSQL, many plugins didn't.

Serendipity, at the time, had none of those problems.

However, I've been having other problems with Serendipity since then. People have repeatedly had trouble with captchas. The RSS feeds have long had subtle incompatibilities with certain aggregators, leading to duplicate posts.

I'm looking back at Wordpress now. It looks like it is a lot more mature than it was 2.5 years ago. Perhaps it's time to switch back.

I hope it will support PostgreSQL better now, but I note that its website seems to list MySQL only these days. Ah well, can't have it all, I guess.

I’ve hosted this blog on three different platforms: Drupal, Wordpress, and at present, Serendipity.

Back in 2006, I rejected Wordpress, noting that most of its plugins were incompatible with the current version, its main anti-spam software wasn’t Free, there was no central plugin directory. And, while Wordpress supported PostgreSQL, many plugins didn’t.

Serendipity, at the time, had none of those problems.

However, I’ve been having other problems with Serendipity since then. People have repeatedly had trouble with captchas. The RSS feeds have long had subtle incompatibilities with certain aggregators, leading to duplicate posts.

I’m looking back at Wordpress now. It looks like it is a lot more mature than it was 2.5 years ago. Perhaps it’s time to switch back.

I hope it will support PostgreSQL better now, but I note that its website seems to list MySQL only these days. Ah well, can’t have it all, I guess.