What the fuck?

http://sbc.merger-news.com/

My stance on the issue: What the fuck, guys? What color of crack do you have to smoke to think this will pass legislative muster?

(Wait, we have republicans in office, dumb question.)

Just promise me you guys aren't going to call me twice as often to try and get me to use your ripoff long distance services now….

Oh, and as a favor, I've got you guys a new corporate logo. Check this out:

Thought you'd like it.

PS: Please don't keep wasting my money if it doesn't make my phone service cheaper, or more competitive, please, SBC? Thanks!

Solaris 8/9

Does anyone here know how to install solaris 8 and/or 9 having the root filesystem being on a pair of mirrored disks? I can't find any howtos, and the manual for the machine is being less than obvious when making references to installing on the multi disk setup.

Taking that a step further, can it be installed with the root filesystem on a software raid 5? (Or is there a hardware raid controller on the FC-AL disk cage in the v880 that I'm missing?)

I've installed solaris on a billion machines a billion times, but never on good hardware that has multiple disks in it. πŸ™‚

BASIC Stamp

For anyone experimenting with Basic Stamp in linux, I've slapped together a few mods on one of the program's on Parallax's website to support BASIC Stamp 2.5. I'm still looking at the license to make sure it's okay to distribute it, but if you need it in the meantime, it's here.
I'm relatively certain the open source stuff in it is either public domain, or intended to be for public use and modification and redistribution, and I know the tokenizer is closed source, but freely distributable, but there's no license on the stampbc code at all that I can find, so I'm trying to find the author to clarify.

If it's not meant to be modified and redistributed, I'll pull it.

MySQL Geospatial extensions (You don't have to be geeky to think it's neat, but it helps)

Check out what I've been messing with this weekend

That's one level of zoom far enough out where nothing shows up. Hit zoom in once to start seeing stuff.

This contains the location of almost every telephone central office switch in the country.

You can pan it around, zoom in and out. This is a few hours of mock up to get a decent vision of what's in the database. I plan on completely rewriting it because it sucks. I'm getting better data as we speak to draw all the streets, and a bunch of other crap.

Can you all see where I'm going with this?

Amazing what I can get done when livejournal's down…

Don't buy from eBay user nkans

The user nkans on eBay is selling knockoff digium cards. That I'm cool with, since digium discontinued sales of this model anyway, which is, literally, a glorified winmodem.

But this "nkans" fellow has a catch. The cards are cheap, and he charges:
US $9.49 + $3.50 for each additional item shipped.

I wouldn't complain about that either. I could see that price if it were packed nicely in a box or other crushproof container.

But it wasn't. It came in a damned padded envelope with $1.84 postage. What the hell is that about?
I posted neutral feedback.

Then the buttwipe gave me negative feedback.
I left:

Neutral feedback – works beautifully – but $12 is robbery for $1.84 postage on a bubble envelope. Buyer paul.timmins ( 29) Jan-01-05 21:37 5736954152
Reply by nkans: My grandfather will not pay me for packing charges. You accepted & bid contract.

So this guy, who has recieved tons of negative and neutral feedback about his terrible shipping methods. And he blames his grandfather. I don't know what the hell that has to do with anything.

And then he destroys my perfect feedback with:

Negative feedback – Not a recommended buyer. Bids what mentioned in the description and complains. Seller nkans ( 670) Jan-02-05 03:41 5736954152
Reply by paul.timmins: Seller never mentions $12.99 shipping = a padded envelope + $1.80 postage. Jan-08-05 00:31

Again, what a buttwipe.

I'm just warning people because I want them to know that while the cards are a good deal, you're gonna get ripped off on shipping, and they might not arrive in working condition. And if you complain, he'll post an incoherent comment about his grandfather and screw up your feedback rating.

Just looking out for my peoples πŸ™‚

Telcodata changes to backend

Telcodata has been converted to InnoDB throughout tonight. It also has a slave replication going finally, so there can be hot backups of the database, should something bad ever happen to it. (There's nightly snapshots taken and spread around, but until now, nothing was replicating any more frequent than that).

We'll see how this affects perfomance tomorrow morning. πŸ™‚ I've got my fingers crossed!