I might have been dreaming but I swear that the load average on this DreamHost server was over 400.
Now I realise DreamHost is offering inexpensive, shared hosting but this is a little excessive.
I just wish they'd told me I would be co-hosted with Amazon, Yahoo and eBay.
Just remembered that I was shocked and ashamed to discover that my father (Silver Surfer) was using IE7 when I last took my laundry home so I felt obliged to upgrade from IE6.
I also took the opportunity to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 RC2 from 1.5.0.7.
No detailed, lengthy reviews, I'm afraid. I did notice some changes to the user interface (IE now looks like Firefox 1.x) but most importantly, all my Firefox extensions still appear to work.
Forget Box.Net. Forget Mozy. Forget memory sticks. Forget USB hard drives.
DreamHost have upgraded the 'basic' $7.95 per month hosting package from 20GB to a staggering 200GB disk storage.
As this humble blog currently occupies 0.01%, I have plenty of capacity for my photos, documents, CV (in txt, doc, PDF, LaTeX formats) and all my homework. In fact, as my hard disk is a paltry 40GB, I have room for absolutely everything.
And if that wasn't enough, Dreamhost are giving me a further 1GB every week.
When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil.
Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn't enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text.
This effect is spoiled by the lengthy verbosity of the full text feed for articles you are not interested in whatsoever.
The ideal compromise would be a 2 line precis of the article but Peter Scott is the only blogger in the universe who is thoughtful enough to do this.
Google recently announced some enhancements to the Notebook and I must admit that, while the concept left me cold initially, I am now starting to make more use of this software.
While I use Blinklist for shared (more permanent) bookmarks, I tend to use Google Notebook for snippets, jottings, interesting links and, err, notes that I may need to access from both home and work (in fact potentially from any computer).
For example, yesterday I had a query about my online tax return and was forced to call the pension administrator followed by the Inland Revenue and jotted down answers to my questions.
Previously, I might have emailed myself the notes from work to home so I then could write a followup letter. This would mean the information was accessible from work (Sent) and home (Inbox) but having it available on a Google server is preferable and less typing.
I used to keep draft blog postings in WordPress but didn't like the drafts cluttering up the dashboard so now these random thoughts also get stored in Google Notebook.
Obviously, all of my notebooks are private but there is some interesting information out there lurking in shared notebooks that isn't accessible from conventional sources.
I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content.
My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave Winer's controversial ' River of News' concept.
Now my previous experiments with Joomla and subsequently WordPress and Drupal have been made incredibly easy by Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache).
And so it proved again. A mere 7 minutes to get Gregarius working. A further 29 minutes to fail to work out why Netvibes has chosen to resurrect and export some dear, dead departed feeds (with Japanese writing) from beyond the grave.
Gregarius has the conventional two pane (feed-article) view and you can quickly review all articles from all blogs in reverse date order. You can then choose to expand any articles of particular interest.
Of course, for the full cascading river effect, I had to collapse the feeds and remove all tags, folders and categories to simply let all feeds flow as one raging torrent. There are no Oracle blogs anymore. You are all fighting for a place on the raft.
The default Gregarius theme is a little monochrome for my liking or maybe that is the default 'Newspaper' view (black and white and read all over) but there are other themes available to liven up the RSS experience.
So now I am no longer skimming my 81 feeds but blissfully wallowing in this river of news.
All of this excitement is almost enough to encourage me to investigate pricing (again) for hosted PHP/mySQL providers so I can read the same feeds from multiple computers.
[With apologies to Cabaret Voltaire]
I want to synchronise my Thunderbird address book between work and home and my Palm Vx. I also want to synchronise Google Calendar with Sunbird and my aging Palm. This is for two reasons; to synchronise and simultaneously back the data up. I feel nervous and exposed, like an Oracle DBA relying on nightly exports.
One option was to repeatedly export/import the data between applications but that is far too time consuming and I am lazy.
I noted with interest, Matt's recent experiences with Plaxo but decided that the name sounded too much like Sage & Onion stuffing. Also, the Plaxo Thunderbird plug-in doesn't currently support multiple address books.
Then I happened across EngTech's superb blog and this excellent article which describes how to use ScheduleWorld as a synchronisation hub (using SyncML) to synchronise anything to anything in any direction and put an end to all human suffering (well almost).
I signed up for a free ScheduleWorld account (the login page looks strangely reminiscent of Google) and successfully synchronised ScheduleWorld with Google Calendar.
Then I downloaded the Calendar Sync4j extension for Thunderbird 1.5 and synchronised an appointment ('MUFC v Celtic') from the Thunderbird Calendar to ScheduleWorld onto Google (and all the way back again).
The I remembered what I was actually supposed to be doing and configured Thunderbird to access the ScheduleWorld LDAP server. This worked once I read the documentation properly and used the numeric ID (instead of the email account).
This is not truly synchronisation in the old sense of propreitary conduits and commercial products. This is purely storing data on a server with an open, standard (LDAP) interface manipulated using various client applications to perform, err, synchronisation.
Now Thunderbird could retrieve contact details from ScheduleWorld. Unfortunately, Thunderbird currently has no SyncML support embedded so Thunderbird is unable to modify the address book. However, I was able to export addreses to LDIF format, import to the ScheduleWorld server and manage (clean) the data using the ScheduleWorld Web interface.
ScheduleWorld doesn't currently support ~~bisexual~~ bi-directional synchronisation with Gmail contacts which would be the 'killer app' and the icing on the cake but if/when the Google API allows it, even this may be possible.
The only disadvantages in this blissful state of nirvana is the fact that the Palm is now an legacy application, an islolated silo and I will erase the entire contents of my Palm address book. Consequently, I will forget to send Great Auntie Agatha a Christmas card including my traditional round-up of the year together with a delightful family photograph.
This is because Great Auntie Agatha doesn't have an email address and her details solely resided on the Palm. Great Auntie Agatha will then pass away peacefully in her sleep next May. All my relatives will be rich beyond their wildest dreams while I will receive absolutely nothing after this Christmas card debacle.
I will then be forced to pursue legal action against 'EngTech' and the brilliant author of 'ScheduleWorld' so if someone could furnish me with their real names and addresses, I would be eternally grateful.
I briefly used Box.net as a virtual 1GB memory stick. Briefly because after the initial transfer of important files, the onus was on me to identify files I had changed recently and upload them.
Mozy seems better suited to lazy people. You simply download a lightweight client, identify folders you want mirrored and Mozy encrypts and mirrors them, quietly in the background.
When you add new files, Mozy mirrors the incremental changes. Mozy offers 2GB of storage for free.
Also, Mozy includes the phrase 'Reticulating splines' during initialisation.
Holy Father
It is 23 years and 7 months since my last confession. Since then, I have downloaded Ethereal and started to sniff packets off the network. I know it was wrong but we had worked for a week on this problem. We had all exhaustively checked everything (twice) and we were tired, hungry and increasingly desperate.
I fervently wished this was a conventional database problem or even an unconventional Siebel problem but the symptoms, the controlled tests and all the hard evidence increasingly pointed to 'the network'.
Initially, I was swamped by gigabytes of meaningless data until I discovered all about the powerful filters with an esoteric syntax (that sometimes even worked). Then I could trace a complete 'conversation' between the browser and Web server. I was so excited when I could actually examine HTTP requests and the associated response. Why I can even look at the packet sizes and the actual contents with timestamps to the nearest microsecond.
I am desperately resisting the urge to examine the detailed effects of content expiry and static file compression and publish a whitepaper. Worse still, I am feeling increasingly lured by '/etc/services' to find interesting ports to sniff on.
Please have mercy on this wretched, miserable, pitiful sinner kneeling before you.
Yours faithfully
Norman Brightside