InfoWorld recently talked about the TCO equation, and I was intrigued. The linux kernel (2.6) has had 19 updates in 2005, all of which would require a reboot of a Linux server. How many reboots would a windows server require in the same time period?

I navigated to the Microsoft Security Bulletin Search, searched for Important or Critical updates for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, within the last year, and the number of updates I received: 40!

Does that help the TCO equation? Not really, but at least you get answers for both sides, so you can determine the cost to you. I will make one small side note that since the last time I had to manage a set of Windows boxen, I was able to find what I needed within a minute on the Microsoft web site, so they are improving. The same search 4 years ago would have been fruitless, and I would have ended up waiting for the next service pack.

I do agree with the summary, do your own TCO calculation:

The upshot is that although you may not be able to convince your CFO to stop asking for TCO figures — and you certainly won’t stop the analysts and the software industry from serving them up — you can learn to live with TCO as a tool for justifying IT purchasing decisions. The key is to make sure that the TCO figures under consideration in your organization are your own, and not the vendors’, because only you can see the whole picture.

So, when a vendor offers you a TCO analysis, your job is not to accept it as the truth, but to find where your situation differs from the analysis that the vendor provided (never accept anything that says stuff like “on average, …”). Only then will you know how to guess TCO.

Popularity: 19%

David Hornik has a great post on the power of blogging:

That is the power of blogging and it is why I spend as many hours as I do wandering around the blog “library.” Moreover, it is precisely why so many smart people are focused upon the hard question of how to abstract that temporal proximity from the blogs themselves. I am convinced startups will solve this problem, not the Googles and Yahoos of this world, and look forward to seeing (and perhaps funding) the different approaches that emerge.

“Temporal proximity” is the technical term for “Tom likes what Steve likes”. This hidden power of hyperlinking is set to explode in the coming months and years, as many people are hard at work on this “problem”.

This is also part of the reason that I believe many ’subscriptions’ in the future will be based on aggregations of items in temporal proximity to one another. My 1500 subscriptions give me a lot of great information, but with over 15 million feeds out there, I am outnumbered by 3orders of magnitude.

I could conceive of the ability of aggregators to make up one order of magnitude in the near future, possibly 2 within a few years, but by that time, we will still be behind 3 orders, as the blogosphere continues to grow. The only way to make that up is to help the user find what they want using some sort of temporal proximity technique, be that cross-linking, keyword search, folksonomy, you-name-it.

It is going to take some serious outside the box thinking to satisfy this informavore (sounds a lot like information whore).

Popularity: 29%

I guess the lack of sleep on the plane allowed me to sleep fairly well in the hotel room. I managed very near 12 hours, with only 3-4 wakeups in the middle. Maybe sleep deprivation is a necessary thing for my while I travel. I guess it will need more testing to find out.
One thing is sure, I am definetly not eating well enough when I am on the road. I need to go out and pick up some vitamins, to keep the old immune system healthy.

Popularity: 23%

I have been serving ads to IE readers for about 6 months now. I chose IE readers because:

• I am not one, so I don’t have to see my ads (hypocritical?)
• I wanted to test the performance of this ‘ad’ thing, without violating the first choice.

So, after 6 months, what have I learned? Basically, the ads are not contextual enough for my blog. I am ‘all over the map’ in blogging topics, so I don’t make the big bucks like Russell Beattie.

I am leaving them for now, but they may be gone soon, as I don’t see this curing world hunger, or even covering my hosting costs in the next few years.

Maybe I need to talk about stuff that is more interesting, or more single subject?

Popularity: 15%

I have been thinking a lot about what a browser should have available to a web developer in this Web2.0 world we live in, and I would like to share some thoughts:

• Cached data storage, by domain - Think of this as very large cookies, if you will. In this day and age of 500GB hard drives, the limits of cookies are ludicrously small. The biggest difference between cookies and this would be that cached data storage would just be a big cache on disk, accessible via javascript (maybe even URI, like cache:), and would not get sent to the server.
  Imagine this capability for an application like FeedLounge. Imagine the ability for FeedLounge to start downloading and caching your unread items for you to read at your lesiure, regardless of your connection status. It would also be able to keep track of the items that you mark as read, and update the server once you come back online. This will allow you to read your FeedLounge items even while on the plane, or lost^D^D^D^D vacationing in Nova Scotia.
  I am not talking about unlimited access to the hard drive, pulling files from wherever. I am talking about a simple api to set() and get() data by a key. I don’t care how it is implemented.
  Here’s a random thought: why not just install SQLLite with a JS access API into the browser for all web app developers to (ab)use?
  I am also not talking about pre-fetching ala Google Web Accelerator. That is just plain stupid/crazy.
  Many smart people have been talking about this very thing: Stephen O’Grady(item number 9, and yes, Steve, you should switch to WordPress), Jason Kottke, even this.
• Controllable history - Some people complain about AJAX-based apps, and how they don’t act like real web pages. If I as a web developer had control of what my history stack looked like, you would be a much happier web application user.
  I know people are going to raise their security flags, and that is a good thing. Why not let me do whatever I want with the URLs in the history stack that belong to my domain. That way the security people can be happy that I am not pissing with eBay purchase history, and I can give you the appication user the best experience possible.

Popularity: 12%

Took the red-eye out to St. Louis this morning, because I figured not getting good sleep in a hotel room is the same as not getting good sleep on a plane. The jury is still out on which is worse…

Popularity: 30%

In his article Web 2.0: It’s a great time to be an investor, Clarence Wooten talks about the ease with which one can start a company in today’s web economy.

What’s different about today’s Web is that new technologies and behaviors that have popularized the blogging phenomenon, are also transforming the Web from a medium where information is simply published and remains static, into a platform where applications reside and services are distributed.

Indeed, web-based applications are sprouting like weeds everywhere on the Web, and in a few years you will be able to find an application for practically anything that you want to accomplish. If one is not available, it might be a simple matter of binding a few applications together to complete the type of task that you need to do.

I use these services to create RSS feeds from tags so that new postings are delivered daily to my news aggregator . I now categorize the most relevant information into new RSS feeds of blogs that I then subscribe to. In some cases, I use a collection of these feeds to create TagClouds that generate automatic folksonomies that allow me to analyze the popularity of related information (tags) over time. Does this make me a geek?

Today, that does make you a geek. In about a year, maybe two, you will be mainstream with this idea. Allow everyone reading feeds on the ‘net to help you point yourself to the information that is relevant/important to you. You don’t have to trust people implicitly, just trust that people as a group will be drawn to the same information on a topic by topic basis.

…cheaper hardware, free software infrastructure and search engine marketing have made it less expensive to start a company. Additionally, I’d add that Web 2.0 has changed the rules for entrepreneurship by lowering barriers to entry enabling bootstrapped startups to gain visibility not through advertising, but primarily through social networks and blog fueled promotion. These changes are impacting venture investing as well – consumer applications are now back in vogue…

Word of mouth advertising in the web age? Say it isn’t so! I have to thank everyone out there that has made an impact to the success of FeedLounge by blogging about it, begging to use it (who ever heard of an RSS hunger strike?), even offering to help with the development. Having talked to some people over the past week, they tend to not see the consumer en-vogue theme. I can only hope that everyone eventually sees that both spaces, consumer and enterprise, are valid spaces, given a sane approach to either.

Not to repeat everyone else in this space, but yes Virginia, now is a great time to be a startup type in this old-is-new web world. Clarence, since blogs are the new watercooler, would you like to take FeedLounge for a spin? We are here, now, helping to change the landscape of what is Web 2.0.

Popularity: 17%

So, you have some network infrastructure that you need to ‘keep an eye’ on, and you don’t really want to obsess over a terminal window 24×7, at least not after the first 3 weeks.

Give nagios a try. It may not be the easiest or most straightforward install on the planet, but the dividends on this particular investment are amazingly high.

I am now watching servers in 3 states and time zones, and not having to lift a finger, except when the phone wakes me up from a sound sleep with a page alert notifying me of an outage. Much better than your users letting you know via IM or email (those were the days, weren’t they, Geof?).

If there is one package that you install to increase your watchful eye over your hardware, nagios is the one I can now recommend, based on initial experience. Time will tell how that holds up.

Popularity: 26%

Say you have a case where you need to redirect all traffic from one site to some other site. For example, when your site is down temporarily for maintenance.

3 little lines is all the lighttpd config you need:
server.modules = ( "mod_redirect")
server.document-root = "/www/"
url.redirect = ( "^.*$" => "http://someotherhostname/dira/dirb/" )

The stop and start lighttpd, starting with the new config file:

lighttpd -f down.conf

Popularity: 18%

I needed IMAP support in PHP4, so I attempted to compile it in using the instructions here. I kept getting the error:

checking whether IMAP works... no
configure: error: build test failed. Please check the config.log for details.

In my configure.log, I was seeing this:

configure:43918: undefined reference to `auth_gssapi_valid'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

The problem was that I was trying to use imap2004e. When I found and download imap2001c as an rpm, and installed it, everything went fine. Just logging this for future frustrated sysadmins without a solution.

Popularity: 24%

While on a customer site, I came across the following on my Windows laptop:

That is just funny on so many levels…

Popularity: 20%

Let’s suppose that you have an <iframe> element that you are using in a UI, and you don’t want to show the inset 3-D border that is the default. How do you hide it?

If you are a sane web developer, you would simply edit the style property, adding something like:
style="border:0;"

Now, if you were testing in Firefox, that worked like a charm. If you were testing in IE, if does not work at all! So what do you do? Simply look in the lovely documentation on MSDN, and find the obscure property named frameborder, and set that to 0. So, to work in both IE and FireFox, you have to do:
<iframe frameborder="0" style="border:0;" />

At least you have one thing to keep you from crying all night tonight: That this incompatibility between the two was solved by adding more stuff, instead of having to change it based on the browser. Isn’t this web development thang so much fun?

Popularity: 17%

I have been on Tiger for a couple of months now, and have been less than impressed. It is not faster (on a PowerBook), and it keeps getting in my way. Spotlight is aptly named, every time I try to use it, it seems to have to ‘warm up’, taking tens of seconds to do anything. Throw in the indexing that it does ‘in the background’ to help the ’snappy search times’, and it is a ball and chain around the neck of even the most powerrful PowerBook.

Yesterday, Mail.app has decided that anytime I switch between mail accounts (I have 4), it needs to do some several second long, 100% CPU task (mostly system, not user CPU). Switching between email accounts had always been a UI redraw, but today something is totally hosing that.

Anyone have any ideas?

Popularity: 11%

Arrived back in St. Louis this afternoon. Will be here for 2 weeks, with a small break in between to go to my father-in-law’s wedding in Gatlinburg, TN this next Saturday. Given the choices of 7-8 hours total travel time with a plane ticket, and 8 hours of driving time, I am a sucker and chose the driving time. It has been a LONG while since I did a road trip, and that is where I have historically been able to do a lot of deep thinking on subjects, technical and otherwise.

Spending tonight working the the FeedLounge database, hoping to bring it back to a level of sanity before we install the ‘real’ database server in the colo.

Popularity: 17%

I was in the need this morning to set some MySQL variables without taking the database server down. This is possible, if you can find the right piece of documentation to tell you how. The proper documentation would be this: 4.3.4 Using Options to Set Program Variables.

Note that not all options can be set. The list of allowed variables to be set this way is listed here: 5.3.3.1 Dynamic System Variables.

Popularity: 25%

Spent most of the week out here in Denver with Alex, and got some of our ’strategic planning’ done. Didn’t code as much as I had planned, but sometimes you have to have a little fun. Downtown Denver is clean and nice, I would actually consider moving here, and either living in some sort of industrial loft downtown, or somewhere up in the mountains.

Since most of the servers for the beta are here now, I have to get cracking and get all the software installed and tested, then installed in the colo. More on that later next week.

Popularity: 29%

Recently published on dev.mysql.com, the whitepaper I co-wrote with Teodor Danciu is available now at Creating a DBA Dashboard for MySQL.

It’s even available on the dev.mysql.com homepage if you act now.

The basic idea of the DBA dashboard is to monitor all of the mysql servers in your enterprise, and then show reports of time-based data, such as uptime, table growth, bytes sent/received per minute/hour/day, etc. You can think of it as the views that MySQL Administrator gives you, only over time. So MySQL Administrator is a peephole into the health of your server, and the DBA Dashboard can open the door to that data.

The data collection daemon portion of the DBA Dashboard was written in Java, and consumes very little CPU and memory (usually about 20MB for the VM). In testing, I was monitoring 100 servers every second, and the CPU utilization on my desktop was under 1%. Who says Java is slow?

If you are using MySQL heavily, and are the lucky one to admin the server(s), I strongly recommend you check it out, for your future sanity.

Popularity: 17%