Author Archives: Matt Simpson

Christmas vs. The Global Village

This topic just does not want to die and I need to blog about it to get the anger out of my system.

Every year, the same group of idiotic wanna-be Christian enthusiasts whine and complain that more and more people are not saying “Merry Christmas”, but instead are saying “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings”. As far as I can tell, their argument has always been “It’s Christmas time, stop taking Christ out of Christmas. This is the time of year that we celebrate the baby Jesus…”, and so on and so forth.
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A Christmas Present from Microsoft

I love Macs. I use one at work, I use one at home and I use one on the go (laptop). I also work with a lot of people and teach a lot of students who also use Macs… One of the most consistently annoying things for me about working in an Apple environment has historically been people using Internet Explorer for Mac. It’s one of those things that irks me.

“Normal” people may not understand why it bothers me and probably think I just have vendetta against Microsoft or something (which I may, but that’s besides the point), even though I try to clearly explain that Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac, is not the same as Internet Explorer for PC. IE for Mac is ancient, under developed and in my opinion, irresponsibly available to Mac users who don’t know any better.
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A Week Unwound

This week was a crappy tech week, filled with server / network stresses, security vulnerability releases and spammers. To get some closure on these issues, I thought I’d blog about them a bit.

Our network provider, iWeb Technologies, was unable to solve an on-going router issue somewhere between their network and Pier1’s backbone. This router issue resulted in my servers primary IP address being inaccessible indefinitely until I logged in and ran a command to notify their router I was still there… highly annoying for me and my customers, I’m sure. Their only immediate solution to this problem is to have me run “arping” in cron every minute, which tells their routers my servers MAC address. The long term solution is to have me migrate from their old network to their new BGP network. Moving to the new network is a great long-term solution, but it requires a whole new set of IP addresses and moving 8 name servers with 260 domains is a bit stressful. Either way, so waking up in the morning and finding out your server is not accessible tends to ruin every day of the week. This issues has been “resolved” with the cron job now, but still.
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The Case of the Missing Brownies

When someone promises to bake you chocolate brownies with sprinkles and bring them into work for you the next day, you sort of get excited. Who doesn’t love chocolate brownies? Free ones! Homemade? Yummy.

So I come into work this morning, with my bib and a glass of milk… but where are the brownies? Catherine (our administrative assistant) decided she had better things to do last night than fulfill her promises and obligations to bake us chocolate brownies with sprinkles.

I for one am appalled and hurt; the betrayal… well, I’m not sure it will ever leave me. *sigh* Just when you think you know someone…

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

Eating My Own Tongue

Last night my wife and I along with a friend (Greg) went out to Moxie’s for a good dinner and a beer. I can’t seem to get enough of their ranch-house chicken burger, spicy fries and basel mayo dip. Yum. Either way, while I was attempting to eat the yummy yummy fries, my teeth for whatever reason got angry at my tongue and attacked. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve bitten my lip / cheek / tongue before, but damn, this time there is actually a chunk out of the side of my tongue causing me constant pain and slurring of words.

So my two-bit piece of advice for the day: chew slowly and keep your tongue away from your teeth. Teeth aren’t always friendly, they will turn on you and attack without warning.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

gDisk + gMail = Sweet Online Storage

Being a techie person I haven’t often been writing about techie sorts of things, so here’s one for you. I stumbled across a very nifty little application today called gDisk that uses Google gMail’s 2.5GB of storage as a portable hard drive by allowing any Mac user to connect to and store data in their gMail account. These aren’t stored as e-mails or anything, the data is just stored in your account. It’s a very neat system, I recommend checking it out.

This got me thinking, Google is missing a couple of things:

1) They should allow you to connect by WebDAV to “Google Disk” or “Google Central” or something like that. This service should be a central storage engine for all your Google data (Base, gMail, etc).

2) I really wish they offered IMAP to connect to gMail vs. just POP3. I’ve grown to really hate POP3. Just a thought anyways.

Either way, check out that gDisk application if you’re on a Mac.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

Duh, It Can’t Thunder When It Snows! Can It?

So I was sitting here at work listening to music, working on some database stuff during the first major snow fall of 2005, when all of a sudden I hear what sounds like thunder. I quickly shrugged it off as a snow plow and went back to work. A couple minutes later our administrative assistant comes in and says “Did you hear the thunder?”, to which I replied, “It can’t thunder during I snow storm, it was a snow plow.” We both looked out the window and saw the roads were still snowy but I didn’t think anymore about it until I heard it again (this time the music was off). It rumbled and rumbled and rumbled. So of course what do I do? I jump on the net (I actually went to Ask Jeeves first because sometimes Google doesn’t answer questions that well). Sure enough I see “Thundersnow”. Can you believe it? Who would-a thought.

Morale of the story: To save yourself from looking like an ass by saying it can’t thunder when it’s snowing, learn about weather phenomena like Thundersnow.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

PHP6 Ready or Not, Here it Comes

The mere thought of PHP6 scares the living bejesus out of me. I haven’t yet upgraded to PHP5 because of a slower then desired adoption rate and because I have to support legacy applications for some clients. That will all change when PHP 5.1 is released in the near future. I plan on upgrading shortly after it’s released. So for the past year and a half I’ve been thinking about how to implement PHP5 then all of a sudden at this years PHP|Works conference in Toronto, Rasmus Lerdorf shows us a PHP function written in Chinese and said PHP6 is being planned and it will completely support Unicode.

That shook me up a bit, I can’t imagine the day when I open an open source PHP script and find that I can’t read the code in it. Well, I guess some current coding is so bad I can’t read it in plain English anyways, but that’s another story. Here are some excerpts from a recent article discussing a recent meeting in Paris between core developers (Zeev, Dmitri, Andrei, Jani, Wez, Marcus, Rasmus and Derick Rethans)… Continue Reading…

Question of The Day

I actually spent a bit of time today reading most of the comments on a Slashdot article titled Ask The MythBusters. In summary, they were looking for 10 questions to ask the MythBusters next week, which is sort of neat. There were some good questions, as well as some not so good questions, but one that stood out in my mind was:

Most restaurants seem to believe that ice is free, and therefore tend to overfill the ice to save money on soda. However, the energy required to freeze water to make ice should be considered — is the real cost of ice actually less than the cost of an equivalent volume of soda?

I just thought it was interesting, I have no idea the answer to that, but it’s fun to ponder.

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson

Late Night Software Releases

I have yet to figure out why every time I release a new version of ListMessenger, I always end up going to bed at a ridiculously late hour. It seems to me that no matter what I have completed and tested, there is always just that one more thing I want to get done. Either way, I slept soundly last night knowing that ListMessenger Pro 2.0.1 was out the door and there would be no more support issues for Internet Explorer and HTMLArea! ha. It made my day this morning when I read a post in the forum that said it now takes only a few seconds to queue 10,000 subscribers, much better than a few minutes in previous releases. I don’t know why I never knew about SQL’s INSERT SELECT query before, it’s been around forever. I guess it’s just one of those things you don’t know is there unless you need, and to my defense the documentation on the MySQL website is not so good.

What’s next in ListMessenger development? Well, I have to do ListMessenger Light 2.0.1 now, which shouldn’t take me too long to remove the Pro features… I assume I can do this in a night or so (so that really means a week). I also need to update the documentation and information on the actual listmessenger.com website as well, especially the demo. I have actually started to setup the new demo on it’s own sub-domain but I stopped last night because I was too tired to actually restrict the demo features. I would love to finish that tonight, but I have to finish that Microeconomics assignment that my professor so gracefully said he would accept on Wednesday in class from me.

I’ll blog about the new features I’m planning for ListMessenger 3.0 at a later date. Blogging about it seems to help straighten things out in my head as well. Thanks for letting me bounce ideas off you 😉

Best Regards,
Matt Simpson