If you can get your user list in some kind of parse-able format (CSV) or get a login to the database itself (DBI) a perl or php script to generate the command-line imports for timetrax is probably ten minutes of work. You'll likely need cygwin on the replacement box to simplify your life.

What's your timeframe and budget for getting this resolved? Most if not all open source projects are amenable to bounties on features and it sure sounds like a few hundred bucks to buy... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:18 AM on July 21, 2008

I've suggested counseling but she thinks it won't really help.

This is a Problem. You, fundamentally, can't help her. You can try to nudge her in the direction of help but in the end it has to come from her own decision.

In similar situations that I've observed people have had to end the relationship because the other party would not seek the help they needed. I'm not suggesting an ultimatum or anything childish like that but... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 3:52 PM on July 17, 2008

Sample size of one, but the small private highschool I went to was always hiring teachers and often did just what you're suggesting re: switch-hitting even as broadly as math/english/computers by a single teacher. Wrong side of the continent to be specifically useful to you but I'm sure they weren't unique.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:43 AM on July 17, 2008

Firsts things first: now while it's fresh document when they installed it, where they installed it and if possible take pictures of it with your house for context. Going forward, document every action you take, when you go to talk to them, roughly what they said, how long you talked, etc. See if you can wrangle a sound level meter and take measurements outside, inside, in your bedroom, etc. If at all possible do this before you bring it up with them.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:22 AM on July 17, 2008

Datapoint: FF3, Ubuntu Hardy and I see a peace sign.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 8:10 AM on July 17, 2008

Not to mention the fact that what Gartner calls a "server" and what ends up actually serving web pages might have nothing in common. Google is famous for running on (lots and lots of) last-year's overstocked PC parts.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 4:34 PM on July 16, 2008

Well, publicly available servers have an obvious maximum of the number of available IPs. You can do IP-sharing tricks of course but those are relatively rare. The only minimum number I can think of is how many netcraft servers are in the same national IP block.

This is skating right over the issues of private, internal webservers, webservers behind load balancers, firewalls, private-IP space, embedded webservers for things like print servers and other appliances and of... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 8:08 AM on July 17, 2008 marked best answer

Expand on "run." Do you mean download the source from a central website and serve it normally, do something potentially crazy like include()ing a remote file or something client-side like an iframe?

Or something totally different?
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 11:13 AM on July 16, 2008

So you're doing something like centrally transferring the source .php file(s) from server1 to store1, store2, store3, etc. and those stores run it like any other php file(s)? I don't know what you mean by database connections, unless you're rewriting the source for each client.

Possible problems: how are you transporting the source? You'll need SSL if you're going to serve the script from a web server, and be sure to actually verify the certificate on the client side,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 11:34 AM on July 16, 2008

HTML at all and poorly-formed multipart occasionally get caught up in especially paranoid filters (read: government organizations).

Hosted images will display as empty boxes in most clients until you've trusted the sender. For this mail admin bandwidth is not an especially conserved resource for us right now and external images require an active connection to retrieve, as well as incurring a "viewed" log entry. I'm on the fence about this one, there's no... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 11:24 AM on July 16, 2008

You get what you put up with.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 7:33 AM on July 15, 2008

Your third option will likely work, the first two not so much. The nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from, and the PC and TV worlds haven't been on speaking terms until recently.

While a converter box will almost certainly work, it's not what I'd recommend. This video card or any other AGP one with a DVI out will give you far better bang for your buck. You should be able to push 1080p to the TV (even if your computer can't actually decode... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 8:57 PM on July 13, 2008

Definitely get one, and keep it in a block of ice in your freezer. It's my understanding, and the UK may be different, that having credit is the important metric, not so much using it. As long as there's no monthly/yearly fee you shouldn't use it unless you have a really compelling reason to. I use mine to buy subway rides and nothing else which keeps it available but mentally separated from my debit card.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 12:21 PM on July 13, 2008

Just to emphasize: document everything. Log, note, date, video/audio if possible and plenty of 911 calls to corroborate. Try and convince other neighbors to do the same. If the police can't/won't help, being able to drop twenty pounds of documentation on a news producer's desk moves you from someone with a problem to someone with a story.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 12:16 PM on July 13, 2008

Earplugs. Guaranteed one-way ticket to snoozeville on airplanes (for me obviously). Get a good reusable pair that fits well before you go and you'll be set. Bonus: plausible deniability for 'not being able to hear' your annoying rowmates' asinine stories!

On Preview: Beaten, but mine are cheaper!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 5:42 PM on July 10, 2008

Speaking of knives: pick up a cheap, crappy, 99-cent folding knife in addition to a quality leatherman/knife/folder/whatever. Never underestimate how useful it is to have an essentially disposable slightly-sharp crowbar.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 6:05 PM on July 10, 2008

I work at an exclusively PHP development shop. Please allow me to present a balanced, nuanced view of PHP as a language, development environment and software culture:

It's crap. Parts of it seem almost explicitly designed to make doing things the Wrong Way easy and tempting. Most of the existing software and tutorials were written by twelve year olds. That said, it absolutely works, it's absolutely possible to write good PHP code and build good PHP apps and run solid... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 6:01 PM on July 10, 2008

A technical or related degree certainly isn't required to work in IT. A degree of some kind will be necessary if you want to work at most large companies/government, but sufficient work experience will often compensate for this (to a point). There is a tradeoff to working in those environments of course, more bureaucracy, more red tape, more politics and more bosses. In exchange you get more money, often a lot more money.

Disclaimer: I'm a Linux sysadmin and I Don't Do... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 1:24 PM on July 9, 2008

Standard anonymity/security disclaimer: unless you are expert enough to know exactly how secure/anonymous you are and where the tradeoffs are, you aren't, not at all. The internet is a very complicated series of systems, any of which can be accidentally or maliciously compromising your carefully constructed persona.

Actual advice: you won't be able to vent about the things you want to vent about without someone finding out. It's surprisingly easy to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 7:24 PM on July 8, 2008

6TB means ~8 drive bays which is into server territory, and you really need to do it twice if you want to actually have a backup (rather than just a consolidated store).

NewEgg will gladly sell you the parts if you're technical or something like this HP if you can stomach the price. Ebay will almost certainly have plenty of better deals on used kit if you spend some time looking. Throw Ubuntu on it with software RAID 5 and LVM and you'll have a nice... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 10:03 AM on July 8, 2008

The speed you get depends on the chipset of the interfaces, the switch, the length of a the cable, and a slew of other factors you may not be able to plan for. It may not even be that much faster than USB2 in some cases.

Well, the chipset absolutely but unless you're getting your cables and switch from the dollar store you'll be fine. GigE is in a much more stable state now than it was even a year ago, but chipset difficulties are still around. If you... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 2:12 PM on July 8, 2008

We use Fogbugz at work and although we don't use the email-to-ticket functionality we're generally pleased with it as a piece of software. It's got a pretty reasonable installation/upgrade procedure from the systems side too.

I've heard of OTRS in the same context, no experience with it though.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 4:12 PM on July 3, 2008

Files are like houses: if they're used they'll last forever. It's when you forget about them and ignore them that they degrade. Anything involving discs is going to be a poor solution because it will be a huge undertaking to update/recreate, and then you're back to relying on this one instance of backing up.

Two suggestions:
1) Buy maybe half a dozen hard drives. Generate MD5 sums of all your files and store the sums along with the files identically on all... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 11:06 AM on July 2, 2008

From the other side of a story like this: My neighbors across the street painted their house green. Very green. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mutagenic ooze green. Glow in the dark green. Visible from space green.

We did the only thing we could to: diddly squat.

Oh sure we made some jokes, mocked them a bit (in private) and moved on with our lives. There are reasonable people in the world and sane ways or handling aesthetic... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 12:22 PM on July 1, 2008

Mon. I've evaluated, used and rejected Nagios, Monit, Munin, smokeping and several others.

For the dirt-simple "is $foo working" alerting nothing is as actually usable as mon.

If you need to keep track of statistics/graphs, Munin is quite good I just didn't like its alerting and Ganglia is nearly zero-configuration if you're on the same LAN.

For locally ensuring that services are/stay up Monit is fantastic.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 10:53 AM on June 26, 2008

I was at the Recycle a Bicycle location on the LES a few weeks back and they had basically no bikes in stock, save a pair of folders. I was told that Saturday before 5 is the time to go, it's when they get the most donations or something like that. No idea if the Brooklyn one has more stock.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 10:46 AM on June 26, 2008

I think jasper411 has it: when you catch yourself thinking about it in a scenario where it's not obviously warranted make it an act of will to distract yourself. Think about sports, dancing bunnies, trolls sitting in a row (don't ask), anything until your attention wanders to something that isn't sex. The critical thing is catching yourself starting to think about it and making the effort to redirect your thoughts, not so much the actual success of not thinking about it.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 12:38 PM on June 18, 2008

As jayder points out, even services that appreciate anonymity are limited by the law.

Use a registrar that doesn't require personal information. Like this not just one that "anonymizes" a regular domain.

Get a cheap laptop (maybe an eee or something similarly portable) and install Tor. Set up your blog on a host that allows SSL logins, otherwise the tor exit node will pwn you. Use this laptop for nothing else but updating your... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 8:38 PM on June 15, 2008

You are me and I claim my sanity back.

If your applications are all trusted-ish (i.e. in-house developed) you are likely already fine.

I'd strongly recommend whipping up an apparmor profile for apache and enabling it, using logprof to add to that profile when apache crashes because you forgot some obscure php lib.

If you're running untrusted-ish code (i.e. multiple authors who you can't throttle/fire) I'd recommend... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 8:25 AM on June 10, 2008 marked best answer

Nth.

You will find that hitting the raw documentation is the only way of getting good information about PHP. Because it's so "easy" to use, PHP attracts non programmers and so essentially all of the documentation is written from that angle. A glance at the comments of say the floor() function illustrates that nicely.

You'll have a much better time looking at the function reference and maybe a good codebase (symfony).... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 7:32 AM on June 10, 2008

Three thoughts:

1) Adding this feature would be very, very simple for any programmer to add to an existing shopping cart system, provided you host it yourself of course.

2) Why not create an item "$1 donation to Foo" and people can just change the quantity? You're stuck with whole-dollar amounts but I can't see that being a big problem.

3) If you allow donations to be "bought" without first... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 4:00 PM on June 8, 2008

puddpunk: You mean

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/yourdevice bs=128k

And yes, this will give you a nicely corrupt card.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 5:45 PM on May 26, 2008

Seconding Freaky, managing the ram/swap tradeoff is the OS' job, it will generally do it better than you can. That said, there are some quirks to Mysql, Linux, and swapping. Definitely make sure your mysql is using as much available memory as is feasible for the box.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 2:33 PM on May 12, 2008

Please investigate using the TLS/SSL connection to your mail server. Not only is it far more infrequently blocked but it will stop anyone with two malicious brain cells from stealing your login credentials.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:43 AM on May 12, 2008

D'oh forgot the SMTP-over-SSL link for sending. IMAP is for receiving. You may have to contact your email provider for some details, especially with SMTP.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:45 AM on May 12, 2008

Seconding juggler. Alone, emotional and rushed is a recipe for poor decision making. Take it easy, get everything straight and be there/have someone to talk questions and decisions over with.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:40 AM on May 12, 2008

I'm with sevenstars, most of these are general rural/country more than southern-specific. Either that or the South annexed upstate New York and didn't tell anyone.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 1:31 PM on May 8, 2008

Seconding JackFlash: tax burdens and inflation are easy to forget but change the numbers substantially if omitted. Be sure to have the same basis for calculating your returns.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 1:16 PM on May 8, 2008

This whole thread and nobody has mentioned Zfone? Zimmerman's totally encrypted, phpfone mark deux. I haven't been able to find anyone bored enough to actually test out the whole encrypted SIP concept but I did manage to get the thing installed in Ubuntu.

Only available in the US, or to non-americans with three or more braincells to rub together.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 6:50 PM on May 5, 2008

We have some ScanSnaps here, I've never used them but I hear no complaints which is a good sign. Even works under linux.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 12:05 PM on May 1, 2008

No idea about Oracle itself but keeping config files under version control of some kind is like a breath of fresh air. Use something fast and distributed like git and have a cron job that fires once a day and sends out annoying emails if there are uncommitted changes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 8:27 AM on April 30, 2008

1) Listen to orthogonality.
2) You (the general you) are terrible at determining what will be a performance hit or not. If you don't measure it it doesn't exist and don't you forget it. Databases are terrifically complicated beasts with optimizations all over in non-obvious places. And don't forget that they're basically designed to do joins. I've personally gotten an order of magnitude speedup by letting the database be a database (JOIN) instead of using it as perl (analyzing a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 7:51 PM on April 27, 2008

Nthing AVG.
For the router, I picked up a Asus 520gu a month ago. It's a WRT54GL with Linksys crossed out and Asus scribbled on with a sharpie. The packaged firmware blows chunks but it's trivially DD-WRTable, Asus even has a program for easily flashing the firmware even when the system is halfway bricked (which is very very nice).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 7:33 PM on April 27, 2008

Seconding everything. Also be sure to find out if the floor can support the combined weight of the servers, HVAC, UPS, etc. and what kind of ducting you'll need for chiller exhaust. Some older construction has surprisingly small limits on very heavy things in small areas.

Sort of a side answer but how sure are you that this data needs to be on-site? Is leasing colo space and a dedicated line an option? What about something like Sun's Blackbox, i.e. a datacenter in a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:43 AM on April 24, 2008

I'd likely skip the whole moon thing, and I'd be tempted to skip the whole space thing entirely. Honestly I'd probably ask him what kind of beer he drinks.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 5:51 PM on April 23, 2008

I stayed in a condo-cum-hotel room in Canada which had an absolutely marvelous one of these. I want to say it was a Delta fixture but I don't completely trust that recollection. It was very solidly constructed (i.e. metal) and a joy to use. They do exist and I'm shopping for one now as a matter of fact. Check plumbing supply stores, they have a much more balanced range versus the somewhat sparse selection in your average Home Depot or similar.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 10:15 AM on April 22, 2008

The only IT guy for a (splitting the difference) 75 person company? No hiring or quitting? Yikes. They had better be paying you out the wazoo.

All of the advice here is good, I'll only add one or two things. First is that every user is slightly different. If you can stand it, get to know some of your more problematic users. Small talk with them, commiserate about how the Foo sucks and have you seen Betty's Quz? Moan a bit about what bugs you that isn't the users... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 9:43 PM on April 21, 2008

It all depends on the time horizon. In the short term it's entirely dependent on the housing market and other magic-8-ball numbers like inflation and tax changes. In the medium term, absent major market shocks like what we're in now owning starts to edge out as inflation eats away at the real costs of paying your mortgage (you cost of living goes up, hopefully so does your income, but your mortgage stays the same).

In the very long term it's a no brainer. If you buy a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 10:43 AM on April 20, 2008

The Mechanical Universe comes highly recommended, I've only seen pieces myself. Connections is, of course, not to be missed. Some suggestions from dansdata though not all are in the same vein.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 6:44 PM on April 19, 2008

The Flip Ultra has been getting rave reviews everywhere (viz). I have no personal experience with it though.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Skorgu at 11:17 AM on April 16, 2008