Recently we had an interesting opportunity to deploy 7 identical customized machines for Yon Reptile Campaign. We’ve been working on disk images to make this quick and painless, and have more or less succeeded. However, getting an archived image onto the machines has a few different methods, depending on circumstance. We also get to pay a penalty every time the underlying hardware changes, since the image bundles in specific drivers. Usually we’re able to work around this with minimal pain.

Excitingly, these new machines broke the mold (they’re slightly older, considerably cheaper machines), so we had to tweak the image a bit. (more…)

Mozilla is an open source project that produces some widely used software. Their most noteworthy product to date is Firefox, a standards-compliant web browser.

Being open source, their projects and products are often enhanced by the contributions of others. These contributions often come in the form of a “patch” — a file that tells the computer what to change in the source code to add the contribution. (more…)

Author’s Note: Forgive this preamble I promise that they’ll be juicy links and google page rank increases in Part 2.

After my October escapade in Boston — with a brief layover at Yon Reptile Campaign — Life™ decided to shine a ray of hope in my general direction, after Thanksgiving. However, quick to grant me access to enough income to pay rent, Life™ viciously raped my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and I was unable to use MPlayer to play movies, use GL to play games, or whatever else we non-Apple people do with our video cards. (more…)

In Part 1 of Malus Sylvestris Migration I went over some basic differences between Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Basic configuration, Application installation, and linking were discussed. In this, the second installment, I intend to cover some more interesting features. These include virtual desktops, configure scripts, and the like.

At the point where I left off, I figured I was pretty good to go. I had Xcode installed, so I grabbed the Thunderbird 2.0b2 source so I could compile it — hacking on Thunderbird is one of my soon-to-be all-encompassing projects. (more…)

There are many options in the database world. Many solutions for all kinds of work loads, and solutions for all kinds of financing models.

Oracle, a database vendor, is pretty tight-lipped about its financing. Nowhere on the website is price listed. Today, we managed to breach this obfuscation. We had to call them.

Licensing for Oracle is offered on a per-CPU basis for the database servers, and on a per-machine basis for the user clients. They weren’t clear as to what constitutes a CPU — does Hyperthreading count as 2 CPUs? does Dual-Core?

Either way, the price per CPU is $40,000.

Per client machine, the license cost is $800.

Plus a support contract.

So, instead of spending well over $200,000 on this…

We’re replacing Yon Reptile Campaign’s ancient Oracle server with one running PostgreSQL.

Anybody who’s anybody has used an Apple computer before. Whether at home, abroad, at school, work, or at that one weird guy’s house, chances are you’ve dabbled with a Macintosh.

And there’s a pretty steep curve attached to switching Operating Systems. This is especially the case when you’ve used a very dynamic, customizable operating system like Linux the majority of the time. In this article I’d like to address some of the issues noted, less than 12 hours after I’ve opened the box, to perhaps help others get reoriented.

For much of my computer-using life, I’ve been an Intel-based computer user. This means that I grew up on (more…)