Last summer Kosada purchased a MacBook Pro for the president of Yon Reptile Campaign. It’s been a great improvement over the old Dell laptop he was formerly using, and, though he was initially worried about whether he’d be able to grasp the new UI, he seems to have picked it up quickly, and he reports that he’s been loving it.

But this morning he called me with a rather odd problem:

“I hooked up my Treo and started syncing it, then walked away for a few minutes. When I returned, the screen was covered with a bunch of squares, and I can’t do anything.”

For years, iPhoto users have been stuck using a limited number of email clients to send their photos easily. This was mostly remedied by the iPhoto Mailer Patcher, but it left out non-applescript aware applications because, after all, iPhoto uses applescript to interface with them. One of the more notable omissions is Thunderbird.

Finally, this void has also been filled, via the iPhoto Thunderbird Bridge. It’s still quite primitive, but all the basics are there for iPhoto-Thunderbird integration.

If you’re an iPhoto/Thunderbird user, give it a whirl.

For those that deal with complex networking, having a device’s MAC address can be very helpful in diagnostics, configuration, and firewalling. Often just using a device’s IP address is enough, but what about DHCP? Unless you can control the device’s IP range, this can cause many hours of troubleshooting. This is where having a MAC address helps. [more...]

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...]

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.

At Yon Reptile Campaign, we’ve set up this dual-core AMD Opteron server. Normally it runs all happy-like and does what it needs to. We take care of its basic needs, and it takes care of the rest.

However, Tyan — the motherboard manufacturer — saw fit to include only 1 of the typical 3 heat sink mounting tabs. Somehow, this 1 tab managed to suddenly break on Sunday, March 18, at about 4:45pm.

And now the processor has Opteron Cancer. [more...]

Robert and I have been doing some consulting for an out-of-state mid-sized business recently. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll call the business Yon Reptile Campaign.

We were analyzing Yon Reptile Campaign’s IT budget, and discovered this expenditure:

This was probably a pretty big job, even compared to the task of getting this business’s IT situation under control…