Category: Computers


  • Why Ten

    The question of why we run ten clusters came up recently. Off the top of my head, the answer was okay. Here is my more thoughtful response. Whenever I have been in a conversation with a BEA (more recently Oracle) person on Weblogic, the number of nodes we run has invariably surprised them. Major banks…

  • In the early days of my using WordPress, I set the permalinks setting (the URL format style) to Numeric. They looked like http://ezrasf.com/wplog/archives/3. On 2008-SEP-27 I changed the permalinks setting to the Day and Name. According to my broken links post each time WP autosaved a draft it incremented the number so the names were no longer…

  • Stargate SG-1 season 3 on Netflix watch instantly requires getting the disks for episodes 5, 15, & 20. Why? My best guess is unlicensed for the medium because of an actor. Netflix needs to work on providing a warning when episodes of a television show require getting the dvd so I can plan ahead. Also…

  • Higher education is very litigious. Students sue universities over encroaching on personal beliefs. People who fail to get accepted sue over discrimination or reverse discrimination. Employees claim wrongful termination. Publishers claim copyright infringement. Software companies battling over patents. Equal funding of historically black colleges and universities to non-black counterparts. We are involved in selecting a new…

  • Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

  • Facebook offers a zip file of our content. The help information explains, Having a copy of your information — whether that is on Facebook or any other service on the web — is an important part of controlling what you share. In addition, downloading a copy of your information may come in handy if it…

  • New Root CA

    One of our clients introduced a new LDAP server for authentication. Like a good partner, they implemented it in the test environment, found it did not work and alerted us to the problem. They also informed us the problem would be the new Thawte Root CA was not implemented on many operating systems and applications.…

  • My web hosting service, Dreamhost, happens to have a one-click-installer for Moodle. So I installed one for my own personal sandbox. In looking at the available roles, it suddenly occurred to me…. Comparing any LMS to another is like comparing an apple to an orange. The industry is like the Tower of Babel. Each product…

  • A security guy at a campus wanted our web server log file in the CSV format. The original file has lines which look something like: machine.usg.edu: webserver.log13646,2010-11-30        11:08:32        0.0010  999.999.999.999    b7tPM1hTgGYMn90bLTM1    200     GET     /webct/urw/lc987189066271.tp1333853785371/blank.html    –       262     “Mozilla/5.0…