Posted by Matt Rose
Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:05:10 GMT
I've been wanting to upgrade the folkwolf, this humble server that I've had for over 10 years now. As some of you may know, and our motd attests to, reliability ain't been a hallmark.
This has been for a few reasons.
- It's sitting on a home DSL connection.
- It's on an ancient 500MHz machine, with 512 MB of RAM. Fercrissake the iphone has a faster CPU than the folkwolf does...
- I think the disk is starting to go.
So last week, after a friend of mine on the well made up this chart, I bit the bullet and signed up for Rackspace Cloud". Rackspace Cloud is a nifty service that will let you run a Virtual Server in their datacenter. For 1.5c / hr, It'll cost me ~ $11/mo to run the folkwolf, which, really, is about the same as I pay for it having it sit under my desk. As pros for this, a better, more reliable connection, free snapshot backups, and an upgraded OS (CentOS 5, rather than the woefully out of date version of Fedora that's currently there)
Posted in administrivia | 1 comment
Posted by Matt Rose
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:53:45 GMT
This quote captures so many things in one paragraph, the stupidity of organized religion, the monolithic perception of Islam in the western media, etc. All I can say is: Allahu Akbar.
John Green:
Those who feel the guidance of God as revealed through the Quran are protesting for freedom and political representation. And the people savagely beating those protesters also feel the guidance of God as revealed through the Quran.
Posted in politics | no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:06:00 GMT
This is an amazing rant about the state of music criticism, and the state of the music industry in general.
Posted in personal | no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:44:00 GMT
My brother-in-law has, I swear, been trying to goad me for the past couple of days over twitter. Actually, I'm probably just personalizing, but it's funnier this way. Also, because of the well-known limitations of twitter, I could only post this as a response.
It pains me to say this, because I have it on good authority that Matt Asay is a smart guy, and Alfresco is a good company. But all I could think of when I read this article was "DUH!, you don't think that's already occurred to people??"
This article pissed me off because the author thinks that he's coming up with something new. He thinks that "we should emphasize the cheapness" is something revolutionary that he just thought of, rather than something that was debated 20 god-damn years ago. We (being the Open Source community) tried that already.
In response, Microsoft came out with Gartner Group bullshit ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "studies" that came up with concepts like "Total Cost of Ownership" to show that, even though Linux was 100% free, it somehow cost more to maintain than NT and IIS.
And, to an extent, they're right. In certain cases, it is cheaper to run a web server off of Windows and IIS, rather than setting up your own LAMP stack. So, honestly, his argument is actually pretty bogus.
Besides. Cost is a relative thing. IT departments don't care as much about the upfront dollar cost of a piece of software. They care about how well they know it, and how it integrates into their environment. Cost is probably third or 4th on their list of considerations. I don't care how much windows costs, if you have a big IT department, it's going to be cheaper than training all your techs to be Linux experts.
Posted in opensource | no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:46:00 GMT
My brother-in-law has, I swear, been trying to goad me for the past couple of days over twitter. Actually, I'm probably just personalizing, but it's funnier this way. Also, because of the well-known limitations of twitter, I could only post this as a response.
This phrase from Matt Asay's latest entry is what really drew my ire
Google, in short, is what open source wants to be when it grows up
I think it's the other way around. Google is the first sign of a "grown-up" Open Source ecosphere. It's one of the big, otherwise unnoticed differentiators between Web 1.0, and web2.0. Web 1.0 was built on big SUN servers running Solaris, and Oracle. Google was thrown on a bunch of commodity hardware running Linux, with python as glue-code.
Matt Asay's got it backwards. Google is not what Open Source wants to be. Google is a sign of Open Source's maturity.
Posted in opensource | no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:17:56 GMT
Wow, it's exactly like Critical Mass, except that automobiles have all the power on the roads today.
Oh, wait, they're just being jerks
Posted in politics | no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:26:00 GMT
I have great news, Liz and I are going to be riding after all. 200km from Toronto to Niagara Falls this Saturday and Sunday.
How can this be you ask, have you met your fund-raising totals? Well we have not yet met the $2500 we are required to raise but we have received and extension and therefore we can ride!
It was the fantastic financial and emotional support, we have received throughout this adventure which had allowed our continued commitment.
For those of you who have donated thank you very much, I appreciate it and am overwhelmed by individuals generosity.
For those of you who are considering a donation, let me reiterate that the money goes to the Princess Margaret Hospital, one of the leading cancer fighting hospital in Canada.
To donate to Matt:
http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/mattrose
To donate to Liz:
http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/lizmcdermott
Anything would help, forward this if you are so inclined,
Thank you,
Matt and Liz
P.S. we have raised almost $1000 each and thank you all.
Posted in personal | no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:54:00 GMT
This is probably getting tiresome, but I gotta share.
no comments
Posted by Matt Rose
Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:40:00 GMT
Well in Two weeks Liz and I are scheduled to ride our bikes from Toronto to Niagara Falls. This is to raise money for the Princess Margaret Hospital and their cancer research and fighters. We will not be able to ride unless we raise enough money, sadly it looks as though we will fall short. I know many of you saw Liz and I at Kelpfest this year, riding a stationary bike, during each show. This was part of our fund-raising efforts and along with being good training it was great fun.
Please help Liz and I realize our fund-raising goals and help us to ride to conquer cancer.
To donate to Liz, you can go to
http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/lizmcdermott
and to donate to me, you can either go to
http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/mattrose
or if you have a facebook account, you can go to my facebook profile and click on the Donate Now button in the ride to conquer cancer box
Posted in personal | no comments
