Dave Lachapelle

So, I’m not the only one, there are a lot of excited people around waiting patiently for their copy of Leopard to arrive, myself included. I can’t honestly remember being this excited for an OS upgrade ever. The Apple community sure is different from the Microsoft one, in that people tend to stand behind the product and look forward to updates.

Anyway, I got an e-mail from Apple this morning stating that my copy has shipped and that it will arrive today! Whether or not it arrives still has to be seen, but nonetheless, I’m excited. For those of you non-believers out there, here’s a quick screenshot:

I also got confirmation today that Time machine will only work with local USB / Firewire / Internal hard drives, and will not work with network drives. I’m probably going to go hacking through the settings to find a way to make it work, simply because I don’t have a large enough external drive, but my fileserver with 1TB of hard drive space would make a great backup.

I’m not usually one to notice such things, but I happened to be hunting around the Apple website for someone I could rant at regarding Canadians and iPhones. I’d just love to know why we don’t have iPhones up here in Canada. I mean, we are connected to the US by one of the largest borders in the world. Seems like we kind of got “forgotten” up here, and no one knows anything about when or if they’ll ever make it up here.

Anyway, I’m off topic already…

I was on the Apple support site, and happened to notice a “Chat Now” link next to the typical Questions? Need Advice? Call blah blah… So, I clicked on it and got a page can not be found message. Interesting I thought, thats not like Apple. I reload the page, and lo and behold, its gone, but when I move my mouse around, the link fades in. Even more interesting I think to myself… I then load the page in Safari, and the link isn’t there at all, unless I move my mouse just right and happen to get the 2 pixels the link takes up. Seems like they’re hiding a new feature on the support website.

Here are a few screenshots I took of the sites, notice the difference I’ve outlined in red.

In Opera:

In Safari:

:

So, I’ve been insanely busy the last few weeks, and haven’t taken any time out of my busy schedule to write anything of interest here. I’ve been really busy with work and life, but I won’t bore you with the details of that…

I will however, take a few seconds to introduce a project I’ve decided to work on (as if I wasn’t busy enough already). As you know, I play WoW fairly regularly (World of Warcraft for those un-educated). There are many resources for the game, and a LOT of addons amongst various sites. Keeping your addons up-to-date unfortunately can be quite the chore, and so some wonderful people over at WoWAce (www.wowace.com), have written a small program to search through their site and find updated addons. Unfortunately, they wrote it in .Net, which obviously doesn’t help us Mac users out there. In comes the Java WoWUpdater: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javawowupdater a small project I’ve taken on, to port the WoWAce Updater to Java allowing it to be truly cross-platform.

I’ll keep you all posted on my progress, but for now there isn’t much to show or tell. If anyone’s interested in helping me out on this project, and knows anything about UI design or Swing, I’d be most appreciative of the help.

Well thats it for now, have fun everyone!

J.

Well, you may or may not notice I’m now running WordPress 2.3 on my site. The upgrade went very smoothly, and I’m hoping it fixes my theme problem I’ve been having. Only time will tell, as it apparently is random, if it happens again, I’m going to go hunting for the source of the problem. I’m really hoping it doesn’t though, as its going to be a pain to diagnose.

I’ll have more to write about later on a small project I’ve undertaken (and no, it has nothing to do with computers for once).

I have to start off by apologizing, I had intended on posting this last week, but got tied up with a lot of work stuff. Our Windows server decided to throw a hissy fit, and I really hate windows. Somehow the permissions got all messed up and IIS wouldn’t read any of the web files, we spent almost three full days trying to get the permissions set back up. Finally we just gave up and decided to back up the system and re-install it.

Anyway, continuing on the theme of system optimizations, I thought I’d talk a little bit about a simple optimization you can make to MySQL, that will greatly increase your server performance. In comes MySQL’s Query Cache or qCache for short. Its already built into MySQL, all you need to do is enable it. “But caching data is bad” or, “My boss says we update our data too much to make it worth caching”. Both of these ideals are in fact wrong. I used to hold to the one that said that caching data is bad, yes, it generally is a bad idea if done improperly, but if done properly it’ll save you a lot of time.

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And no, thats not APC as in American Power Conversion, thats APC as in Alternative PHP Cache. At the office, we host a fair number of high traffic websites, sites that routinely push a few gigs of traffic a day each. Obviously, thats a lot of web traffic, and we do have to keep our servers running fairly well. We also have a few, what we refer to as “seasonal” sites, where traffic for the sites spikes during certain parts of the year.

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Very recently i have come to a shocking conclusion about Guelph’s supposedly acclaimed transit system. As a pre-cursor to this whole rant, I would just like to state that these are my own experiences, however, they are mirrored by others that I know. It would appear, to the majority of people I know, that Guelph Transit thinks their transit system is too convenient for the general public, and thus have gone out of their way to inconvenience passengers.

As can be seen on the Guelph Transit Website:

Beginning September 2, 2007, Guelph Transit changes its scheduled 30 minute service to 40 minute service, Monday to Friday during peak hours on all regular base routes*.

The asterisk refers to this bit of text:

* Regular base routes: 1 Woodlawn; 3 Waterloo/Fife; 4 York Road;
6 Auden/Eastview; 7 St. Joseph’s; 8 General Hospital; 9 Stone Rd. Mall;
10 College/Niska; 22 Conestoga; 23 Paisley/Imperial; 24 Industrial; 51 Gordon;
52 University/Kortright; 61 Victor Davis

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Okay, so, recently I’ve been having this really annoying problem, where my wordpress homepage would just come up blank. I kind of ignored it, but I knew it had something to do with themes causing problems. For some reason, every now and then my blog’s theme gets set back to “default”, I’m still not 100% sure why, and after spending a good amount of time trying to “fix” it. I just ended up removing the “default” theme and doing a symlink from my theme’s folder to the old default folder, that way I can at least keep my blog up.

I’ll definitely keep hunting around to try and figure out why, and post here when I do find out.

In terms of life stuff, been super busy, as per usual. I think I’m going to be donating a bit of time to helping out my new guild on Norgannon with their website, but thats another story for later. For now, its back to work.

You must know these commands to make it in Linux/UNIX. The following contains a list of commands as well as descriptions and examples of each command.

read more | digg story

So, I haven’t been to the zoo for quite a while, many years in fact. Tania and I, this past week, decided to take Tania’s niece to the Toronto Zoo and we had a blast. She’s such a little cutie and so smart. I also enjoyed walking around for the day, reminded me a lot of my childhood, going to the zoo with my parents and looking at all the animals.

Anyway, thats it for now, been super busy this past week, and going back to work tomorrow.