Dave Lachapelle

Fun article for a bit of Tuesday morning nostalgia.  My personal favorite quote in the whole article:

In the beginning, Intel created the 8086 and its first 16-bit microprocessor.
And Intel said, Let there be x86: and there was x86.
And Intel saw the x86, that it was good.

Its amazing to think that in only 31 years we have come so far as a technologically advanced species.  Just stop to think for a minute, 30 years ago, not a single person in the world could even begin to imagine the depth and breadth of information we have at our fingertips, real-time communication without boundaries or borders.

Always amazes me to some extent.  Anyway, here’s the original article if anyone’s interested.

A Brief History of CPUs: 31 Awesome Years of x86 | Maximum PC.

Interesting article on Bluetooth 3.0, I haven’t really been following it – however, it seems as though somehow Bluetooth 3.0 are going to be creating temporary (hopefully secure) wireless networks for transmitting data.

Bluetooth 3.0 prepped for launch on April 21 – Ars Technica.

I’m curious though, how do they intend on dealing with frequency crossover from actual wifi networks.  In my experience, bluetooth networks are horribly prone to interferance and hopefully that doesn’t translate to the new specification.

Found this article in the Hamilton Spectator yesterday, glad to see the project I’ve been helping to propose has finally gotten the go ahead and even got some press.  So, now its go time for CFL Media, and the next few months are going to be rough as we work towards re-launching all the CFL / Team websites under one banner – similar to how the NFL or NHL handle their sites.

I’m fairly excited to be at the center of this project from a technological standpoint.  We have a lot of great ideas, that will probably end up as written guides on my blog – for instance we are currently evaluating Varnish HTTP accelerators to help deal with the huge spikes in load we tend to have, being an event driven business.

Anyway, thats all for now – read the spec article here:

http://www.thespec.com/Sports/article/523528

Life is super insane right now – between work, wedding planning, building a house and trying to get some form of sleep, I barely have time for anything these days… I will try and make more time though if thats even possible.

Well, a bit delayed, but a happy new year to everyone out there who may find my blog.  Speaking of my blog – I have a few plans for updating it significantly over the next few months – I’ll be keeping the URL structure the same, but overhauling the layout and functionality to better suit my needs.

So, santa was good to be this year – got a lot of clothes and other fun stuff, bought myself a GPS from Best Buy on Boxing day – btw, if anyone ever decides it may be a good idea to go to any store on boxing day, its NOT.  I literally spent 2 hours in Best Buy – 1.5 of them waiting in line to pay for my item.

Anyway, so far, happy with it, I ended up with the Garmin 250W, I haven’t updated the maps yet – perhaps I’ll do that today, but thus far it hasn’t failed me.

Well, it has been a while once again since I’ve had an opportunity to post on my blog.  Things have been progressing well for me, both in my personal life as well as in my career.  Though I still find myself without much time to do everything that needs doing, I’m beginning ot get my life in order.

Tania and I are continuing to work on the wedding planning, which is moving along at a decent pace.  Tania found an idea for a centerpiece that I really like, but requires some construction work on our part, so I think I’ll likely build a sample and see how things go.  We also managed to book our limousines for the day of.  We decided on a 1961 Rolls Royce for Tania’s transportation to the church, and consequently our transportation to the photos.  We also managed to get a 20 person stretch hummer in the deal, so, all in all should be a good day.  We’re still working on the DJ and Decorations, which are kind of the two big things remaining.

Beyond that, work is going well for me – I got a promotion a few months back, and things have been doing well – though I never seem to stop working now-a-days.  I’m now the Director of Technology for MRX and the Ticats, which is more than a full time job.  Hopefully will have some extra help soon though.

Anyway – have to finish up building a site – I’ll post more details on it here soon.

So, I just encountered a very strange issue with PHP’s FTP function and thought I’d take a quick sec to write about the problem, in case anyone else is having it.

Essentially we have a module in our application that moves a few files around via FTP.  Now this works fine on some servers, but some have problems – ftp_put returns ”, and creates a 0kb file on the remote FTP server.  Turns out – after much diagnosis, that enabling pasv mode in some cases fixes this problem (ftp_pasv).

So, I have been struggling the past few weeks with Textmate and it being stupid slow on certain projects that contain a ton of files. Apparently every time Textmate gets focus, it re-scans the entire project folder for changed files – which really sucks if you’re alt-tabbing back and forth a bit to see changes you’re making to a project.

I finally did a bit of searching around and discovered this gem:

il maestro ignoto » Blog Archive » slow projects loading in textmate

To save some typing, you can just copy and paste this into your preferences:

!(/\.(?!htaccess)[^/]*|\.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|mp3|pdf|swf)|\.(tmproj|o|pyc)|/Icon\r|/svn-commit(\.[2-9])?\.tmp)$

This will tell Textmate to ignore graphics and whatnot when it regains focus and greatly speed up the loading of your projects.

So, I just added OpenID support to my blog, which I hope will encourage more people to comment.

I fixed the stupid problem I was having with tank by re-installing Ubuntu.  Since I no longer have any optical bays, I had to actually set up Ubuntu over a netboot install, which was kind of cool.  If I have some time, I’ll post some instructions on how to do it in case anyone’s interested.

Been a little while since I’ve posted I realize – been quite busy lately.  So, I picked up a new toy today for my fileserver / it just arrived today, I ordered it quite a while ago.  I had one more hard drive than I had bays, and I wasn’t using any of my optical bays – so I decided to buy a 3-4 drive bay converter.  Specifically I got one of these: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22889&vpn=CFP51%2DB&manufacture=Silverstone%20Technology

Really nice piece of hardware – very well packaged and organized.  Anyway, I proceeded to shut down the fileserver to install the drive, got it all set back up – drive detected, go to boot ubuntu, and guess what it won’t boot.  I end up at a busybox prompt.  Really not cool.

It would appear there’s some kind of bug in the ubuntu kernel or one of the recent ubuntu updates that is giving me grief – I know its not the new drive because I unplugged it and continued to have the same problem.  Specifically if I try to boot up, it gives me an error saying it can’t mount /root – Device or resource busy.  Well, I mean, really, how can the drive be busy, there’s nothing open on it.

So far I can almost get it to boot up but I think I’m going to leave it for the night and see if I can come up with a solution.  Currently to boot it up I have to do this:

mount -o ro /dev/hda1 /root

ctrl-d

That will at least bring me to a prompt, but for some reason I can’t access any of my drives – they’re all saying device or resource busy.

Again – Really not cool.