Dave Lachapelle

I know a lot of Canadians are weighing in on UBB (not enough mind you) but a good chunk of us are. Meanwhile most other countries are pointing at Canada and laughing. So, I thought I’d take a few minutes, and jot down my own thoughts on the matter, mostly for my own benefit.

In doing a bit of background research, I happened across a Canadian Heritage parody done by none other than Rick Mercer – video after the jump. To summarize – Canada – Gouging consumers since the advent of the telegraph.

(continue reading…)

Figured I’d put up a quick post. I’ve been growing more and more annoyed with OS X creating resource forks to some of my mapped samba drives, and after searching high and low for a method of disabling resource fork creation on network drives, I’ve effectively come up empty handed.

Now, that being said, I did come up with a way of dealing with resource fork creation – while its not exactly elegant, it works. It just so happens that all my servers are unix based, so to deal with resource fork cleanup, I just added a cronjob to my crontab. This will delete all of OS X’s resource fork files in a specific folder (and subfolders).

0 */1 * * * find /var/www/ -name ‘._*’ -print0 | xargs -t0 rm > /dev/null 2>&1

Note, if you’re going to use this, change the path (/var/www/) to whatever path you want to cleanup.

Also – I take no responsibility for this, make sure you have your data backed up, and all that jazz before you use it.

I happened across this today and found it quite interesting – wanted to document it for later use.  Effectively, its a method for implementing memcached using Propel in Symfony 1.2.

memcached as singleton in symfony « ESL Developer Blog.

Happened across an interesting / simple explanation for those who don’t know how ISPs screw their customers, and thought I would add another way ISPs screw over their customers.

You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.

I happened across this little tidbit as I was scrolling through my RSS feeds.  I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t even had a chance to read half of the entries in my feed reader (most days now I’ve been just saying mark all as read).  But this one caught my eye.  Apparently Boxee has partnered with a third party to build an actual Boxee Box.  This is definitely good news, and I really hope they can pull it off and come out with a great media center box.  Currently I’m running Boxee off my AppleTV – yes Apple, I hacked your stupid AppleTV to run Boxee because you don’t include XVid or DivX codecs, and thats what all my TV shows are stored in.

—Insert Apple Rant here

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rant about Apple – they brought out this awesome device called the AppleTV, I was super excited by it, has a really nice interface, easy to use, tied to iTunes, and was supposed to make life easier when streaming media to my TV.  Then I found out that they want you to only use the media format they use, which kind of screws anyone with any significant amount of digital video thats not in mp4 format.  Unfortunately I fall into that category, with somewhere around 1.2TB of TV recorded for viewing at my leisure.  To re-encode all of that, I’d a. have to have a ton of extra hard drive space, and b. way too much time on my hands.  So, really, Apple, get with the times already, just include the codecs in the next AppleTV update and allow me to mount my Samba share on it and I think a lot more people will buy your device.

—End Apple Rant

Even if Apple does include these features – which they won’t – I still think a Boxee box is just what the industry needs to jump-start it.  A lot of other companies have tried to bring out media center boxes, but they all suffer from one critical flaw or another; poor ui, no networking support, poor codec support.  So, I’m putting my money towards a Boxee box when they come out – looking forward to finding more details on December 7th during the Boxee Beta release.

Boxee Blog » a Boxee Box is coming!.