The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Thursday, June 13, 2002

PayPal Insiders Register to sell $141.9 Million in Stock This is from my print copy of the Wall Street Journal so I think it's damn reliable.  The journal gets this stuff right.  I am in no way saying that they should or shouldn't.  I would comment that if I was a shareholder, I'd be scared -- very scared.  The CEO is personally registering to sell $13.6 million dollars worth.  Interesting...  Scary...  I'd also recommend looking at Yahoo Pay Direct.  Not as popular but pretty damn good in my experience.   10:24:50 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Why Do I Blog So Much ? I've gotten a bunch of questions as to why I have such a high blog output.  Here are some of the reasons: ==> Read Story <== 8:56:52 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Basic Network Troubleshooting or What Do I Do Before I Call My SysAdmin ? Background: Lately it seems like I've been suffering the tortures of the damned.  Let's just say that the essay below was written in response to an interesting problem I had yesterday morning.  I'll tell more later but I would comment that if you have 2 boxes in a data center and one of the boxes needs to be reformatted since the data center screwed up, it's a statistical fact that the probability of them choosing the wrong box because, well, they're just dumb is actually 50/50.  And, the closer you get to a launch date, the higher that statistic gets.  Of course that probability reached 100% yesterday.  Very disconcerting.  I'm sooo glad that not only are we fanatical on backup but that we were smart enough to minimize our exposure (more on that later). NOTE: If you are in the hosting business, I strongly suggest that you bother to check if anyone is actively connected to a box before taking it offline and reformatting it. Ok... Enough of that junk.  Now for a helpful essay (at least I hope it's helpful).  Thanks to Kjartan for a great job editing and enhancing this article (yes Virginia, I do take the time to pick the brains of real experts at times). I was troubleshooting some network connectivity problems recently with a box in a remote data center that wasn't responding and I thought this technique would come in handy to someone.  There isn't any magic here and I'm not pretending that there is.  Still, if you are new to doing network stuff this is useful.  ==> Read Story <== 7:45:00 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

The Boston Mozilla Launch Party or Say "Thank You Andy" Although I was unfortunately paged away from the Boston Mozilla party so I didn't get to go to www.manrayclub.com, I had a great time at the little bit I did get to attend.  Andy of surfmind did a great job pulling it all together, even getting it running in a totally different city (he's in LA normally and was just in town for business -- so, why not, pull together an open source launch party if you just happen to be around and the schedule works).  Great job!  I learned a couple of good things here: Andy really knows his human factors.  Very cool.  I'm usually not a fan of professional human factors folk since they often seem to lack the common sense that, well, I guess was never given to them.  Andy's not like that.  Recommended. Mozilla impresses me a lot but a good part of that is as a component set for building applications.  For example you can rip the renderer into your own application and use it instead of the IE engine.  Andy and I talked about this at length and that's __damn__ cool.  It also seems to be a substantially cleaner model than the current Microsoft COM objects. If you are in the Boston / Cambridge area and need a place for an event, think heavily about Mama Gaia's Cafe.  401 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge (think MIT area).  Not only is the food both cheap and good, they have a 50 person room that they make available free with some notice and they even have wireless Internet support.  Really nice people too.  And, finally, they think Open Source is just plain cool.  It also has a sound system.  So either stop by for lunch, cool sandwiches / coffee / great burritos, or hold an event.  Strongly Recommended. ==> Just A Few Photos Since I was Called Away <==  7:09:04 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Cool, Random Email Signature of the Day "Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term. Evil can be transmuted into good. What is evil to one at one time,  becomes good at another time to somebody else." - Sivananda 6:42:53 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

I know Adam a bit.  Not a lot yet.  But he's smart.  Damn smart.  He runs Radio under Linux using VMWare (yes -- it is possible -- and that's cool).  And he's a fellow PHP guy that is tinkering around with RSS.  Here's his latest: 26,747 New RSS Feeds Available. Taking to heart what Paolo said yesterday about aggregators not just reading news I sat down and wrote some PHP to turn all 26k+ artists on discogs (the most comprehensive electronic music database) into RSS feeds. You can use this page to find an artist, I've provided auto-subscription links for both Radio and AmphetaDesk users. So when a new release is added to discogs.com by an artist you are subscribed to it will show up in your aggregator. The next step is to tweak this a bit and allow you to subscribe to the 6,000+ record labels. [Adam Wendt's Agnostic Audiophile Smorgasborg Good job.  Thanks! 6:31:23 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This