Amazon Prime a**hole

I paid for Amazon Prime because I’m rich and lazy. Besides, I spend about 15 hours a day at work, now.

This means whenever I have an urge to get a spatula, I just order it and it gets sent two day shipping at no charge. (Yes, I’ve actually done shit like that.)

But the new thing is they tried to sell me digital access, which, while a neat idea, is like a dumb ass version of Safari so no thanks.

Doing that must have caused a big mess up in their order flow because it just sent the stuff to my old company using my old billing information. I went to my accounts page to correct it but because the Amazon Prime thing, my order was being processed and I couldn’t cancel.

Dave IM’d and said it was a convenience tax.

(Just think what would have happened had I had 1-click turned out.)

[Updates after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 7

Creative abuse of the OSCON submission system

OSCON proposals are due in 20 minutes. I submitted something just now. That’s like 10 minutes sooner than last time. I am improving. 🙂

The last talk new talk I gave was at OSCON so I had to come up with something new. Since I just changed jobs and actually spent the afternoon B.S.ing one of Dave’s submissions (in exchange, he was the one who reminded me (multiple times) that proposals are due), I had to keep things sort of vague but possibly interesting at the same time.

That was a challenge.

[My proposal after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

Terminology soup in x86

I’m trying to help someone in academia buy a unix workstation. The task involves intensive number crunching on very large (14 GB) data sets using packages like Maple, MatLab and SAS.

Here is a quote they got from their computing department:

There are two main UNIX servers:

  1. Sun Microsystems V40z with 2 Dual Core 64-bit AMD 852 CPU’s and 16GB RAM
    running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (64-bit).
  2. Sun Microsystems V40z with 4 Dual Core 64-bit AMD 880 CPU’s and 32GB RAM
    running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (64-bit).

Can you translate the above into English?

I appreciate any help.

[My translation after the jump.]
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

On PHP Debuggers

[The views expressed in this blog are definitely my own and not those of anyone I work for, have worked for, or even get drunk with.]

I’m used to Xdebug. We use Zend Platform. Am I going to have to have a Rodney King moment?

Here is Derek’s take on it, and here is some guy from Eclipse PHP IDE’s response.

I don’t care.

I want the developers here to use the development environment they want and me to use the debugger/profiler I want. Anyone know a solution? Currently it seems that if I use Zend Platform, we have to use Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT to debug. If I use DBGp, we can use ActiveState Komodo, NuSphere PhpED, or PHPeclipse.

Am I wrong? Are there other editors that support DBGp? Which should I use (in particular I want have valgrind for profiling output and I like the built in error system in XDebug, but I haven’t had a chance to delve into Zend Platform so you can try to sell me on that).

[Other rants after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2