Posted on May 15th, 2008%
About a week ago, I had to contact Verizon to find out why a cell phone number I haven’t owned for three years was showing up on my online statement. In the process of the call, they reset my online account password, and now I can’t log in. (Hence the misuse of the phrase customer support.)
Today, I went to Verizon’s web site to reset my account information, where I was asked to provide my email address and phone number.
Clicking submit opened up Firebug! Thanks, Verizon, for letting me do your debugging work for you. Does this mean I’m on the payroll?
. . .
→ Read More: Verizon lets you debug your own form submissions
Posted on May 15th, 2008%
A friend of mine (who is a reseller for Diamond Multimedia) forwarded me an email last night which shed some interesting insight into video card driver stability with Windows Vista:
ATI Provides Proven Driver Stability
Microsoft is currently involved in a class action lawsuit regarding problems with its “Vista Capable” marketing. As part of this trial, hundreds of pages of internal Microsoft emails were unsealed. If you want to take a look at them, here they are (pdf). Aside from providing some interesting insight into what goes on internally at Microsoft leading up to the release of a new OS, there is also a ranking of the cause of crashes logged with Microsoft.
The rankings, based on crashes logged with Microsoft in 2007, paint a very positive picture of ATI’s graphics drivers. For instance, 28.8% of all Vista crashes were caused by nVidia drivers, compared with 9.3% caused by ATI. When you adjust for market share, we still . . .
→ Read More: ATI video drivers may be more stable than nVidia drivers (but does it matter?)
Posted on May 15th, 2008%
I set up a Windows server as a WAMP server (Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) to run vBulletin. Everything worked fine, and the learning curve was pretty short.
Then I tried getting PHP to connect to a remote Microsoft SQL server. Sorry, no luck!
The apparent fix required an updated ntwdblib.dll. The one that came with the latest PHP5 bits (5.2.6) was apparently out of date (version 2000.2.8.0). A newer one, which I founded linked to from a UserScape support page, is version 2000.80.194.0. Shut down Apache, download the newer DLL (replacing the old DLL), and restart Apache. Viola! Hello, MSSQL server.
. . .
→ Read More: Connecting to MSSQL with Apache and PHP on Windows
Posted on May 9th, 2008%
A friend of mine has returned once again to a place called “career second-guessing.” He’s an IT guy who’s comfortable but not “happy” with his current employer or work situation. (It’s a decent paying job with little surprises but no room for growth.)
We’ve been bantering via email about what he should do. My last response was something that may be of interest to others, so I’m sharing it below.
“Do what you love” is probably the wrong thing to say. The correct thing to say is “Love what you do.” There are huge differences. Sounds almost the same, and it is — the difference is the chicken and egg.
If you believe, “Do what you love,” you must first figure out what you love — something that’s not easy to do, because we don’t know what we love until we find it. Think about the time before you met your significant other… If you had to describe your perfect mate (physically, mentally, emotionally, . . .
→ Read More: "Do what you love" or "Love what you do"?
Posted on May 7th, 2008%
Last week, I dealt with an outage of my “business-grade” Internet connection for the last time. The solution? A managed server, courtesy of SoftLayer.
For a pretty darn good price, I get full access to a dual quad-core server with 4 gigs of RAM and 500GB of usable disk space in a RAID10 array. Add in an awesome web-based control panel, an excellent sales staff (thanks, Michael!), and provisioning in less than two hours, it seems like the right decision so far.
It’ll take some time before I migrate completely to this new rig, but until then, I can enjoy the following scenery.
. . .
→ Read More: Eight cores, four gigs, ten raids, oh my!
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