Greg MacLellan

I was sitting here watching TV, and this amazingly great song (video link) came on as the theme song to some show called The Loop. If you haven’t before, check out The Zambonis!

I came across an interesting article showing that running VoIP over a (TCP-based) VPN actually improves call quality. This goes against what you would expect – VoIP traffic uses UDP to ensure the least amount of latency, while TCP ensures all packets arrive in order, but means that one holdup can stall the whole stream. Once they investigated more, it actually makes sense why this happens. The VPN ensures that all packets get there, in order, which yields a better call.

I strongly believe that for any backup system to work, it needs to be automated and basically maintenance-free. People are just lazy, and having non-automated backups is a recipe for disaster. I believe Moore’s Law applies to backups: The day you need your backups is the day after you forgot to make them. This particular article will only deal with one component of a backup system: keeping differential or historical copies of files.

I just thought I’d post something about this great service that I realize has now become one of those vital pieces of my internet world. Del.icio.us is basically an online bookmarking service that lets you “tag” sites with keywords. You can then browse your tagged sites by tag or multiplte tags. It has completely replaced my browsers built-in bookmarking feature. I used to have a fairly large collection of bookmarks, and it was always a pain to keep organized.

At issue is a blog started by Dawe, a 46-year-old widow who lives on a disability pension, chronicling her disputes with Homestead over issues in the apartment where she has lived for more than a decade. Homestead informed Dawe that it would evict her unless she removed the blog, which she has refused to do. read more | digg story

It’s at least a start: RIM (the makers of the Blackberry) have announced an acquisition of Ascendent Systems, a company that makes software for connecting mobile phones to corporate phone systems. This means that companies using Blackberries will be able to basically turn the Blackberry into an extension on their phone system. I can’t find a ton of technical details, but apparently it supports SIP. It says the cell phones get full functionality of the deskphones, like 4 or 5 digit extension dialing, conferencing, transfers, parking, etc.

I was just watching Daily Planet, and Jay Ingram described something called the “tourist illusion”. You’ve probably experienced it before: you drive to a new place, and then back again on the same route, and the trip back seems to be much faster. It’s an effect that deals with human perception, and can be demonstrated in other ways as well. Commercials are generally 30 seconds long, but the first time you see a new commercial, it seems much longer than every time after that.

Something that really boggles my mind: Why do all the distros still push their 3 or 7-CD or DVD sets as the main way to download them? It’s 2006 for crying out loud. My distro of choice these days is debian, and I’ve been using the net-install ISO for a couple years now. Waste of Bandwidth Most distros come with, well basically, everything. Interestingly, most people use one desktop environment. One internet browser.

The much-anticipated Zend Framework was released a couple of days ago, and I finally got around to looking at it today. I really wasn’t impressed much. It’s really not much more than PEAR, with a sloppy MVC framework tacked on. I certainly don’t think it’s not a useful library: the Zend_InputFilter class looks very handy, and the Zend_Db stuff is an interesting implementation (though, I’m not sure if I’ll be switching away from ADOdb anytime soon).

The alarm clock goes off, and pops 4 puzzle pieces into the air, and won’t shut up until you reassemble them. Seems like a neat idea, but I have a feeling all it would teach me is how to do puzzles in my half-sleep..