Category: Metal (Technical)

I’ve added Google ads and the Google search bar to my site, more out of interest than in expectation of a vast revenue stream. The process was remarkably easy – it’s good to have a pleasant surprise technology-wise for a change. The search bar doesn’t yet search the greenman domain properly, as Google still have… Continue reading Google Ads and Search

An exciting day today with two resignations in the technical department. Blogging helped Russel Beattie get a job at Yahoo (at least according to this post by Jeremy Zawodny, where he claims the appointment as further proof that blogging can help smart people get jobs). Jeremy also regularly advertises Yahoo vacancies on his blog, so… Continue reading IOL Vacancies – sysadmin and developer

I was impressed with the first episode of Go_Open. The presenter, John Vlismas if I remember the name, is, ‘funny’ according to the 18 year old sister of my partner. A relief after I feared a boring voice droning on to an already converted audience. Of course, competing with the rugby and Survivor didn’t help,… Continue reading Go_Open begins

Doing some research for an upcoming Tectonic article, I came across some writings by Fabian Pascal and Christopher J. Date. They are both well-known in the relational database world, and have been particularly harsh on MySQL, calling it ‘one of the worst SQL options‘. Written before MySQL even supported transactions, and while the developers were… Continue reading Arrogance, slashing Slashdot (and MySQL) and the end of America

With Firefox 1 being released, there’s been a rush of sites displaying their browser statistics. However, none of the big South African sites to my knowledge have done this. I’m hoping to get these stats on the IOL site itself quite soon, but I couldn’t wait. Here’s what IOL readers are using (which is probably… Continue reading Firefox usage growing quickly amongst South Africa readers

Spotted an amusing snippet on Distrowatch. It appears South African Impi Linux fans were attempting to up their distro’s profile by calling their page on Distrowatch (which ranks distros by the number of times their page has been called) up to 10 times a second. Read the full commentary here. As Madonna said, no publicity… Continue reading DOS attack by Impi fans

I always think of the peg when considering inventions I wish I’d thought of, but probably would never have, even though they are obvious now. I used to ponder inventions much more as a child, or at least in the days when I didn’t have 3000 emails in my inbox demanding immediate attention. Now there’s… Continue reading The next peg?

A friend attended the talk given by George Monbiot when he was recently in Cape Town. The gist is given in a Mail and Guardian article on the same talk in Jhb (the article’s in a horrible archive format!). Monbiot had talked about a looming energy crisis, as oil is running out. He mentioned that… Continue reading George Monbiot and the looming energy crisis

MySQL 4.1 has been released as production, and it’s a big step forward. Perhaps it’s about time to update my book and start working on a Mastering MySQL 5. Also due to be released is FreeBSD 5.3 (it’s just been delayed from Oct 25 to Nov 5). The database servers at work are running on… Continue reading MySQL 4.1 and FreeBSD 5.3

After my post on Banking and Open Source in South Africa I’ve been made aware of the Defending the Fox site, which lists non standards-compliant offenders. It’s an awful design (they say they’re changing it soon), but I like the principle, especially the ability to contact the owner. Hopefully they’ll take the criticism constructively. Here’s… Continue reading Defending the Fox