antipaucity

I’ve been in the stackoverflow beta for a few days now, and am finding it to be a really interesting development and sysadmin resource.

If you’re also in the beta, you can look me up as origamigumby.

I was watching a recorded edition of Beyond Tomorrow (from Science Channel) and saw an awesome-looking motorcyle helmet, the Reevu. It has a series of polycarbonate reflectors that take light coming into the helmet from the back, reflect it over the rider’s head, and display it on a small mirror just above the visor in the front, so you always have a view to your rear (and even sides, byt turning your head slightly), and don’t have to take your eyes off the road as long, or at all.

They run about $500 in the UK, and I want one. It’s in the same price range as Shoei and other mid-high end helmets.

I was making a change to a small table today: adding a field that wanted to be a varchar. The other fields that were of type char all magically changed to varchar when I was done with the alter statement that added one field.

I don’t know if that’s supposed to happen, but it was serendipitous for me, as I wanted to change the char fields to varchar anyway.

And, interestingly enough, if you have a table full of varchar fields and you try to add a char field, it will automatically switch it to match the varchar form, and not switch the varchars back to char.

I didn’t see anything in a quick search on mysql’s website about this behavior, so it’s either undocumented, my google-fu is weak, or it’s a bug.

I’m a member of TriLUG - the Triangle Linux User Group.

Mostly I’m on the mailing lists as a lurker, sometimes as a contributor.

But this week I asked a couple questions which the friendly community jumped-on to assist me with.

Thanks guys!

A horrible comparison has been drawn in the following AP article about TimeWarner: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jwm8wu3jZWZLcKfIlycqFqFegknwD9126HN8A. “You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?”

There’s a problem with that statement: lots of cell phone users are going to unlimited time and text plans. I just switched because my personal phone is also my home phone is also my work number. So, switching made a great deal of sense.

My roadrunner bill was for “unlimited” usage. Of course, it’s de facto limited by the speed cap. If they want to meter usage, they could just drop the top speed. It’s how my hosting provider operates: I pay for an ”unlimited” 2Mbps pipe to the outside world. I can’t push content faster than that. No per-gig funkiness required.

(Thanks to Ben P on the the TriLUG mailing list for pointing this story out.)

http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampRDU

So, apparently the way it works is there is no schedule, no plan, and no idea of where the “un-conference” will go.

Interesting idea.

I’ve never been to one of these, but have a couple months to come up with something interesting to present on/with. Any thoughts?