Monthly Archives: February 2006

Transparent Commodity Infrastructure and Web 2.0

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Tom the Architect pointed me over to this article called Transparent Commodity Infrastructure and Web 2.0. Excellent piece.

I especially like this quote here:

Let me use an example: back in 1998 if you were building a web-based startup, you were probably running on Solaris/SPARC and using an Oracle database. You were also likely to be running on some sort of a Java servlet engine (though there were exceptions, this was again the leading edge). This huge apparatus usually required at least 1 of the following: DBA, sys-admin, release manager, and build manager– nevermind all of the consultants and vendor people that it took to solve problems that arose from trying to get everything working together.

Fast forward to 2005. Anyone still using Solaris/SPARC for web apps is either a moron or a depressed Sun shareholder. MySQL and Postgres are now considered “enterprise-grade,” and if you should be so masochistic as to still want to do Java development on the app-tier, you’ve got Tomcat, Jetty, and even JBOSS available to you on your platform of choice.

I couldn’t agree more. So many companies stuck in the 90’s … excellent article and worth a full read.

Stairway To Heaven – Randy Rhoads

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Photo by rbieber

A picture of the Randy Rhoads section of the book "Stairway to Heaven: The Final Resting Places of Rocks Legends"

I found a book called Stairway to Heaven : The Final Resting Places of Rock’s Legends. This is such a cool book of photographs of the grave sites of many of rocks departed.

I had such a kick going through all of these pictures. Not sure why, but this kind of thing has always facinated me.

Change of Focus

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In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve kind of slowed the volume of stuff being posted to the site. The reason for this is that I’ve been focusing pretty heavily on the podcast site lately. I’ve found that podcasting is something that I’m extremely interested in, know nothing about, and completely suck at — a perfect place to focus and learn something new.

Not only that, I enjoy the process of podcasting more than blogging. I find it to be a more “personal” medium. I find myself preparing more (not as much as I should, but definitely more than blogging).

So if the site looks like its getting stale, it probably is. This might change, or it might not. Lets see how quickly I get bored or burnt out with podcasting — and lets hope that if that does happen, it happens after I’ve hit my 20 podcast goal that I set with Andy.

In August of 2004 I wrote a post listing some of my favorite quotes. One of those was from a friend who once told me that “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly while you learn it”. I’m putting that one to the test here and seeing whether it holds water. Personally, I’m having fun with it.

Dreamhost Now Providing One-Click Subversion Support

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My web hosting provider DreamHost has added Subversion to its list of software available through its one click installations. The service provides Subversion running under Apache.

If your looking for a Subversion provider, DreamHost might be it for you. Their prices are pretty reasonable. I’ve been with them since 2001 and have no complaints whatsoever. Excellent service and you can admin things quite easily through their control panel.

If you want to check them out, hit the DreamHost link on the right to tell them I sent you. 😉