Travel

I’ll be back to the states May 28 through June 9. This is the time I’ll finally be moving out of the place in Santa Clara. I’ll be looking to sell/give-away/donate/throw-out some of the less portable stuff so let me know if any of you would like to buy or take (best offer accepted!) any of the following gear:

Queen Size Mattress
Queen Size wood frame bed with headboard and two bedside tables (one still in the box)
Wide Wood Dresser
25″ CRT TV
Wood TV Stand
Apex Region-Free DVD Player
Large Wood Desk
Computer Desk matching above desk
Filing cabinet matching above desk
Bookcases of various sizes
500 CD rack
250 CD rack
Sun Ultra 80 4x450mhz 4gb 2x72gb Server
Sun SunBlade 100 500mhz 2gb 2x160gb Desktop
Two Sun Multipacks with 6x72gb scsi disks
1U case with power supply, dvd-rom, floppy, two 3.5″ drive slots with caddies
1 sofa
1 matching love seat
1 la-z-boy recliner
52″ rear projection standard definition TV
Stereo Rack
5 speaker surround speaker system (has subwoofer too but it’s broken) and speaker stands
Denon pre-digital surround sound receiver
Turntable
Qudraflex-666 vintage receiver
1 two shelf rack perfect for storing laserdisks!
Lots of laserdisks!
20″ Sun CRT Monitor with dual inputs
4 port KVM
APC Smart-UPS 2200 2000VA UPS with four external battery packs and web management card (all batteries replaced May 2005 so should be good for 2-3 years more)
Metal ‘gorilla’ 6 foot high storage rack
Two 6 foot high plastic storage racks
Various other PC and Sun parts, boards, memory, ethernet gear, wifi-b access point, etc.
Two Bay Networks 8 port network terminal servers (serial to ethernet, great for console ports)
Two Remote Power Management units (power on and off gear over the network, one may not be working)
Trek bicycle with Shimano pedal mounts
Brother Laser Fax/Copy/Printer

Basically I’m looking to keep my CDs, Books, some clothes and magazines, and get rid of everything else. Due to lack of time, I’m willing to let this stuff go cheap to my friends. This list was made from memory, so it’s quite likely I’m forgetting things.

ALL ITEMS FOR PICKUP IN SANTA CLARA ONLY, TO BE ARRANGED BY APPOINTMENT BETWEEN MAY 30 AND JUNE 6. No shipping or delivery. No pickups after these dates.

Brilliant Satire

A new website, 4/29 Truth, is collecting 9/11esque conspiracy theories about the Macarthur Maze collapse and it’s absolutely hilarious.

I wanted to add its RSS feed as a subscription in my Newsgator Online RSS Reader but got an error message trying to do so. This was perfect fodder for a comment added to the 4/29 Truth site:

Newsgator Online is also in on the conspiracy to suppress the 429truth.com web site. They will not allow the 429truth.com RSS feed be subscribed to using their service, giving the message: “Error: Subscription could not be added. Please check the URL and try again.” Here is a screenshot of what happened when I tried to subscribe:

http://jameslick.com/lj/429truth-banned-from-newsgator.png

This is yet another indication of just how much the government is controlling which sites the multinational corporations will allow us to access.

(I really did get an error trying to subscribe but I’m thinking it’s more probably a temporary error and not deliberate.)

EDIT: A few hours later I was able to add the feed without any problems.

Email marketers need to make change of address process easy

I’ve been trying to consolidate the email addresses I use to get away from using tagged addresses. This involves changing my email address on a lot of company email lists. While almost every newsletter and marketing email now has an easy and quick unsubscribe option at the bottom of every mail, few offer an easy change of address function, and many make it nearly impossible.

There are of course a few exceptions, those that make it quite straightforward to change your email address. With others I’m able to use the unsubscribe function and then go back to subscribe the new address on their web site.

But then there are the others. The worst seem to be those associated with magazine subscriptions. They often require you to enter a subscriber ID from the address label on the latest issue of the magazine just to get into the ‘customer service’ area and even then not all of them even have an option to change the email address. There are also a few sites where you use your email address as login name, but there is no obvious way to change the address.

Honestly guys, a lot of these newsletters and such I could easily do without. If I need to spend more than a couple of minutes to figure out how to change my address, I’ll just hit unsubscribe and be done with it. And you’ve just lost access to someone you might have sold something to later.

The solution is simple: down at the bottom of every email you send out, just below your ‘unsubscribe’ link, put a ‘change of address’ link too. On the linked-to page, ask for the new email address and then change it. Don’t ask me for my subscriber ID, my mother’s maiden name or my shoe size. Just my new email address.

Converting mysql InnoDB tables to MyISAM

Now that I have a VPS with limited memory available for my ‘main server’, I’ve been looking at how to optimize usage to make sure I keep well under the memory limit. I found a nice article Optimizing Apache and MySQL for Low Memory Usage, Part 2 which explains some great ways of reducing your mysql memory usage. One of their best suggestions is to disable InnoDB which can save up to 100M of memory.

I didn’t think I was using InnoDB at all but it turns out that Mediawiki by default sets up some tables using InnoDB even though most are setup as MyISAM. The Mediawiki developers note that InnoDB is better for those tables for high load wikis, but since mine doesn’t exactly qualify as high load, I thought it would be safe to convert.

But how to do it? Some sites recommended dumping the db, changing the ENGINE type for the tables in the dump and then reimport it. I’m sure that works, but it seems like a fairly crude way of going about it. Turns out there’s a better way.

First run the ‘mysql’ commend line program and connect to your database. If you have more than one database on your mysql server, you’ll need to check them each one by one:

mysql
use database;

Then get a list of databases using the InnoDB engine:

show table status where engine="innodb";

For each table change the type as follows:

alter table tablename engine="myisam";

For good measure look at the table types again to make sure you got them all:

show table status where engine="innodb";

If it doesn’t show any, then you can go ahead and put ‘skip-innodb’ in your my.cnf as outlined in the document about optimizing mysql above and you’ll suddenly have an extra 100M of memory available!

Back from Singapore

Actually, I was back on Wednesday night, but was busy with catching up with weekly paperwork and such. The meeting was really nice and I think we got a lot of things accomplished. If even a few things are actually followed through in, there will be a lot of good to come in the next few years. I got to meet a lot of nice people, including the Singapore regional HQ staff which I usually only talk with by email or sometimes by phone. Also plenty of good food and drink as well.

Meeting Day 1

I got to Singapore OK, though I wasn’t much good yesterday evening after having gotten up so early. One of the other meeting participants came in on the same flight but somehow we never bumped into each other. The meeting has been quite interesting. I can’t talk about any of it, but there should be a lot of good things to come out of it. It’s also been a great social opportunity to talk to a lot of Subway people in the Singapore office and from across Asia.

The hotel charges for Internet though, so I’m limiting my use.