I've upgraded this blog to beta 3 of Movable Type 3.2, and everything seems to be working. I like the new look, and the whole system just "feels" a lot more robust. Now we'll see if the junk filtering does a good job of reducing the amount of trackback spam I clean out daily.
I don't know if Sun is trying to turn off customers or what, but I installed Solaris 10 on the old Sun Blade I've got kicking around my cubicle, but the simple task of updating it may prove to be beyond me. They have about four different unfriendly methods to accomplishing this, none of which seem to work. There's a built-in utility called smpatch that should do the trick, but fails to install 95% of the patches it claims I need.
It seems to be indicating that I also need some other piece of software, which is actually required to do the updates, a Sun Patch Manager. Why this isn't installed, I don't know, but I attempt to get it from their web site. Oops, wait, no, you have to have a valid support contract to download it. Okay, I have a valid support contract, I give it to them, they still won't let me download it, and the web site insists I'm not logged in, though the screen clearly greets me as Seth Bokelman and says I am.
Why do I need a support contract when Solaris is now free? Is Sun trying to build up a large reputation for having their operating system exploited often by not letting people who have installed it patch?
Why is it so difficult to make patching easy? Assuming this new smpatch system works, my understanding is that one only has to run "smpatch update". That's reasonable, I can handle that, but why didn't it install ready for me to do that? There's a GUI installer, it made installation a breeze. Isn't the first thing most people would do after installing a system is update it? I think so, but Sun apparently thinks you should be able to install a system with an IQ of 75, but you need to be a trained professional to run an automated patch process.
Now, I'll be the first to admit I know very little about Solaris, but I can handle updating my Red Hat box with "up2date -u" and I update numerous Windows boxes via my WSUS server. If Sun can't make the updating process easy enough for me to sit down and do it in under an hour, they don't deserve to survive in their ongoing struggles with Microsoft and the Linux vendors.
I just took the MIT weblog survey, if you have a blog, add your data...
There are two more technology jobs open here at UNI, for anyone who's interested: Assistant Applications Administrator:
NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information management, or related field required. Experience in Microsoft Operating Systems or UNIX required. One year of experience in Oracle/SQL with an understanding of data security, integrity and consistency; familiarity with backup, recovery, utilities, tuning and performance monitoring; and knowledge of technology market and trends preferred. Student experience will be considered.
and Programmer Analyst – IBM Mainframe/WEB:
NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information management, or related field required. Candidates must possess an understanding of administrative uses of computing services, have a working knowledge of COBOL, knowledge or exposure to a relational DBMS and SQL, and course work or practical experience with modern programming languages such as Perl, C, C++, or Java.
UNI is also hiring a Manager, Design & Multimedia Production:
NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS:Bachelor’s degree in media technology, information technology, educational technology, or related field plus at least four years of experience in multimedia production required. Supervisory experience required. Excellent communication skills required.
UNI is looking to hire an Assistant Systems Administrator:
NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, management information systems, or related field plus at least one year of system administration experience in a multi-user environment required. Student experience will be considered.
I installed the Google Web Accelerator this morning, and it says it has saved me 7.7 minutes of time already today. Too bad it only works on my Windows machines, and won't save me time on my Macs...
As you may have noticed on the right, I’m working my way through Java Programming for Absolute Beginners, which is kind of fun so far. I haven’t done any non-web programming since about 1994, so my skills are rusty in the extreme. To top it off, I never worked with any Object-Oriented languages, so this ought to be interesting. So far, the book has my interest, as you actually learn the language by writing a series of simple computer games, and most of my difficulties have been typos in my own code. Their Mac instructions aren’t entirely accurate though, I think they may be for Mac OS 9, but it’s really not clear. I’ve just used the UNIX instructions, and haven’t had any significant problems so far.
I’ve switched my RSS/Atom feeds over to using FeedBurner, just to try it out. It’ll let me actually get an idea of how many people are subscribed to my feed, as well as offer some cool features when I get around to making a Flickr account soon.
I was feeling bored while I installed a server today, so I took the opportunity to calculate the various values of the new TiVo Rewards structure. You get 5,000 points for referring someone to TiVo, but the actual “value” you get from that referral depends greatly on what you spend your points on. Unless noted otherwise, all prices came from Amazon.com:
| Item | Points | Price | $/100 Points | $/Referral |
| 20GB iPod | 25000 | $299.99 | $1.20 | $60.00 |
| Bose QuietComfort 2 (Crutchfield) | 25000 | $299.00 | $1.20 | $59.80 |
| Creative Zen 20GB Portable Media Center | 45000 | $471.99 | $1.05 | $52.44 |
| Nikon Coolpix 5200 | 35000 | $349.99 | $1.00 | $50.00 |
| 140 hour tivo - Rebate | 25000 | $229.99 | $0.92 | $46.00 |
| Humax DRT800 - Rebate | 35000 | $319.99 | $0.91 | $45.71 |
| iPod Mini 4GB | 20000 | $179.99 | $0.90 | $45.00 |
| Colored TiVo remote (TiVo.com) | 4000 | $34.99 | $0.87 | $43.74 |
| Pro Installation (TiVo.com) | 15000 | $129.99 | $0.87 | $43.33 |
| Delphi MyFi | 35000 | $299.99 | $0.86 | $42.86 |
| Phonex PX-441 | 7000 | $49.99 | $0.71 | $35.71 |
| iPod Shuffle 512 | 15000 | $99.99 | $0.67 | $33.33 |
| DWL-122 (Buy.com) | 7500 | $41.76 | $0.56 | $27.84 |
| 40 Hour TiVo - Rebate | 20000 | $79.94 | $0.40 | $19.99 |
| Linksys USB200M | 7500 | $24.99 | $0.33 | $16.66 |
