Derek Bodner’s Blog

Posted at sixers.realgm.com

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I recently broke down and bought a tivo. I don’t really watch much TV, but I mainly wanted one for sports. I tend to not always get out of work on time, and miss the first half of a lot of Sixers games. It’s also nice to be able to tape college games (It’s going to make tournament time infinitely better), and for the rare shows I do watch, it’ll be nice to know I won’t miss any.

Anyway, I ended up getting a series 2 tivo, mainly because I didn’t feel like paying for a series 3, who are still comparatively expensive. I found a really, really good deal on an 80 hour series 2, so I went with it.

I originally set it up in our bedroom, as my main use for it wasn’t so much for live tv (fast forwarding live tv would be nice, though), but to record stuff when I’m away. The TV in our bedroom was pretty much only used in the mornings, and since the series 2 is only a single tuner, I didn’t want to tie up the TV at prime time recording my sixers games and prevent Elyssa from watching TV during that time.

I then decided to take the cable box out of the bedroom, as we really only watch stations we can get on basic cable in there. I brought that into the living room, and hooked the tivo up to that. I have the cable box without the tivo going to input1 in the tv, and the cable box with tivo going to input2 on the tv. The cable box with the tivo hooked up is on the ground and turned around, as I don’t need to change it since the tivo controls it, and the two boxes signals never get crossed up. So now I can have something recording on the tivo, switch inputs, and still be able to watch live tv. The ghetto dual tuner tivo for a third of the price. All in all, the setups nice. It’s nice not missing the first half of sixers games, that’s for sure. And I’ve been extremely impressed with the tivo interface. I don’t even care if that makes me a non-gnu/linux purist.

Just some rants about various topics before I head out for the weekend:
Global Warming
- Every time there’s a warm day during the winter, people screaming “global warming”. No. While I’m not going to completely rule out global warming as a threat, most estimates have the average temperature increasing about 1.5 degrees farenheit over the last 30 years. When people go “god, it’s so hot out, this is proof of Global Warming”, shut up. That 1.5 degrees is not make a substantial impact on your warmth.

And really, try to have a global perspective. Have you heard about it being the 2nd coldest january in the last 15 years? Have you heard about China’s historically cold winter? Or about Greenland’s winter? Of course not. Because it doesn’t fit the chic story. I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist, but please don’t use the last week’s temperature at your locale as proof.

Change

“I’m the candidate for change”. Oh jesus. I haven’t yet fully decided on who I want to vote for in the democratic primary, much less the general election. But dear god, if I have to hear about the rhetoric for “change” any more, I might throw up. That crap from Obama might just push me away from him. It’s as much the media’s fault as it is the candidates, but every non-incumbent candidate since the dawn of time has used that as a platform. I’d like to think our presidential candidates have a little more depth than that, and that our voters are a little more educated than that. I sometimes worry I’m going to be disappointed on both fronts.

nba.com has stats pages for each team (i.e. nba.com/sixers/stats, nba.com/hawks/stats, etc). Visited this morning and the SQL queries were being echo’d out. Oops!

Screenshot.

This is from February 6th, 2008.

I’ve spent some time in the Web Hosting Industry, both running my own (small) operation, then working for two years for HostMySite. During this time, I’ve come to frequent various message boards, as I enjoy the industry as a whole. I still browse and take part in these forums, even though I’m not currently actively involved in the industry (except as a client).

However, these forums sometimes scares me. This is a post I saw from the owner of a Web Hosting company that offers managed dedicated servers. Who knows the size of their operation (I had never heard of them before today), but just the fact that someone may fall into the trap of buying a dedicated server and expecting support from them scares me. I saw a thread titled “Large MySQL Migration”. So I click, expecting multi-gig databases, high traffic databases, migrating a replicated setup. Something of the sort. I click on the thread, and here’s his question:

I need to migrate a MySQL DB, in the past I have just created an SQL file and used that method (sometimes having to split the SQL file up) but now the DB is about 50 meg and 733,233 records.

Seriously? A whole 50 megs? That might take you a whole two commands and 30 seconds to complete.

No doubt he had probably only ever used phpMyAdmin, hence his comment about splitting up the files.

It’s irresponsible to provide managed services if your level of competence is that low. You can’t support something you don’t know, and please don’t try to trick people into thinking you can.