The Technical Exorcist

This is on the new host, after the database import.

WordPress and WordPress MU will cease to be separate products. Incredibly, there doesn’t seem to be a decent announcement. The guy who owns WordPress mentions it at a conference, the wordpress developer blogs talk about it as fact, and the process has already being tracked on the WordPress Trac website, but but I haven’t been able to find a formal written announcement with details.

Absolutely brilliant.

Personally, I think the merge will be good for us. It will make it more difficult for web hosts to discriminate against MU users, who sometimes like to block WP MU from being installed. It will make it more difficult for WordPress to discriminate against MU users, who like to keep MU lagging behind all updates, and only provided half-assed support and fixes.

What do you think?

I performed several backups and upgrades on this site today. We are now on WordPress MU 2.9.1.1, and all plugins are up-to-date. Based on the change logs, I hope this will resolve some of the posting issues our contributors were having. Please report any bugs or problems.

I passed the Net+ exam today with an 805 out of 900. Minimum score is 720. I think I got by more on good logic and troubleshooting skills than I did on knowledge. A lot of the test focused on enterprise networking technologies like WAN. I’m not too good with Fiber Optics, frame relay, leased lines, etc. I never managed a business grade firewall either, so I was shaky on the port numbers and protocols. I was glad I studied up on subnetting and supernetting. . . some people said that it didn’t feature much on the Net+ exam, but that wasn’t my experience at all.

Some questions definitely left me scratching my head. Differentiating between dynamic routing protocols? I felt lucky that I could recognize RIP. I got no clue which alternative would have shorter “convergence” time. And I don’t have any idea why MAC Address filtering would have more overhead and be less effective on some types of cables compared to others.

I was pleased that there was next to nothing about IPv6 on the test. It’s hard enough calculating IPv4 addressing logic without having to do much larger numbers, and in Hex to boot.

Comptia wants you to take their stupid survey after the test, and they have devised a method of pure evil to accomplish this. After you finish the exam, they refuse to tell you your score until you complete the survey. Those fifteen questions never seemed longer.

An amazing number of people think that genius is doing something random and then marketing it. A perfect example of this is an 18 button gaming mouse. The Inquirer has an amusing review. Reminds me of Wes Peden’s juggling. . . It’s different, totally random, and completely unappealing.

At last, Gigabyte has released a motherboard with integrated USB3 and SATA3 chipsets!

A decent article can be found on The Inquirer. Gigabyte’s website also has an overview. Only a couple hundred bucks on newegg. . . not bad for a new release.

For those not in the loop and desiring the overview, USB3 allows for 4.8Gbps transfer speeds for external peripherals, approximately 10x the current USB speed. It also does away with the irritating CPU polling that would cause USB devices to give your computer the hiccups.

SATA3 is twice the speed of your current SATA connections—6Gbps transfers speeds will be handy for faster internal flash drives in the near future.

These are both major speed choke points on modern computers, so the improvement should be more noticeable than your everyday technology advancements.

I just put the Ethereal Land through a number of updates. Here’s what I did:

1. WordPress-MU install was upgraded to the latest version: 2.8.4a
2. All plug-ins were update to their latest versions.
3. Post’s from Ethereal Land blogs are once again being pulled automatically into the newspaper.
4. The site administrator can once again change post authors on the Newspaper.
5. The duplicate “Front Page” category was removed to prevent confusion.
6. Backups were run.
7. The search box on the newspaper was fixed.

Please let me know if there are any outstanding issues.

Thanks,

The Technical Exorcist

Intel has put an awesome pictorial tour of how modern computer processors are made—from sand to packaging. It is somewhat simplified so anyone non-technical can understand, but it is still a great education. I highly recommend you check it out.

Click Here for Intel’s tour

From CNet. . .

a few weeks after the verdict was handed down, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis threw out the verdict on the grounds that he originally misguided the jury by indicating that simply the act of making a copyrighted song available for sharing amounts to infringement. A new trial has been rescheduled for March.

In an attempt to avoid another trial, the RIAA appealed the judge’s decision to declare a mistrial. But now it looks like the RIAA’s latest attempt to gain a conviction for copyright infringement has been thwarted.

Read the rest of this article.

Finally, someone has come up with an improvement in the often-overlooked flaws in computer equipment—noise. La Cie has found a way to make quieter computer fans. They are only selling them on their server hardware it seems, but I hope the technology is adopted for home and office PC’s as well. Fan noise can be terribly irritating, especially when it’s high pitched.

Link