I finally got around to trying out RE_INVIGORATE, a free real-time stats tracker that does some neat views (the time zone display is pretty nice). No slicing and dicing, but good fun. It’s interesting comparing the interface to something like Sawmill (horribly ugly and baroque, but extremly powerful – alas, single-threaded, no real-time support).

Expression Engine came up in passing at a lunch meeting today. There are some really great ideas in there… The data modeling sounds killer (back in 2000 I began working on a KM tool w/ similar capabilities; that was interrupted by development of a vortal). I’m interested in seeing the caching and also a few of the security features. It seems that they’ve taken a lot of good techniques out there and put it all together in a unique way. It may be worth paying $199 just to look at how the internals are assembled.

I’ve been enjoying RE_INVIGORATE, it’s been fun. I’m tempted to throw it on the USC homepage just to see. It’d only increase load on the DAS system by about 20% or so? 🙂

In all seriousness, I’ll be following up w/ Omniture’s SiteCatalyst… (although $20K/yr is a large chunk of change. There has to be something better; perhaps running Sawmill for analytics and licensing DAS for realtime feedback might be an option)

Two people I chatted w/ in the shoutbox sidebar:

• Concept4.ca – photolog of an Ottowan Civil Engineering Student
• PassiveDigressive – blog of Chris Vincent

• uPortal Roadmap – JSR 168 via adapter in v2.3, 3.0 will use Portlets internally (using Pluto)
• Meta-Directories: Cutting Through the Hype
• Meta-Directory Implementation
• Novell DirXML vs. Critical Path* CP* Meta-Directory
• Sun ONE Meta-Directory Deployment Guide 5.0 SP1
• The Paradox of Fair Use – a very good presentation by Siva Vaidhyanathan

As traditional when putting off work, I’ve gone digging through crap. This time, we’ve turned up an old homepage. Wee.

Of course, it had an ugly disclaimer slapped on it (thank you Board of Trustees), but nothing a little LayoutFooterOff couldn’t take care of.

I’ve been a happy Rackshack customer (now EV1Servers.net) for over two years now. I’ve recommended them to all my friends that need cheap, reliable, unmanaged dedicated servers (power and network has been rock solid, current uptime going on 308 days [that was when I did the remote Red Hat to Debian conversion]). Reading this on /. made me pretty sad: SCO Identifies EV1Servers as Linux Licensee

jasonhamilton writes “EV1Servers.net has been identified as a Linux licensee, giving them the dubious title of being the first dedicated hosting company to have a licence agreement with SCO.
Rather than ‘eliminating uncertainty from our clients’ hosting
infrastructure’, as Robert Marsh (CEO of EV1Servers) claims, some users
of EV1 appear to be somewhat upset.”

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be recommending them anymore. While I wasn’t planning on moving (and can’t really spare the time), I probably will be looking into it when I get a chance.

Of course, that means hanging around and doing searches through at WHT, hearing the horror stories, and deciding which is least horrific.

• FastServers.Net
• ServerMatrix
• ServerBeach (hey, they offer Debian OOTB)

Creating a good web-app interface for laptop retreival could be a good afternoon project…

• Create a phone home script to track your Mac
• hostreg – A tool for remote reporting in “obfuscated” environments (eg. A program that might help you get your stolen crap back.)
• Mac OS X get ip address in script
• DynDNS.dk IP Update Script – This is a SysV Init script which update DynDNS.dk with the current IP address.
• GnuDIP Dynamic DNS

Best Passions blurb I’ve read:

I’m just thrilled that so many people can get so excited watching a good, old-fashioned public crucifiction. It’s nice to know that some things never change.

Frank Boosman takes apart Orson Scott Card’s ridiculous arguments against gay marriage

In the first place, no law in any state in the United
States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has
never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a
woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her
husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the
law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that,
without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children.
And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in
divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any
civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all
homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to
join them in marriage…

This is so nonsensical, it’s amusing. Card to gays: “You can marry! Just not each other! What’s the problem?” Does he actually believe this?

Hmm, ok, I guess this does beat out cool-2b-real. McDonalds, I’m living it! Hmm, is there a ‘mockery’ VoteLink?