Driving from Mountain View to Los Angeles
Today we stopped off at a house in Los Angeles where one of James' friends lives. We're on the way to Tempe, Arizona -- that's another six hours or so away tomorrow.
Kern County oil wells on I-5
Wow, and then we drove past a bunch of oil wells in the middle of an otherwise pleasant rural area called Kern County. I didn't realize that the Kern County area is responsible for two thirds of all oil produced in California. So there you go. There was even a 1950s truck next to one of the wells, which looked like it had just been abandoned one day from the look of the vegetation around it. If I wasn't going 130 kilometres an hour with the camera in the boot I would have taken a picture. Here is someone else's shot:
Are you required to wear a seat belt in California? I thought you were…
And then I saw a dude sitting in the back of a pickup, wrapped in many blankets, taking pictures as they drove down the road with his big SLR. Now that's dedication to getting a good shot. I would have a picture to show you, except that the OV511 driver oopsed, so the webcam wasn't working at the time. Damn Linux. [btags:road trip]
Meh, 3G coverage with Verizon is patchy
At least between Mountain View and LA the coverage is a bit patchy. We're back online again, but were off line for a couple of hours. I guess we should take the data from the GPS and provide a map of where Verizon failed to work for us...
SQL Server is incompatible with Windows Vista?
From Slashdot, apparently Vista and SQL Server don't love each other. That's pretty funny, if true. It seems sad to me that Microsoft worked for so many years on vista, and seems to have missed the mark so much.
On the road
Well, we've set off on our trip to Tempe, AZ. The first leg of the trip is to drive down to LA today. There we'll meet up with one of James' friends, and have dinner and so forth. Remember we're tracking the trip online, assuming the 3G coverage is good.
Where in the world are Mikal and James
Tomorrow we will be driving to LA. The day after we continue on to Tempe, Arizona for a week in the Phoenix office. Then we drive home. We got bored this afternoon, so you can track our movements here: http://blog.jdns.org/traveltracker.
Dear lazy web: writing to the win32 event log in Python
Dear Lazy Web, I have a need to be able to write to the MS Windows event log in Python. I must admit I don't know a lot about Python on Windows. Does anyone have a good short sample they would like to share? Hugs and kisses, Mikal
This would be me pimping tcmalloc
Uber cool Google written malloc implementation saves day at Wikipedia. Rusty objects to the 6mb memory overhead. I guess the overhead is a big deal if you run lots of binaries, which isn't always the case.
Open Source document management from Alfresco
An Alfresco employee (Alfrescoer?) posts about some of the interesting things they've learnt about being an open source company along the way. The comments about PR being more effective the cold sales calls is especially interesting. I argued for years at TOWER that we should be paying more attention to people searching for our product, instead of paying pretty boys to drive sports cars to sales presentations that everyone secretly hates. If your product has a good reputation and people can find it online, surely the customers will come to you?