http://dan.makovec.net/blog Ramblings of a disaffected geek Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:58:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently we launched our online Cars portal, and so far it's been reasonably successful at attracting private sellers due to its relatively cheap pricing, array of payment options and seller features when compared with its competitors.  As with any new commercial site, we've faced a chicken and egg situation.  You need ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=284 Well, I'm stuck here for a week, and once again, Sydney has turned on the charm. We have the wet weather, the grumpy check-in bitch clerk, and the Pakistani taxi driver who told me that all gays will burn in hell and he'd like to personally cut all their throats ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=283 Woah.  This will have some interesting consequences out there amongst the open source community.  Sun, which created Java, Solaris and some pretty funky hardware that our sites run on, is buying MySQL, the company that developed the data base that our sites, and nearly every startup web operation's sites, runs on.Just announced a few ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=282 TCH's comparatively miniscule storage quota was getting on my nerves, particularly with my IMAP addiction.  So I've moved to DreamHost, where the hosting's cheap and the storage and bandwidth abound.Actually, I moved my mail across to DH a couple of months ago.  I just moved my web across this evening ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=281 I just came across MeBeam - a free service which lets you conduct video conferences using nothing more than a web browser.  It uses a flash based chat client that accesses your hardware effortlessly. Definitely the best one I've seen so far. http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=242 We had a little problem with a DDoS attack this morning on DirectoryAustralia, so I was forced to go down the path of using Apache mod_rewrite to blockany access by a given user agent whose identity had been borrowed by a rogue bot.  Not pretty, but it got the site back ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=280 It's 10.30 at night and I'm up on the 75th floor of World Tower overlooking Hyde Park and Kings Cross all the way across the harbour to Manly. From up here, this town ain't so bad.  Tonight however I descended my ivory (well, glass really) tower and walked amongst the plebs ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=279 Ouch. It hurts. It felt so good this morning, back on the weights and cross trainer after a year of blobbing up. Now it's lunch time and everything aches. Why do I do this to myself? At least this gym has a pool. That'll be nice on a hot day. http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=278 Just an addendum to that last post, in case anybody finds it handy: when building the db44 port, it appears that you'll need to use some variants. Use: port install db44 +darwin_8 +universal Hope that helps! http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=277 Was scratching my head over this one for a while. When I try a port install db44, I get the failure: ../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c: In function 'main':../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:212: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:214: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast ../dist/../db_dump185/db_dump185.c:229: error: 'struct __db' has no member named ... http://dan.makovec.net/blog/?p=276