Dan Makovec’s blog

Back in Sydney

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 as soon as I mentioned that I used to live in Newtown.

I’m theoretically here until Friday, working night shift down in the datacentre for the next couple of days. With any luck though, I’ll get my stuff done sooner and get back on a plane a day or so early. Fingers crossed!

Sun buys MySQL

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 hours ago.  I wonder how this will develop? 

Just moved to DreamHost

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 so that I can finally give TCH the flick (as soon as the DNS updates, which I’m hosting at E-Info, propagate).It also gave me a chance to install Joomla and a couple of other pieces of software I’m investigating for work.  An interesting afternoon’s research. 

MeBeam - platform agnostic video conferencing

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.