The Technical Exorcist

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 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.

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.

The McCain campaign really fouled up the selling off of their surplus IT equipment.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

Besides Blackberries, they had un-wiped laptops out for people to look at and purchase. The staff claimed the laptops would be wiped before they were sold, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone knows laptops on display are just begging to be stolen. There is no excuse for having them pawed over by the public when the data hasn’t been destroyed yet.

Full article on Fox: McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter

I was working on some new Acer PC’s at work, when I noticed something that struck me as rather suspicious. The default profile is named “Acer User” as you might suspect, but in the Windows Directory structure, it is named “Lenovo User”. As you might already know, Acer and Lenovo are fierce competitors in the computer field. Why in the world would Acer have the words “Lenovo User” in their directory structure?

The only other times I’ve found the Profile name and the Directory structure do not match is when you change the name of a profile. Is Acer using Lenovo disk images, and then renaming the profile?

Has anyone else noticed this kind of anomaly on an Acer? Does anyone have any explanation?

This is the last thing they want to hear after the resounding slap of Vista’s face hitting the pavement.

Piling on top of Sony’s many sins, it seems that the Sony VAIO customer service is abysmal. It furthur demonstrates that Sony is not a customer oriented company, and that has practical implications.

Google has just added a feature to Google Maps that improves it to the point were I don’t think the competition has much of a chance unless they follow suit. You can now alter your driving directions with a simple click and drag interface!

Read the article on The Register Here

According to The Register, The US Department of Defense is creating a simulation of the world to model how various countries and peoples will react to various “stressors”—acts of God, Wars, etc. Reading the article, it sounds like a very interesting concept. I doubt it will be very accurate, though. When you’re working on that scale, everything is so complex I don’t see how the program could harvest sufficient information to be even close to correct.