3.5 hours later and the new screen door isn’t done, but at least it’s hanging straight and the latches work.
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Need to buy ~5-6 yards of mulch delivered to Stannards. The guy on 19 across from the Vets doesn’t seem to have mulch this year (or yet). Anyone else selling (I don’t have a way to get it myself, sorry Ted)?
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Henge Docks Macbook Air 13” no likey Matrox Dualhead2go
I was on the preorder list for a Henge 13” Macbook Air dock that just got released, and promptly ordered it when I got the email it was available. I already run closed lid into dual 24” 1920x1200 monitors powered by a Matrox Dualhead2go, and I figured the dock would tidy up my desk as well as get the Air up into the, well, air and give it some better airflow.
However, when I got it and plugged it in, my Matrox Dualhead2go proved to be problematic with it. The displays would flicker and periodically go dark and flash back on, but worked fine without the dock. I tested all the cables through the dock with a single monitor setup and it was fine.
Henge support was friendly and tried to help, but they weren’t sure, so I contacted Matrox, and got this reply:
Matrox provide the input cable and the input adaptor to ensure that the integrity of the signal is not decremented due to the length of a third party cable. Also, the pin configuration of our cable has been modified in order to supply some power to the Matrox unit. These are the two variables that differs from a different DisplayPort cable. We hope this information proves useful.
I can’t fault Matrox, they were prompt and answered my question. My perception is that the Dualhead2go is a bit hackish in the way that it works (no idea why power must go through the DisplayPort, it requires USB as well, or why not just give me a wallwart?).
Anyway, the Henge Dock is going back. I let Henge support know about the problem, if their customer support is truly GREAT, the fact that the dock won’t work with the Matrox should make it onto their website somewhere.
me (as a parent to whatever coach/teacher/etc. who wants my kid to do a fundraiser): “I will gladly cut you a check so I don’t have to do this” http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ucomics.com/fb120421.gif
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Overheard on the McCarran Airport (Las Vegas) pager system: “Paging Mary Quite Contrary to gate D59”. Airport employees apparently amusing themselves.
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My Talks at the MySQL conference 2012
I was honored to get two talks accepted at the MySQL conference this year, but interestingly both of them are actually only indirectly about MySQL.
The first is called “Writing non-blocking code for interaction with data systems and web services in Node.js and Perl”. This sounds fancier than it is, I picked up some non-blocking programming in Perl and a bit of Node.js (which, strangely, is pretty straightforward once you write some Perl AnyEvent) my last year or so at Yahoo. This talk really is just meant to be a gentle introduction to what this type of coding is, how it works, and some of the things you can do with it. My goal is to present something I could have used when I was trying to make the jump from straight procedural to event-driven programming a few years ago.
The second is “Running a high performance LAMP stack on a $20 Virtual server”. This talk is based off of my experience running a small hosting/consulting company that resold cheap VPS servers running my custom tuned Debian Linux to run LAMP stack sites. This typically ended up being things like Expression Engine and Magento. I spent a lot of time tuning these servers to maximize the RAM utilization to give my customers the best bang for their buck. This talk goes through all of the various architecture paths I went down and what I ultimately settled on, including webserver(s) of choice, CDN usage, PHP daemons, and big win MySQL tuning.
I’m working on putting these classes together this week, and I just got some good news that both of them have been selected for OSCON this year as well, so if you miss the MySQL conference, maybe I’ll see you there instead.
Angry Birds space is actually quite fun and a good next generation. I was fearing more of the same tedious aiming issues, but they added a guide that shows you where the bird is going (to a point), maybe this makes it too easy though. The planet gravity is fun, and the looks on the pig’s faces when they are about to bite it is worth the upgrade by itself.
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