Information Week: Computer Ablaze in Las Vegas Desert

I'm sorry I missed this while at Interop. I would have brought marshmallows.

The storage unit is set on fire as part of the demo to show that ioSafe technology can protect the data inside from fire and flood.

And of course, the story contains a photo gallery.

Network World: Interop 2007 Highlights

The only reason that I went with the other Interop photo gallery first is because nothing in this photo gallery is actually on fire, though it's still pretty cool.

Ed Ropple: A Windows Based Packaging Mechanism.

Hey! You got your Package Manager in my Windows!

Me? You got your Windows in my Package Manager!

An example of this lacking functionality is the severe lack of any sort of package management software. Services such as Valve Software's Steam exist, but they are for closed-source software and are game-based to boot; they do not help the adoption of open-source software. I'd like to propose a system that will help us get open-source software into the hands of everyday, nontechnical users. In addition, the server portion of the project could be repurposed to create a Macintosh-based packaging system for F/OSS as well.

Truth be told there are many, many things I like about Windows that you just can't do in Linux. However, package management is one area in which Linux-based systems have leaped ahead. Adding a package manager to Windows is a big step towards simplifying the end-user experience in Windows.

PHP Classes blog: More defensive programming practices to survive Web site traffic peaks

Network engineers often overlook the "other half" of the equation - the application developers - when accounting for unusual traffic spikes and other network problems. This site points out some PHP techniques for better coding to survive bursts of traffic.

If a site is not fast enough to serve its pages, many simultaneous user accesses force the Web server to create more processes to handle all the requests. Consequently, more database connections need to be opened at the same time to generate the database driven content pages.

This is bad because it demands more server memory. Once the server RAM is exhausted, the machine starts using the virtual memory, making the server even slower, until it halts completely.