Monthly Archives: December 2005

On the Cost of HA

December 9th, 2005

A blog entry adds more insight to Jeremy Wright’s Web 2.0 Companies Need to Scale. As an IT administrator, I worry about the availability of Internet applications that run on the servers that I maintain. Perfection is something that I strive for personally, and I continually think about robust methods that will bring the availability […]

Polymorphism in PHP

December 8th, 2005

While thinking about a programming language deficiency, I rediscovered polymorphism. Overloading a function allows a function call to behave differently when passed variables of different type. I was trying to devise a method of simulating function overloading, because PHP does not support it. I considered implementing a function with an if-else statement ladder that tests […]

Forming and Maintaining Knowledge Workers

December 6th, 2005

A piece in Newsweek by Google’s Schmidt and Varian discusses ten guidelines to hiring and maintaining good knowledge workers. Several guidelines, such as catering to the every need of knowledge workers, are feasible only in thriving companies, but there are a couple of points in the article that are applicable to all companies and have […]

Bill Gates Gives Father a Birthday Gift

December 5th, 2005

As much as the software industry overdog and the its representatives are disfavored, I do find Bill Gates very respectable. The scholarship program for law students that was formed in honor of his father is a great gift. I, as a juror, have seen young public defenders and prosecutors at work. I am fairly certain […]

ISPs and Port Blocking

December 2nd, 2005

There is no reason for ISPs to block certain ports, but according to this blog entry, it seems that some still do. SBC Yahoo! DSL blocks outgoing connections on port 25 (SMTP) by default, however, they allow their clients to request the port to be opened. Whether or not SBC Yahoo! DSL unblocks outgoing connections […]