Category Archives: technology

Amazing

It’s almost as if Microsoft knows how bad Internet Explorer is. This must be a ham-handed attempt at (1) making people hate it less and (2) slowing the trend of people abandoning it in favor of better browsers like Safari and Firefox. Heck, even Opera. My translation: “Hey, look. We know IE sucks. So how about this deal. You download a copy and we’ll feed a hungry person. Sound good? See, we’re not evil! We’re all kinds of philanthropic!”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think corporate (and private) America should be doing far more than the status quo to help people in need. But making someone download IE8? Weird.

I’ve Done It

I’ve really done it.

I moved my blog to WordPress.

Why? Well, as you probably know, I’ve been using Tangelo, an application of my own creation, for my blog for about four years or so. But I haven’t updated Tangelo in a very long time. I haven’t had a public release since 2006, I believe. So I decided it was time to stop fooling myself and let go. Tangelo is dead, and that’s okay. I can stop working on it.*

And that’s actually quite liberating. Because now I can stop worrying about developing my blog application and focus more on writing, which was the whole point to begin with.

So why WordPress? Because it’s powerful and ubiquitous. It’s built on open standards and it rocks pretty hard.

The cool part is that I still have all my posts. That’s impressive because I started this blog on Blogger back in 2002. From there I migrated all of my posts to Movable Type a couple years later. Then when Tangelo was ready for testing, I moved all my posts again. And the other day I exported them from Tangelo and into WordPress. That’s really quite a journey in weblog terms. The only thing I lost was the old Haloscan comments, and while I could probably salvage them, I don’t see a reasonable way to link them back to their original posts, so adios.

At any rate, here we are. Enjoy the new digs while I get things situated.

* If you’re a Tangelo customer, sorry. But I’m guessing you probably saw this coming. If you need help moving from Tangelo to WordPress, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help out.

On Commercial Databases

Nowadays I like to think of SQL Server and Oracle as the Death Stars of the relational database universe. Extremely powerful. Monolithic. Brilliant. Complex almost beyond the ability of a single human mind to understand. And a monumental waste of money except in those rare situations when you actually need to destroy a planet.

– James Devlin