graham.reeds/

What is up with Amazon?

I just surfed over to Amazon.co.uk to start my Christmas purchases and guess what? Their website is borked. But not in a nothing works (though I have got a few 404 when looking at PC3200 RAM for my machine), but in the fact that links from Amazon.co.uk link to the .com with the dollar listings.

Now I don’t know whether they will ship from the UK or whether they will ship it out from the States. They know where I live – I’m logged in for crying out loud – they should be able to redirect me to the correct page.

Which while I’m on the subject of Amazon, when I click on an Amazon recommendation from a blogger who happens to be outside the UK, why don’t they take me to the UK version of the page so I can actually easily add it to my wishlist instead of adding it to a new American one?

In the last 12 months their service has repeatedly gone Americanized and as I result haven’t purchased from there – if I go to Borders I may be paying a couple of extra quid for the bricks and mortar but at least I know where the books is coming from.

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Linux

People bleat on and on about how much better Linux is than Windows. Here’s some news: I’m fairly bright, and I like challenges, but even I am getting frustrated at Linux. I’m using RedHat 9, which might make some of you mutter “Why isn’t he using Ubuntu?”. Well I’ve joined a group of like minded individuals, and we’ve inherited a server and it happens to be RedHat 9. So it stays.

So I get VirtualBox, download the 3 CD’s that RedHat is provided on and start installing. The installation was painless. However getting the needed stuff installed is where things collapsed. Every website and forum that goes into installing redhat files has a slightly different way of doing things. But they don’t tell you where to get the files from: “Type the following to extract the apr-1.2.5-41b+8.tar.gz”.  That’s fine, but please tell me where to get that file first. Also installing from source isn’t the greatest it’s cracked up to be. Various software components organically evolve – functions come, go and get renamed or deprecated and dropped. So trying to compile several things from releases that you try and glean from the net isn’t the productive, especially when you have to wait 10 minutes to find they aren’t compatible. So there goes rpmfind.net.

And that brings me to my next point: The point of the tools is to make me more productive, not the tools themselves. Spending an afternoon trying to install software (Subversion of all things) isn’t productive. Windows takes about 30 seconds: Download the msi, double click the msi, accept the default config, done.  I can now start using Subversion. Can I use it on RedHat? No. Because I still haven’t got it installed.

So why don’t I use the install I have on my Windows box? Because I am trying to get the steps figured out so we can use it on the server without me borking the entire server.

This is the reason why Linux will never break the strangle hold of Windows. You may say that if I used Ubuntu then I wouldn’t have this problem, but RedHat was released in 2003.  I can still double click MSI installers created in 2003 and be confident that they will work as advertised.

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Stack Overflow update

It’s taken a while but I’ve started seeing Stack Overflow results creeping into my programming Google queries. They still haven’t been seen above the ExpertSexchange results that have been in the resulting set of results but hopefully that will change (soon).

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Traffic Spike

Just checked my stats and while the traffic has been constant for the past few weeks, a couple of days ago there was a massive (2x) spike in traffic which disappeared just as quickly. There wasn’t an increase in spam which usually coincides with this type of event – in fact with 1 spam that day it is one of the lowest I’ve ever had.  Drilling down via the wordpress stats plugin it appears that most were legitimate hits too.

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Mr & Mrs Bears Big Adventure

Mr & Mrs Bear is just back from 4 days at Disneyland Paris.

Fab time – but how much for candy floss?!?!

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Congratulations…

…to me and Mrs Bear on reaching our 1st Anniversary!

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