So Apple started pushing safari with itunes installs and making it an auto selected update with itunes and quicktime update. However much I love firefox and use it as my primary browser, it seems like work will never go with it at Roswell. We do support Safari for our mac users but I was told we will not support firefox because it is too hard for our help desk staff to support two browsers. I never considered that Safari could be our standardized browser for both platforms until now. I would do anything to get rid of IE6.

Seriously, the entire institute is on IE 6 for next eternity, a browser that came out in 2001. We had a major initiative to push to IE 7 but we couldn't because our medical records system, a vendor product called sunrise record manager by eclipsys is not IE 7 compliant. IE 7 is not hard to update an app for. If anyone of you are familiar with IE6 to IE7 porting you will immediately realize how ridiculous this is. They didn't even change the javascript engine, so it is mostly about CSS and any hacks that they were using for IE 6 but mostly has to do with them just no caring because they already have the cash. Maybe it is customized activeX controls? The problem is it is such a critical application that we can't risk it not working.

The vendors rake in the big bucks and then can't do simple things like be IE 7 compliant despite years of beta and tons of data on how to update your software. It makes me sick.

How can we say as an organization that we want to push our technology into the future and rely on web based solutions and then use a delivery interface that is an insecure, non standards compliant, memory-leaking piece of crap from 7 years ago. Even Microsoft thinks it sucks. I mean they had IE 7 a forced update but we had to turn that off.

We, and I am sure many other organizations, have many other problems that come from relying on other expensive vendor products. Its like they have no responsibility once the buyer signs on the dotted line. This one product which is not even in production yet and comes from a major vendor and is susceptible to SQL injection. Instead of forcing the vendor to fix the problem (which there is an answer for) we are now getting a $90,000 reverse proxy for the server that will look for possible sql injection attempts and stop them before they hit the server. How did we get so in bed with the vendor that they can get away with this. I feel like they should be sued for selling an insecure product.

If I ever ran an organization like Roswell I would do a major re-evaluation of the cost benefit of such heavy reliance on vendor products. Most of them could be reproduced with teams of dedicated in house developers and moreover even make money for the institute if we could sell to others. Its not like the vendor products just get purchased and work out of the box. They all have teams of people that have to support them anyways. I guess it is hard to find people who know how to program.

Really, I don't know the answer - I do know that it is not just keeping IE6 forever and relying on more vendor products to act as band-aids.

I think my stomach is trying to kill me right now. I skipped breakfast, except a banana because I was in a rush and we had no eggs. Then I skipped lunch because I had a meeting to prepare for.

Then it was 3PM and I didn't want to stop programming what I was working on when all of a sudden my stomach started feeling like it was being stabbed in my stomach. It was way up high in my actual stomach which is weird as I don't even really have pain there. Right now it hurts really freakin' bad I hope eating will satisfy the monster.

this is what I get for eating now-a-laters before bed and not eating a normal breakfast or lunch. I suppose I just should push it to much, this whole "better" thing, argh.

The word of the day on my screensaver was antichrist? Do you think that happened by chance or that my computer is possessed. It is good Friday after all.

I got my chumby today. It's name is Alastair. I think it has tremendous potential for as an interactive display device at the hospital. The background behind them sounds so much like the (e:jesse) story I always expect to read about. Here is a wiki about the chumby. (e:shawnr) got me hooked on it.

At work it looks cute on my desk.


At home it looks redic next to mr. big.


It came with the cutest packaging and some charms to hang on it.


During lunch (e:jon), (e:enknot) and I went out to Lagniappe's on Allen Street and I got the oyster poboy with fries. It is really freakin good. (e:enknot) got the same thing with fried okra.



We were down there because (e:enknot) was selling some books to Rust Belt for trade value. Book stores fascinate me. They seem so primitive in terms of information delivery and they have a particular smell. I think it used to be the smell associated with knowledge. Now that is pretty much replaced with the sweet smell of fresh plastic. At least in my world.





While we were on the way to Lagniappe's I saw this couch at that eclectic store across from the pink and decided to buy it for (e:matthew). After work (e:tery) and I went to go pick it up. I haggled it down a bit.


He liked it but it didn't match his plan for the home show. Luckily, we have lots of other rooms to stick it in. I think it is the first piece of really sturdy furniture we own.


I bought my tickets for Kimya Dawson at the Tralf on April 10th. You can order them on Ticketmaster
As a side not I really want to beta test the PS3 home world. Does anybody have a connection that can get me in?

We went to Red Lobster for (e:matthew) birthday and to celebrate lobster fest. He had the rock lobster and maine lobster combo, I had the lobster fire skewers - it was so good. I wish I had taken a picture but I was so greasy with butter and goodness I forgot.


They also had these really yummy collada drinks.


I finally dumped the pictures off the iphone from St. Patrick's Day. I had forgotten to take my real camera to the event so these pics are all I got. The iphone does pretty decent it bright light.

We were standing right under the beer tree when it started although we had no part in creating it. Call me pretentious but I won't drink beer out of cans since the whole Alzheimers aluminum thing. Who didn't get a picture of this.


The street was so packed with people that the police had to keep shooshing people back closer to the sidewalks



I can't believe how much beer was everywhere. I mean people were doing beer bongs on the street. I think St. Patricks day is the first place I saw teenagers drinking on the street.



Here is a pic of (e:terrys) profile. He almost looks like a red head.


The church of the ascension (e:paul,43683) finally put out their garbage dump. Is it even legal t oh ave this much garbage outside of bins. The thing that is weird is that so much of it was not necessary to put out. Liek I can see food scraps etc but when your garbage is so fucking packed - is it really necessary to throw out a film projector and a box from a coffee maker, etc.



The food at roswell has been improving


I gained just about all the weight I lost during the crohn's drama. I was trying to see what I would look like with longer hair before I decided to shave it off.

Don't let anyone tell you that Linux web servers won't work in a windows environment.

I really hate windows servers. Call me a linux snob fine but really the windows servers annoy the hell out of me. I mentioned this before but when I started at Roswell the web stuff was all 100% windows, .net. , mssql. Now, all new web dev is now 100% PHP/apache/mysql on linux and we have four new servers. I just finished setting up our fourth centOS 5 (RHEL 5) server and not only are they extreme performers both hardware and software but they also integrate seamlessly into our windows server environment.

The newest two servers were the first ones to run internal applications and yesterday I got mod_ntlm.so to compile on these 64 bit systems running apache 2 so that people from IE can auto authenticate internally as is required for our internal applications.

I also compiled pdo_oci.so so that our applications can access oracle through PDO. Neither was particularly easy on the system we were using but they both work perfect.

I am so thankful that my boss and his boss both trusted me and let us go in this direction. It will save us not only a lot of money up front but also a lot of money in time saved. Not to mentioned support from the head DBA who is agreeing to move new development into MySQL. The cost savings over oracle is tremendous.

Now we have all the yummy command line goodness and extreme extensibility of LAMPP at our disposal. I am thinking about building some more mods for apache that deliver additional information about our users as pulled oracle this week.