200th DNA exoneration tomorrow. Today’s Chicago Tribune has a remarkable article about the exoneration of Jerry Miller. Miller, an Army veteran who’d never been convicted of a crime, was identified in a police line-up by two eye-witnesses, and ended up serving 25 years in prison before being cleared by DNA collected at the scene of [...]

The Essence of Duct Tape Marketing. Duct tape (the tape) is simple, effective, and affordable—it’s not always the prettiest solution, but it does always work. The central theme of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by John Jantsch is that effective small business marketing is a system—not an event—composed of [...]

Scaling to multiple databases with Rails. Remember that point about Rails lacking an easy-to-use way of dealing with multiple read/write databases? Strike that. Nic Williams has released Magic Multi-Connections. It makes it dead easy to use a cluster of databases to scale read and write speeds higher than a single connection would ever allow. That [...]

The yaTimer – a very handy utility. If you are a freelance consultant, writer, or designer, this versatile software timer may be what you have been looking for. It makes keeping track of multitasking activities almost painless. I have been searching for a better way to keep track of how much time I spend on [...]

Primal Issues. What few in the media (but a great many down on the street) are saying about the Virginia Tech massacre is that law enforcement botched the whole thing. Between the time Ho began firing in the dorm and when he started exterminating people in Norris Hall was a gap of two hours, during [...]

Cluster-like Non-Clusters for SMB Messaging Regardless of size, no business can afford to be without e-mail access these days. Combine that with the more and more services we pile on these mail servers and you’ve got the making of a perfect SMB disaster. Mail servers are far more than just “mail”, they drive groupware functionality, [...]

Required Reading: Microsoft Security Explained. This is not a joke, not a Geek Squad employee recording their customers in the shower, not a deathbed confession of who killed JFK. This is real. This is the most eloquently put illustration of Microsofts incompetence / ignorance. I wish I could write like this but unfortunately I’m the [...]

CentOS 5 is Out!. Congratulations to the CentOS team. They released CentOS 5.0 today, which is the free version of the Enterprise Linux OS. Basically they take the source for Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and recompile and rebuild a solution so you can install and run it.. Free vs. $3K, easy choice if you know [...]

The General-Purpose Storage Revolution. It happened so slowly, most people didn't notice until it was over. I'm speaking, of course, of the rise of general-purpose computing during the 1990s. It was not so long ago that you could choose from a truly bewildering variety of machines. Symbolics, for example, made hardware specifically designed to run [...]

Indeed. Easter Sunday. The ancient affirmation “The Lord is risen indeed!” (given in response to the primary Resurrection declaration, “The Lord is risen!”) used to puzzle me a little, but in looking back, I suspect that I was just thinking too small. Anyone who has ever looked at the center of our galaxy through even [...]