I've seen this in the Denver area back in about 2004. (Westminster actually). Around 112th and Federal, there is an area that is really open to the North and West, and got all the lights that faced north completely covered in snow. When I first approached it, I thought that the power was out, so slowed to a stop, saw a few other cars stopped, and waited for them to proceed (assuming everyone was treating it like a 4-way stop, since power must be out). I stopped and the other cards didn't go, so I double checked all directions and started to proceed through the intersection when a car from the right comes flying over a hill at quite alot faster than I thought they should be going, and skidded enough to just miss me and go behind me. I had a hard time clearing the intersection because I was going up hill against ice and snow, and the other driver was going quite fast as they never stopped, and were going downhill as well.

I don't know what else I could have done in that situation.

It seemed that later that day I saw workers using a dump truck to drive around, standing in the back with and using compressed air, or forced air to blow them off.

I do know of a popular CMS that has some Twitter integration code, where for a proof of a really-bad-concept, a developer modified the module before a live audience to evaluate anything between php tags in a tweet within the global scope.

That's probably much more dangerous ;)

Get a couple of these. Works great, is simple, can be quickly reconfigured, works with almost any desk that you can screw into the bottom of, and did I saw it works great?

Add some velcro ties to it if you have too much stuff otherwise all the individual hooks give you plenty of places to hang loops of cables.

There are plenty of ways to store data inexpensively in a RDBMS. There are plenty of GPL and low cost RDBMS available.

The real issue is that the more and more we move into complex data structures and we push the limits of what an ORM can do with those simple, inexpensive RDBMS, the more problems we run into trying to map our objects into rows in tables.

Here is one of the more interesting solutions that I've seen to the problem, but it only work over relatively simplistic data where managing indexes by hand is ok, and it's okay for the indexes to be incomplete at any given moment. Ironically, that gives them more availability than trying to force MySQL to do indexes. But it really depends on the data and needs.

Agreed, Kyocera made what was at the time, a major advancement, a flip phone, that was a full palm pilot, and could run whatever palm apps you could find to put on it.

I still miss my 7135, 4 years later, and have never seen another phone that rivals its features and reliability. I'm thinking of trying an iPhone soon, but even that isn't the same somehow, given the state of paid/signed apps.

Also when my third Motorola v710 gave up and I got sick of replacing them, I dug out my first phone, a Kyocera 2135, then over 4 years old, plugged it in, and told Verizon what my EIN was, and it worked GREAT. After 4 years.

Although I will agree that newer Kyocera phones aren't as good as the old ones, I wouldn't knock them too much.

In other news, anything that you don't understand is scary and could be used for bad stuff.

It's kinda like how when riding around with a much older friend, and he went off on skateboarders (while driving by a municipal park with facilities for skateboarders) I pointed out that not all skateboarders are in gangs, or destructive towards property, and that practicing in a park may be a more constructive activity than their alternatives.

He had never thought of skateboarding like that before, as he had only heard it mentioned in other contexts and had not considered the alternative I put forth. Like virtual everything in life, there are good guys that take part, and bad guys.

Acquia, provider of commercial supported Drupal ?

Yeah, when I first read this article I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, but reading it made alot of sense. It's basically just using a simple schema like the "slacker" DBs for canonical storage, and then using additional tables as 'indexes.'

How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data

Given their needs in terms of adding features, altering the schema, and building indexes, being able to make the indexes "eventually consistent" was huge. You have to remember that to keep things nice and denormalized, you need lots of tables, joins, and that MySQL (or any other FOSS RDMS) CANNOT build indexes across tables.

That's a common name?

My first and middle name in quotes, gives me 1,480,000 hits on google.

Yes, my first name is the #1 most popular name for the decade I was born, and my middle name is the second most popular.

Learn what each of those are, and then study 3 major applications or frameworks to see how they go about preventing them.

For instance, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, or the Zend Framework.

I'd say you're own your own in regards to privilege escalation and logic errors with your own code.

There are really only a few things to power. Most of the time a generator that supplies 20-30 amps at 120V should be enough.

Growing up in the rural midwest that's exactly what my father had setup. He had a 20 amp Honda that had a special breaker panel that would plug into it. It had 3 circuits on it, the furnace, the well pump (we didn't have city water) and the refrigerator. When the power went out he would go and throw those breakers in the main panel, and connect the generator in the garage, and plumb it's exhaust out the special port he had built there, so that he could keep it inside out of the whether. For all cooking/lighting we turned to fossil fuels of some sort, whether oil lamps (of which we had many antiques that we would put to use) or a propane camp stove for cooking.

If you have FiOS or something like that, make sure you power your ONT, otherwise powering the router may be a crap shoot, as if it depends on the cable system it may or may not stay up, and the same thing with the phone company, if the DSL will work, then your regular old POTS would still work, so no point in powering up a router and VOIP just to emulate the already powered POTS.

If you are looking into a full house system you definitely want to go with something diesel, probably Kohler, where for small 20-30 amp generators, Honda gasoline models are hard to beat.

Almost every article on the web (which is a copy-paste press release) references 2 problems, a temporary outage, and "an ill advised zoom." Does anyone know what the ill-advised zoom was?