Pandemonium Medicine Show

The Two Words : Some relevant advice regarding legacy technology from Bob Newhart.

I've been compiling a list for the last couple of months of legacy technologies that I feel are well past their 'Best Before Date' and should be eliminated. Keeping them around in spite of better alternatives makes all of our jobs more complicated. The reasons for keeping the dead technologies alive end up sounding like delusional rationalizations.

I'm looking for suggestions of obsolete technologies which we would all be better off by getting rid of them. I'm not going to share the complete list I've compiled because I want people to come up with their suggestions. Some ideas to get you started:

• Cylinder/Head/Sector Disk Addressing
• Telnet/rsh/rlogin
• Non-UTF character encodings
• S-Video
• ...

If there's a technology you're forced to use or support that's best destined for the boneyard please make the case for its obsolescence.

With Solaris 10u8 aka Solaris 10 10/09 due any day now I've been planning to upgrade my installations. When I originally installed Solaris 10u6 with ZFS boot I assumed that the upgrade process to 10u7 would be about the same as it has been for UFS boot installations. It turns out, unfortunately, that the Solaris 10 installer doesn't offer direct upgrades for ZFS.

After a few days of fruitlessly searching the Internet for a procedure to upgrade my ZFS boot installation from 10u6 to 10u7 I contacted my Solaris oracle, Dave Clack and, of course he knew exactly how to do it. Since lots of people will undoubtedly need this procedure in the next couple of weeks, here it is. This procedure also works for OpenSolaris. Dave's instructions mount the DVD ISO using lofi loopback. If, like me, you are running you Solaris installations in VirtualBox then you can just mount the image as a virtual DVD. The procedure remains the same with a few path changes.

Upgrade a Solaris 10 ZFS Boot Installation from one "u" level to another

lofiadm -a /share/iso/solaris_dvd.iso mount -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt pkgrm SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWluzone SUNWlucfg cd /mnt/Solaris_10/Product pkgadd -d . SUNWlucfg SUNWlur SUNWluu SUNWluzone 10uX is currently installed version 10uY is the version number of the one you downloaded lucreate -c 10uX -n 10uY lustatus luupgrade -u -n 10uY -s /mnt luactivate 10uY init 6

EDIT: removed un-needed SUNWrmvolmgrr step.

You want to know how to frustrate a web accessibility architect? Suggest you are adding alt tags to your images for the SEO benefits rather than for accessibility. It's true that image alt tags do increase page search rankings and the resulting tags are useful for those using non-visual browsers, but wasn't making your pages accessible reason enough?

If that doesn't work you can suggest that you'll continue to use tables for formatting even after you convert to CSS or include multiple invisible iframes on every page.

A few months ago I was updating my Wikipedia user page after seeing a user box on someone else's user page that I wanted on my own user page. I opted to browse a bit and see if there were other boxes that I might also want to add. One category of user box I wished to add to my page was to indicate my language preferences. Though I live and work in the United States I've remained a devout Canadian speller and used other idioms of Canadian writing (garbage not trash, holiday not vacation, etc.). Confronted with the options for spelling preferences I found that there was no existing user box for "I use Canadian spellings". I didn't wish to use the "I prefer United Kingdom spelling" user box because I don't use UK spellings for many words. I could have originated a new "Canadian spellings" user box but another of the existing choices intrigued me:

This polyorthographic user box doesn't accurately describe how I try to write. I do prefer to write using Canadian spellings and idioms, but it does reflect how I read. I'm comfortable reading almost all modern styles of written English. I opted to add this user box to my Wikipedia user page rather than creating a new Canadian English user box. I didn't feel that it was entirely accurate but felt the distinction wasn't worth fussing over.

Since adding the user box I've actually continued to think about it and how I use language, strange as that may sound. I discovered that my feelings about using Canadian style orthography were more complicated that I had thought. For example, last year while working on the JXSE Programmers Guide 2.5 I made the conscious decision to use American spelling and grammar to be consistent with the previous edition and the other chapters written by other people. Reasonable enough. Also, after reading about International English, Basic English, E-Prime and the Simplified Spelling Society (all courtesy of the zany link boffins at reddit.com) I decided to follow some of the rules that these simplified grammars advocate for my email and forum communications whenever I suspected that the reader might not be a native English speaker. I believe that using English that is less idiomatic has possibly made my writing easier to understand. Since I can never remember all of the English grammar rules anyway I'm also choosing to write only in the narrower style of the rules that I do know.

I'm finding myself becoming increasingly comfortable with being a polyorthographic English writer and now believe that the user box will eventually accurately reflect my writing. I'm also taking more of an interest in other ways I can continue to improve my written English.

The Consumerist is linking today to the innovative and pleasantly refreshing Aviary Terms of Service page. Wow! Why can't they all be like that?

I still convinced that the terms could be even shorter and less legally dense. (legal density--good or bad--discuss amongst yourselves).