Posts tagged Musings
Linux Distributions vs PHP
Mar 24th
The splintering of Linux distributions seems to be continuing!
This week, I have had requests for PHP versions 5.3 and 5.2 on both Red Hat EL 5 and CentOS 5 – though never distribution supports higher than 5.1.6 in the official repositories.
PHP 5.2 has been out quite a while. Ubuntu Hardy LTS has it and it is 2 years old. Ubuntu Lucid LTS is coming out in April has 5.3 by default. I bet Debian Lenny is at 5.2 or higher already. SUSE is at 5.3 (for version 11.x where X != 0)
“Why” seems to be the question of the day – why doesn’t RHEL do some updates to something people feel they ‘require’ for their PHP web applications? CentOS would then follow.
Even old/stodgy FreeBSD (my personal favorite) is all over the 5.2 camp for PHP since 6.x, and the *BSD people do not play the version of the day.
If I have to run Linux based systems, I choose Ubuntu. Not always the latest version but at least this distribution keeps up with customer wants (and sometimes…needs).
Goodbye VISI, it had been good
Mar 22nd
Today, a Minnesota company has been purchased by a corporation outside of Minnesota, for the second time.
A Brief history…
Vector Internet Services, Inc. started in October, 1994.
In July of 1996, I went to work at Vector (as it was known then) along with some of my old Winternet crew.
In May of 2000, VISI.com (as it was called) was sold to DSL.net out of New Haven, CT. Details of this sale are available to anyone who can use Google and has a little bit of time (ticker was DSLN).
In May of 2004, I left VISI.com out of boredom – DSLN really didn’t allow for any growth in the business or employee potential. Yes, I have a small chip on my shoulder about DSLN.
In December of 2005, Digital North purchased VISI.com for $3.3M and later renamed itself to VISI.
In March of 2010, VISI sells to TDS Telecom for $17.8M out of Madison, WI (Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. is out of Chicago and is the parent organization)
My largest competitor in the local market has been sold for its 3rd time, though I don’t know if that’ll be the charm.
I am sad to see them go. I’ll also miss the competition in the local marketplace for ‘largest locally owned & operated service provider in the state of Minnesota’, though I can think of worse ways to go
Best wishes and good luck to everyone still employed with VISI, and to the customers who continue to use VISI today and in the future.
References:
- Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. acquires VISI Incorporated (from TDS)
- Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. acquires VISI Incorporated (from VISI)
- VISI sold to Wisconsin Firm; no layoffs planned (twincities.com)
- Managed-hosting firm VISI sold for $17.8 million (finance-commerce.com)
- TDS Partnership to Fuel VISI Growth (from blog.visi.com and Mike Sowada)
- news.google.com search query
How to re-blog?
Dec 5th
I am having a crisis. Nothing earth shattering…
I read different things sent to me via multiple avenues, from email to Twitter, and then I head off to read the actual content of those shortened URLs.
But how do I get that data to other people easily without cluttering up this blog? That’s my crisis and one I am trying to figure out.
I am a geek, I read geeky thing, though not all technical and not all necessarily SFW (if you don’t know what that means…whew).
So, how to do it without cluttering up what I hope to keep a clean and informative blog…that’s the problem I need to solve.
Comments welcome!

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