[Wikipedia-l] Brion's notebook

Mon Oct 6 23:07:44 UTC 2003

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Holly crap! You are almost at a $1000 already.

Thanks to some very generous folks, I think I just broke it actually! 
Big thanks to everyone! Don't let that stop y'all from sending me _more_ 
money ;) but don't forget the Foundation. Good intentions don't keep the 
site running when we don't have working servers...

The problems with the current round of upgrades should hopefully be solved
this week; there were some mismatches between the old parts (server cases,
power supplies) and new parts (cooling fans for the processors) and such.
Once the new new bits are in Jason can get those installed and fix
whatever went wrong on Larousse. (Hopefully nothing permanent involving 
smoke and sparks!)

After that we've been talking about getting a new bigger database server; 
this will give our sites room to grow and allow more slack for times of 
hardware failure when other machines have to take over for the dead one.
Jimbo has mentioned the possibility of matching funds, where he would chip 
in part and part would come from donations to the Foundation. (All hardware 
so far has come from Jimbo's own generous pockets.)

(In case anyone's curious, I'm planning to get a 12" Apple PowerBook G4. 
It's small and light, as a notebook computer is supposed to be, and my 
home network needs some diversity. MacOS X is enough Unix-y under the 
hood to be a comfortable web server testing environment, too, moreso 
than trying to run Unix-based apps on Windows and without the troubles 
that Linux often has with specialized laptop hardware.)

> Is the bar updated by hand by you, or does it update automatically? A
> similar bar on the Wikimedia fundraising page would be nice (even if it
> has to be updated by hand - I volunteer but I'll need access to the
> account total info).

Mine's done by hand, but hypothetically one could do it automatically by 
filtering the confirmation e-mails paypal sends. (Those don't include the 
amount of fees extracted by paypal, however.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)