Where can I find Informix IDS version 10?

Meh.

Informix IDS version 10 is too hard to find on the internet - at least in a legit way. You'll be better off settling for IDS version 11.5. You could opt to go for IBM's time-limited trial or go for the one offered by the IIUG thanks to the info here. (IBM also offers a time unlimited version of IDS Developer Edition version 11.5 so you could go that route as well but I was specifically looking for version 10 and ended up at the post I linked to which is from way back 2006). Unfortunately, you might not be able to easily locate the downloads as per the instructions on that post unless you look harder. Here are some tips:

After creating a free IIUG account, re-validate your email address to allow you download from the Software Downloads sections. How you get there? Simple.

Step 1
First you need to be logged in here: http://www.iiug.org/software/index.html. Even after a successful login, the visual feedback still says otherwise, since the login controls still appears.

Step 2
Click on the Member Area link near the top of the page, underneath the login control which should display a popup with the address: http://www.iiug.org/cgi-bin/member_area.cgi in the location bar.

Step 3
Now click on the Software Download button then follow the steps to re-validate your email address to allow you access to Downloads if you haven't done so already.

Step 4
Once done, clicking on the button once more will present you a list of tools/programs available for download. Please be informed that the downloads are subject to terms which you have to agree to.

As at the time of writing this post the following four items are listed as available for download:

Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Developer Edition 11.50 xC5 released August 10 for AIX (64 bit), HP (64 bit), Sun Solaris (64 bit), Windows(32 and 64 bit), Linux(32 and 64 bit) and Macintosh (64 bit);
Informix Dynamic Server Open Admin Tool Ver 2.24 released April 2009 (OAT);
AGS Server Studio;
AGS Sentinel;

Enjoy!

Graduate School Admission Tips from the Inside.

This is that time of the year where graduate school admissions are upon us with me being far from ready to take that leap; although I have been nursing the dream of one day getting admitted for a Masters in Computer Science and then a Ph.D, I still think I need to immerse myself more in the industry and of course earn additional money along the way.

I came across this very insightful and candid post by Prof. Amin Vahdat, a CS professor at UC San Diego after stumbling across his blog from a Slashdot link that talks about Facebook's really impressive architecture to handle 300+ million users and counting.

This lead me to check the UCSD CNS web site where I noticed that Matt Welsh, now a Harvard faculty, (a name I vaguely remember to be related to NBIO and SEDA) would be giving a talk in the CNS Lecture Series come January 2010. He also maintains a blog: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ where he also has a post on How to get into grad school for intending graduate students.

I particularly enjoyed the witty and simply hilarious post he linked to by Prof. Luis von Ahn, Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. My best part:

7. DO mention the name of a professor that you want to work with, but make sure the professor is still alive.

Now that definitely is the type of advisor I'd like to work with, one that wields a seemly boundless sense of humor.

At least both Profs. Amin Vahdat and Matt Welsh are active in the research areas I am interested in: operating systems, distributed computing, concurrency and computer networks but the real challenge is if I can blast through the GRE and bring my research skills up to snuff to earn glowing recommendation letters that are important in getting me into their schools. I've never been a stellar student (although I once came top of my class in nursery school :D) so I'll have to rely on doing insane stuff when I go back into academia for a MSc. I'm thinking of throwing an MSc. in Economics into the mix since I also have a real strong knack for business but haven't quite nailed how I can apply this. I'm vaguely thinking applying distributed computing on some business problem that currently takes requires a lot of resources to complete similar to this but for a truly novel business problem.

Service Unavailable: IIS 6.0 Windows 2003 Server SP2 (64-bit)

I recently got this error on http://ejeboo.com and was a little bit worried since I had no idea how long visitors to the video search site have been experiencing this. I tried to quickly google for the possible cause and resolution while I opened an RDP session to the server to instinctively give IIS (6.0) a reboot.

For whatever reason, the google results that pointed to support.microsoft.com articles that dominated the SERP refused to load fast enough. Anyway, a restart of the World Wide Web Publising and IIS Admin services easily resolved the issue for me.

Funny thing is I never had any such issue with Apache when I used to host the site on a Linux VPS from SliceHost.

Google Minimalist Home Page

TechCrunch has a post on this here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/02/google-fade-homepage/

I happen to have come across one of the iterations of the final minimalist design as captured in the screenshot.