The Crack Team » 2005 » April

Diet Sodas That Don’t Taste Like Ass

archangel — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 08:52:49 +0000

For most of my life, I’ve hated diet sodas. Sacharine/Sweet & Low tasted especially horrible, but Aspartame/Nutrasweet didn’t taste great, either. Diet Coke and other colas taste pretty foul to me, and I love Coke. Friends have told me that all I have to do is choke down the stuff daily for 3 months, then you can stomach it no problem. I’ll pass. However, a few diet sodas have managed to taste really close to their non-diet counterparts:

Diet Minute Maid Orange The first diet soda I really enjoyed, very close to the original, but almost impossible to find in can form these days. I occasionally see it in 2-liter bottles.
Diet Sunkist A very good substitute for Minute Maid Orange.
Diet Sprite, aka Sprite Zero Nearly identical to the original. They are getting on the low carb bandwagon, rebranding it as “Zero”. Great for me, as it’s carried in 7-11 now, and I’m occasionally seeing in vending machines.
Diet Cherry 7-Up What I like to call a Shirley Temple in a can. Not very manly, but tastes great. Note that I have not included Diet (regular) 7-up, that misses the mark.
Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi This is pretty groundbreaking for me. I’ve long been a champion of Coke in the cola wars, and I’ve outright hated all diet colas (only Diet Rite came anywhere close, and still not close enough for me). Regular Coke meant less sweet, more carbonation; Pepsi tastes too flat. But in diet sodas, less sweet tastes wrong. Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi still needs the carbonation of Coke, but flavor wise it’s an achievement. Almost no diet taste. Can’t say the same for Diet Cherry Coke, which still has a ways to go. As for carbonation, if you’re just drinking a can, there isn’t much time for it to get any flatter. Worth it just for the caffeine, which none of the other sodas in the list have.
Coca-Cola C2 This is great while it lasts. I think this tastes very close to regular Coke, and makes an excellent substitute. Unfortunately, it looks like both this and Pepsi Edge (never tried it) have lost millions for their companies. The problem is, they wanted to capitalize on the various low carb diets, which prescribe zero sugars, not just lower carbohydrates. Half isn’t close to zero. Still at the supermarket, but my local vending machine has been sold out of it for some time, and it doesn’t seem to be getting replenished.
Coke Zero and Cherry Coke Zero Nowadays, I probably drink more Cherry Coke Zero than anything else. There is just something about cherry that masks/softens the aftertaste of artificial sweeteners. Coke Zero isn’t bad, and it’s finally arrived in a few soda fountains, most notably movie theaters.

Now, if we could just get more of these into vending machines, instead of the foul Diet Vanilla/Lemon/Lime Coke/Pepsi/Dr. Pepper permutations that currently fill them.

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Tossing My Red Hat into the Sun

archangel — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 05:58:08 +0000

Over the past couple months, I decided to migrate this server from Red Hat 9 to Solaris 10. What follows is the logic and history behind that decision, which is still in progress. This is the first in a series of articles about moving from Linux to Solaris x86.

Red Hat 9 is way past its prime, esp. considering Red Hat (RH) is up to version 4 (guess their odometer rolled over). A while back they told me they were stopping support; first the general software updates went, then the security updates.
     So I decided I wanted to upgrade to something supported. My first consideration was RH9′s successor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I ran into a few barriers. For the version I would use (workstation), they want $180 – per year! That seemed kinda insane, considering it was free not too long ago. I looked at Fedora, and at the time the documentation consisted entirely of… release notes. That’s it. No warm fuzzies here. So I said, ok, if I cough up the cash, how do I upgrade? You can’t! There is no upgrade path (not even with Fedora), you have to do a full server migration.
     I’m really curious who decided to change the pricing from free-as-in-beer to expensive-as-in-Microsoft, while at the same time forcing customers to rechoose their OS. At the very least you’re gonna consider moving to SUSE.
     This also sparked a debate about whether you could sell free open source software and not let people copy it, as they seemed to be saying. Nobody but Red Hat knew what the deal was, and they didn’t seem to be talking (or nobody asked them; much of the geek community, e.g. those who post to places like slashdot, don’t like actual research, even if it takes less time). I finally got the info from a coworker, who learned from Red Hat that you were paying for their compilation services and support, not for the actual software. In otherwords, if you had the patience of a saint (and an intellect to match), you could legally obtain the source and compile it yourself. Of course, you still couldn’t get updates from RH, or you had to get the source for those and compile them, too, making your life a living hell. I have heard that another company is offering compiled RHEL binaries and support for a significant discount, and for some this may be worthwhile.

Enter Sun

This sudden change, with no way out, made me very bitter towards RH. I was pretty much dead set on finding another company to do business with (where I define “business” as using a company’s product and resources with little to no compensation). At the time, I was assuming SUSE was the only viable option. At the time, it probably was; I’m far too lazy to wrestle with Debian.
Now, things are a bit different. Sun has recognized the opportunity to take customers away from RH by offering Solaris x86 for free. For a while, Solaris didn’t seem viable. Yes, you could get it free if you bought the $75 media kit, but they basically said they didn’t see the need/demand for the x86 version, and it looked like it was going to stop at version 8. Then they realized Linux was stealing customers because of x86 hardware prices, not the Solaris license costs (there aren’t any). And a lot of customers using Solaris x86 got upset. Result: change of course.
OS religious wars aside, Solaris is generally considered to be the greatest operating system created. This doen’t make it an obvious choice for a few reasons:

Available software (much less, even compared to Linux)
Ease of maintaining (harder than Linux, way harder than Windows)
Hardware compatibility (improving, but weak)

I’m picking it anyway, as I think I can get around most of this.
     To do what I want to do with this server, I need: Apache, Java 5 (for Tomcat), PHP, Perl, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Postfix. I found most of these available in package form at Sunfreeware.com, and all at Blastwave. More on them later, but basically I can easily add all the software I need.
     As for hardware, I’ve got some basic stuff like an Athlon processor (Sun is teaming with AMD), Asus motherboard, NVIDIA graphics card (unified driver architecture ensures compatibility across almost all NVIDIA chipsets), Toshiba DVD-ROM, and an Adaptec SCSI card. Nothing off the map.
     As for admin stuff, I’m really more of a Solaris admin than a Linux admin, at least at work. I hate system administration, passionately, so I do want to minimize it. I thought it would be about the same for me; turns out I’m wrong. It’s definitely worse, and I’ll get to that in an upcoming article.

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And We’re Back!

archangel — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 05:32:38 +0000

So there’s been a paucity of posts since my whirlwind romance with World of Warcraft. Alas, the infatuation has faded. I still play, and plan to for some time, but its hold over me has been broken. I think I first realized this the weekend I spent more time reading about J2EE than playing. There have been other things on the plate, and I wasn’t sure how to get back into this. Mind you, this is still a group blog, nobody else was prevented from writing here. Of course, nobody’s prevented from reading, either, but that doesn’t stop them. (I am a master of circular logic).

Anyway, Blizzard released a game patch, which means my big set of community-created addons (Cosmos) has probably been broken, and it will take a couple days to fix it. Luckily, my characters will be gaining rest bonus (extra xp for time spent away from the game, basically rewarding you for not using their servers while still paying them money). So no big loss, and I’ll again be suckling at the teat of mother Blizzard in a few days time. ‘Til then, I write!

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