HTML

I’m not saying that you need to know how to program, but at least learn a bit of HTML. It only takes a few hours to grasp the basics and it’s always a good resume booster.

The Basics of Hardware

When you say you’re a techie you better know a little about hardware. I don’t mean that you need to know about every single component thorougly, but you should be able to open up a computer and understand what is going on inside. If someone says their computer isn’t booting, you should be able to test each piece of hardware and deduce what is broken.

The Basics of Software

Like I said with hardware, you don’t need to know about every single piece of software, but have general knowledge about how it works. You should know what a boot loader is and how to install an Operating System. You should hopefully understand the differences between the major operating systems and be able to suggest what is best for a user based on their own knowledge.

Read

I find this one very important. Technology moves so quickly nowadays, you need to stay up to date on the latest developments. I recommend getting a feed reader or use something like Google Reader and subscribe to some tech feeds. A few good sites to get started on are CNet, Slashdot, Digg, Techdirt, Engadget, Wired, TechCrunch, PCWorld, MacRumors, Technology Review, and Popular Science. I have about 50 feeds in my feed reader right now and they keep me up to date on the latest news.

History

Along with reading, you should really know some history behind technology. If you look at the past, you better appreciate what we have now and will give you a bigger picture of how technology has advanced over the years. While Wikipedia is always a good place to start, you can find a lot of books in your library or off Amazon.

Know Best Practices (Also Practice What You Preach)

A lot of people ask me for advice about what kind of anti-virus software they should get or what they should do to protect there data. You should know that backups of data is essential for everyone and storage space is so cheap these days, there isn’t much reason not to do it. You should also actually do the same things so you can talk about it from personal experience.

There is a lot more you can do, but I think these are the basics every techie should really know. If you are intrested in this stuff then you obviously like to expand your horizons and usually you like to get smart in a specific subject. For me, I understand a lot of hardware, but I’m more of a software person. I program with some languages and I read a lot of software-related books that interest me. It’s up to you to find your niche.

After a quick check of prices we came down to GoDaddy. I use GoDaddy for all my domain names, but I never thought of having sites hosted there. None of my personal projects were “mission critical” so I thank ZoomCities for hosting them for free on a fast VPS. I can’t put a major site on a free hosting provider though. I wasn’t involved in budget discussions, but they settled on the 24 month Unlimited plan. It’s $13.49/month or $323.76 for the whole shebang. Obviously there are limitations to that. There are physical hardware limitations, but one thing I can’t get over is the speed.

Since it is an “Unlimited” plan I bet a lot of people host a lot of illegal files and are sucking the bandwidth of the shared server, but it seems overly ridiculous. Look at these statistics that compare ping time with my site (dweitz.net) and the recorder site.

--- dweitz.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 15.594/17.816/20.278/1.380 ms

--- therecorderonline.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 97.226/98.067/101.293/1.112 ms

I haven’t forgotten about speed of light differences though. GoDaddy’s servers are in Scottsdale, AZ while the server I have my site hosted on is in Ashburn, VA. Those two sites are about 2,203 miles apart from each other. The speed of light is 186,000 miles/second. So that means data can travel at a theoretical limit of 186 miles per millisecond. So every 186 miles we can add 1ms difference and not fault the server. For 2,203 miles that would be a difference of 11.8ms. So for round-trip that would be 23.6ms added. So if that GoDaddy server was in Ashburn the response time would be in the area of 73.626ms round-trip minimum. That’s a difference of 58.032ms between the two. Even if you slow down the routes between here and GoDaddy it wouldn’t be enough to bridge that 58ms gap.

I can’t blame GoDaddy though. A lot of service providers oversell their shared hosting. 1&1, Bluehost, and Dreamhost just to name a few. If you want to go to a dedicated virtual server it starts at $50/month most places and that’s a basic package. You get a lot more value add with a shared hosting package. Most people are going to be stuck with shared hosting still though, unless you have enough advertising or a massive budget to pay for dedicated hardware.

I hope I get FiOS in my area soon so I can build a server and run it from my house just for the heck of it. Having a server in my kitchen was one of my childhood dreams. I had messed up dreams as a kid.

(PS: First Post of 2009, w00t!)

Adium (Free)

I love Adium. I can be signed in across multiple protocols seamlessly which is a plus because I have accounts on six different IM networks. Also, it is readily customizable with a plentiful amount of themes. It also integrates with growl so I get little notifications when people IM me.

Handbrake (Free)

Handbrake is an awesome application that takes DVDs and turns them into MPEGs to store on my computer. I have a pile of DVDs at home and I’ve already lost a few to scratches and unfortunate encounters with my cat. There are a plethora of options you can set, but you can also go with the presets if you don’t know what you’re doing. Handbrake will now also convert between other formats as well from your hard drive instead of a DVD.

Little Snitch ($29.95 to buy / 3 hour free trial)

Have you ever had the curiosity to know what apps are doing in the background? Well Little Snitch satisfies that need. It tracks all incoming and outbound traffic on your computer. It works much better than the built-in firewall in OS X and allows you finer grain control over port blocking and what types of packets you let through. It’s a little annoying for the first minute while it learns everything, but after that, the little network monitor pop up is fun to watch.

NetNewsWire (Free)

If you’re like me, you read a lot of news on the web. RSS feeds have simplified the consumption of all that data. I have some main feeds on my iGoogle homepage, but I have a lot more feeds in NetNewsWire. It automatically syncs so I can check them elsewhere and it will sync up when I get back on my main computer.

smcFanControl2 (Free)

The Macbook Pro has this nasty tendency to heat up to burn your lap. smcFanControl solves all of that. I tend to keep the fans running about 4,000rpm which keeps my lap cool and battery life isn’t affected that much. It sits in the taskbar and have your choice of display options, but the default is compact and gives the CPU temp and fan speed. This was the second application I downloaded besides Adium when I first got my computer.

TextMate (30 Free Trial / $51 to buy or $43.35 with EDU discount)

I absolutely love this text editor. Some people prefer BBEdit, but I’m on the TextMate side. It does exactly what I want it to do and the project features are hands down the best. I use it for everything I create from simple HTML templates to advanced PHP scripts.

Transmission (Free)

I use BitTorrent…a lot. I find Transmission to be a great minimalist application on OS X. It gets my torrents down at blazing speed and its integrated support of IP blocks and bandwidth throttling are a plus. uTorrent recently came out with a beta application for OS X, but I’ll wait until it’s out of beta.

Twitteriffic (Free, $14.95 helps support them and remove the ads)

I do the occasional twittering and this app is excellent. I used to use Snitter (which is a great app), but I heard a lot of good reviews of Twitteriffic, so I tried it out and I was sold. It sits in the task bar and it uses growl to show the updates. The text box is a bit small, but I don’t find it much of a nuisance.

UnRarX (Free)

This nifty little utility is a godsend. I’m always getting files to download in lots of different formats and broken up into a million different files. UnRarX handles them nicely and quickly. It can recover corrupted files and it supports password-protected archives.

Versions (~$50 / 30 Day Trial)

As a programmer, I use version control a lot on large projects with multiple people. There is TortoiseSVN for Windows, but I never found something easy to use on the Mac. Versions seemed to come out of nowhere. I downloaded the beta and instantly took a liking to it. There is no crazy menus or slow Java programs to run to update and commit files. It’s all done in a Mac native GUI. It’s a bit pricey, but it works REALLY well.

The biggest problem I see is a lot of data is out there and accessible on the Internet. Spending more on IT security is all fine and dandy, but many risks stem from uneducated employees who accidentally leak data onto the web. The most secure system in the world is no match for the idiot who has access to the Publish button.

The Large Hadron Collider’s network was attacked recently as well.[source] While it was a simple hack, the LHC IT people revealed that the crackers were one step away from a computer controlling part of the LHC. I don’t even know how this can happen. Who thought it would be a bright idea to stick those computers on any network that was accessible to the outside world? Computers that control ATLAS and the other experiments should be on their own network. That network should not have any physical connection to the outside world.

The company I work for recently had a breach as well. It wasn’t a computer system though. It was a CD containing information such as names, social security numbers, and other personal information. It was suppose to be sent to the state for some tax reporting purposes. The disk never got there though and I got a piece of snail mail about two months after it happened that laid out the situation. I was offered the chance to sign up for a two year LifeLock account for free, courtesy of my employer. Since I now have a LifeLock account, I can safely say my Social Security number is…why should I tell you? Spending money on IT security wouldn’t help in this case, but I wonder why the state still runs it this way at all.

IT security can always continue improving, but it’s the people, not the hardware or software that is to blame most of the time. If a system gets breached because the adminstrator set the password to ‘admin’, who is to blame? The IT administrator of course. The system is obeying what the human is telling it. Artificial Intelligence is just that, artificial. A system can learn over time, but that’s just the wisdom of the crowd. The solution to all of this is to shutdown the internet, but unless you want to live in the stone age, then I would advise against pulling all those plugs.

I just read HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML, and I must say, it’s a little over the top. In reality, I think just about every single XML feed that is dynamically produced is done with sending the header text/xml and printing out lines while in a loop. It may not be the best way to do it, but it works. Sending it as application/whatever creates messy situations in IE and it’s all around not fully supported by any browser.

The same deal has happened with XHTML. It is suppose to be pure XML, styled and transformed with an XLST stylesheet. I have never seen that anywhere on the web with the exception of starcraft2.com. In place of true XML, we tend to just use HTML sprinkled with slightly stricter rules. Then, a text/html header is sent and the browser just ignores all the strict markup we did and parses it as normal HTML! I now understand why a lot of people like to use HTML 4.01.

It really isn’t the standard creators fault. The W3C has done a wonderful job creating very specific and well layed out standards. The problem is not them, it’s the browser makers. Some are obviously worse than others (*cough* IE *cough*), but none of them have fully implemented some of the latest standards. I can’t really pin down Mozilla because they’re an open-source, community developed browser. I can, however, yell at Microsoft. They have an entire team of dedicated people that just work on Internet Explorer. They get paid crap tons just to work on it. It seems like all that money really hasn’t paid off. Other browsers are light-years ahead of them in terms of speed, reliability, security, and just plain rendering ability. No one is perfect, but it seems to take YEARS for some basic implementations.

I would love to implement these standards on the sites I create, but the hard truth is, they just don’t work right yet. Until everyone can work together, nothing is ever going to work the best it can be.

PS: I know I haven’t posted in a while. I’ll keep trying.

You may not be a geek, but I’m sure you have always been curious as to what all that stuff on the screen of programmer actually means. You first need to understand that programming isn’t an easy task. Also, it requires dedication and the curiosity to learn it. Here are my thoughts on learning a programming language.Like I said in the introduction, this stuff isn’t easy. You may have heard of some magical programming language that is incredibly easy to learn, but it’s just a gimmick. To give an example, there is Visual Basic. By the title, you can guess that it is fairly simple. I have news for you though, it isn’t. Back in the day, BASIC was easy to learn, but no one programs in that anymore. Visual Basic is probably one of the easiest languages to learn, but it still requires reading a couple of books to really gain some experience in it.You shouldn’t get confused between markup languages and programming languages. HTML, the angled bracket tabs that allow your browser to display everything, is a markup language. HTML is easy to learn and isn’t used to program anything. If you really want to get into making programs for the web, you need to learn a web programming language.

Web programming languages are vast in number, but there are a few quality one’s that you should take a look at if you are interested. One of them is PHP. This site is actually powered by PHP. It isn’t the best by far, but it is the most widely used one. There is also Perl and Ruby. Those three are actually called server-side languages which means that they are parsed by the server before they are displayed to the user. Client-side programming involves Javascript mostly. Since Web 2.0 busted out, Javascript has had a second coming in the form of AJAX web apps and such. There are many libraries to help you out and if you’re interested in making all that glam, buy yourself a book and learn the basics.

There is also application programming. The majority of game development now takes place with C++. This is a complex language that may take years to master, but it will certainly be rewarding in both your sense of accomplishment and your salary. There is a program or collection of programs from Microsoft called Visual Studio. These components rely on Microsoft’s .NET Framework. That’s where Visual Basic is and also Visual C++ and Visual C#. Those are the most common ones. Visual C++ is different from normal C++ though. So you can choose either one or the other. When you use C++ to develop a game for example, you usually use a graphic library. You have probably heard of DirectX, but there are also others, like Qt.

Also, if you’re interested, there is programming for micro controllers. This is what I do on my robotics team and can be a pain, but it’s fun. When you are working with them, you have to take into account the memory limitations and capabilities of the microprocessor. If you are programming for a normal computer, you are able to use floating point numbers, on a microprocessor though, you would probably fry it. Microprocessors can be found anywhere from your car to your toaster. Someone has to program them, why not you?

I hope I gave you insight into the wonderful world of programming and maybe you want to get started on a project of your own. It can be frustrating at times, but that’s when you need to try your hardest to understand it. Sometimes you really have to push yourself because the programmers who made the languages usually make them for functionality, not ease-of-use. You can find programming books in most bookstores or online at Amazon. If you don’t have much money, fire up Google and find some tutorials.

The specification for HTML5 is being created with browser developers as part of the process. Since they have an idea of how hard it will be to implement each part of the spec, it should go smoother. Also, HTML5 is an incremental upgrade. It’s nothing as radical as XHTML and provides several neat enhancements that will make developing for the web easier. XHTML is currently just HTML with self-closing tags in most implementations. It’s a struggle to try and design with standards when they aren’t even supported and you’re just left with “tag soup“.

Being a good web designer is partly being able to develop a design that works across multiple browsers and platforms. This can truly be a pain when you’re talking about trying to get your code to work with IE6. How I yearn for a scenario when we can just tag team IE6 and no one would create sites that are compatible with IE6. This would force the user to upgrade to a browser with a least some standards support. Our entire school system just made the switch from IE6 to IE7. If our school system with hundreds of computers can make the switch, any small company or personal user should be able to also. All they have to do is click the install button, and then it works (not 100% of the time, but hey, nothings perfect). I by no means advocate IE7 to people, but if it’s the only option, so be it.

The Flash Player 9 has been downloaded over 3.2 billion times.

The reason why Flash does so well is that it comes pre-installed on a lot of machines and it can automatically update from within the browser. As I have said before on other blogs, people are stupid. They are also a bit impatient. If they have to go out of their way to install another browser or upgrade to say, IE7, they aren’t going to want to. Hitslink provides a glaring example. IE still controls about 78% of the market with IE6 still ahead of IE7 by 4%. IE7 was pushed through as a priority update on October 18th, 2006 [source]. That’s over a year and it’s about even percentage-wise. Now look at the Firefox trend. Firefox 2.0 has 15% of usage while the previous iteration, 1.5, has .63%. Since then, Firefox has updated automatically within the browser itself and it’s updated when the browser is restarted. No fuss for the user and most of the people that use the browser are on the latest version. Flash just upgrades and installs and people get the latest version without them having to do much except maybe click a link to automatically download it.

I digress. For all my hopes, they may just be dashed. I want to be realistic about it, but I so desperately want standards to become, well, standard. Making it so the user doesn’t have to do anything would be a step in the right direction.

Previously, I had an iRiver iFP 899. It worked out fairly well when I had it. It had 1GB of storage and it played songs fine. The only real qualm I had about it was the “iRiver Music Manager” that came with it. It was slow as hell and the drivers got screwed up every time I upgraded the firmware. Since it had a SSD inside, it was resilient to a few “accidents” I had. I dropped it on the ground, in a cup of water, and on other various surfaces. Thanks to the plastic case you get with it, I still don’t have a scratch on the thing.

Now back to the iPod that I just got. The one that I got was the iPod Classic 80GB Black. I like it better than the 5G version of the iPod, but the back is still very prone to scratching. Within the first 24 hours of owning it, the back already got scratched to hell. I had it in my jacket pocket, which is padded, so I really don’t know how it happened.

The interface is obviously sleek since its Apple. While it’s not particularly an amazing sight to me, all my friends are amazed by the album artwork panning across the screen on the right side. I know Apple likes to tout their cover flow feature, but I find it kind of annoying. I hate having to flip through the albums to find what I want. I either turn it on shuffle, or find the album I want by scrolling through the album list. The scroll wheel is light-years better than the little nub that I had on the iRiver player. It just took me a few minutes to get used to scrolling around quickly to find songs.

My biggest reason for buying the Classic was the space. I wanted room to store not just my music, but my movies too. I have about 12GB of music and about 50GB of movies on my external HD that I wanted to copy over. I came to the realization that all the movies are encoded with either DivX or Xvid, so I have to convert 90% of them over to the m4v which the iPod plays. It’s a minor setback though.

I have come to loving the syncing feature with the iPod also. I’m not the biggest fan of iTunes, but it gets the job done for what I have to do. It syncs up my music, videos, and podcasts quickly. I haven’t done any photos yet, but I assume the same.

All I have to say in the end is great job Apple. While not the perfect device, the iPod comes very close to achieving perfection. It single handedly started the portable music industry and has created a space for competition to brew.

EDIT: I guess this must just be a Google Reader issue because it looks fine in the raw feed.

They make it dirt simple for anyone to create graphs. Instead of making a bunch of data and saving it out and realizing that you screwed a number up, you can just go change a number in the URL and it changes instantly. No need to upload all the images, just use the <img> tag and link to the URL with it.

If I figure it out more, I think I’ll make a little script in PHP that will auto-generate URL’s. Then it won’t give you any excuse for not using graphs when you have numbers to show! This is just an example of what it can do:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chd=t:10.0,80,20.0|30.0,8.0,63.0&chs=250×100&chxt=x,y

To give you a background, our school network connects to the internet on two T1 lines. Last year, you could look forward to achieving around 70kbps download speed on most sites because of the volume of users and students using it during the day. At night, you could look forward to going around 190kbps.  Since the phone system was installed, you can expect to have around 20kbps or even slower during the day. I could connect via a modem and get better download speeds than that! This is especially frustrating in my networking class since we take our tests and read material online. Some of that is flash-based content which is just horribly slow. Since the phone system is constantly running, it doesn’t get much better at night.

Another slowdown is the phishing filter. I don’t get the reasoning for this one, but it’s affecting the system, so I figured I would talk about it. Every single request for a page has to go through the phishing filter which takes a second to analyze if your only serving up a page, but when it’s looking at all the packets being requested from everyone in the school, that number rises to 100s of pages per second. The result is waiting at least 10 seconds before the pages even start to load. They also “upgraded” to IE7, which has it’s own phishing filter, and its own problems. I usually turn it off, but to those who leave it on, it just makes it that much slower.

I guess VoIP is the way of the future, but it has to be used responsibly. Our IT guys made an assumption about the amount of bandwidth it would take up, and it has cost us. The phishing filter doesn’t make any sense since people shouldn’t be using their credit cards and getting scammed on school time anyways. I don’t mean to blame it on the IT guys because they were probably pressured to reduce costs by installing VoIP and the phishing filter is the result of people’s actions. That’s all for now, see you in the future!

Internet politics encompasses many debates. I’m not talking about a tiered internet, but that is bad enough. I’m talking about disagreements between the Tier 1 ISP’s. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn’t access half of the web because Level3 had a disagreement with Cogent and they cut off access. It has since been resolved, but if this happens more often, it will cause more disruptions. Also threating the web is not just qualms between companies, but their unwillingness to upgrade their networks. Core fiber and other essential networking that keep the internet running aren’t being upgraded. Although people will transfer around one exabyte of data next year, the big corporations such as AT&T defy the rest of us. In case you don’t know, an exabyte is over one billion gigabytes. They can barely handle it at this level, what makes them think they can keep going this way?

You can also look at the way we have large websites run. A lot times they are run at a co-location which may have good uptime, but a few minutes of downtime can mean money for some people. There have been two examples of this recently, Rackspace and 365 Main, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this as more web sites pop up. The general idea of grouping a bunch of web sites together in one facility is ironic; since the beginnings of the internet were made around the idea that if one place goes down, a bunch of places don’t go down at the same time.

Don’t be surprised when you try and go to Google.com and it doesn’t work. I hate to say I told you so, but it’s inevitable the way it’s going.

WordPress has gained an even more massive audience than last time I wrote. The community at large has released a few a versions of this wonderful software. I have attempted to switch over to Movable Type or some other alternate blogging system, but I keep coming back to WordPress. I really don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, I hope they continue on the same path. I look at this from a user’s perspective too. As a programmer, I see a few parts that could use a little overhauling, but most of it is just a matter of taste.

If you go back a few weeks, you will encounter the release of that $200 PC from Wal-Mart. I do have some qualms about gOS, but I’ll save that for another post. The system itself is solid, and it will help people enter the digital age with little impact on their budget. The only problem I foresee with such a system is that the ineptness of the consumer will create a help desk nightmare. Say someone goes out to buy Microsoft Office for their brand-new PC. Guess what, it won’t work since it’s not Windows that’s installed, it’s Linux. I personally know plenty of people who don’t know what an Operating System is, and would be completely pissed off when they realize they can’t install a piece of software that they just paid $400+ for. Seeing how this is a budget PC though (which comes with OpenOffice preinstalled), most people who are buying the PC won’t go out and pay twice as much of the cost of the PC on a single piece of software.

No recap would be complete this year without a mention of Apple, Inc. From new iPods, to the iPhone, to Leopard, Apple has made a major play in the tech market. It’s been covered ad-nausea in the media, so I won’t repeat what they’ve already said. I’ll just say that they all look cool, and if I had the money, I would buy them.

Google has also been doing fairly well this year. With the recent release of its Android mobile platform and breaking $600 a share, it’s looking up at the Googleplex. Google hasn’t been immune to all attacks though. From their attempted buyout of DoubleClick, to take-down notices from the studios against YouTube, and Gmail exploits (partly due to a jar exploit in Firefox, which is supposed to be fixed in 2.0.10), no one can say it’s been easy-going.

On the security side of technology and the web, we have the Storm botnet. The botnet is estimated to be really freakin’ huge (that’s just an estimate) and can DDos sites and take down entire networks, all with a single click. The main problem is that people are curious. They are also inherently stupid. When guys, in particular, see an image that says click the bunny to see what’s behind it, nothing with stop them from clicking that goddamn bunny.

Going to the gaming division, we had a few big announcements this year. The big games were Halo 3 and Bioshock. I’ve played both, and I love them. The console battle has clearly been won by the Wii (still can’t find any in stores), but the Xbox 360 also turned out well. The PS3 has suffered from over-engineering and a lack of good games. I have a feeling the PS3 will do better once MGS4 and Haze get released on the system.

So many big events happened this year. If I could, I would cover them all in this blog post, but that would make for headaches and stiff fingers. So until next time, stay classy Internet.

Case in point, yesterday, I submitted a story that WordPress 2.0.6 was released, but I said that Automattic had released it, when in fact Automattic doesn’t actually own WordPress (it’s an open source project) and therefore doesn’t release it. An edit feature would have been great in this place. Instead of people having to bury it and create a new story with correct information, I could have just edited it if I could.

Digg already lets you have the ability to edit your comments for a certain amount a time, so why not if you submitted the story? There would have to be certain restrictions in place to prevent misuse. I would say after about 30 diggs or so on the story, the edit feature would have to be disabled since if 30 people saw it and thought it was OK, it probably doesn’t need any editing. It couldn’t be like comments since if only 5 people digg it and say something is wrong, it might be a while before you go back and check to see what people said.

In conjunction with the edit feature on the comments, this would be a small, yet greatly appreciated addon to digg. All those in favor, say ‘I’.

If you are a web designer/coder/master, you may have heard of Open Source Web Design or OSWD as it was called. Well, to make a long story short, OSWD broke down because of its lack of updates. Through that reformation, Open Web Design was born. It’s now the end of the year and it looks like another shift is about to go on. With MonkeyMan leaving OWD and the new owners being not ‘likable’, there is obvious furor in the community. Blogger Andreas Viklund shut OWD down, figuratively speaking [ref]. Currently there was a forum ‘upgrade’ which most of the community thinks is overkill. They ‘upgraded’ to vBulletin, but many are saying that it was a mistake. You can look at the forums yourself.

There is a new player in town called OpenDesigns. This site was created by SeanRox. Him and two others, LobsterMan and Christopher are the current administrators. There will be moderators soon too. I hope, for the sake of everyone, this is here to stay. I’m assuming it is going to be a more democratic process and this should work out good for everyone. Not to mention they use WordPress as the back end and Vanilla for their forum software. Not saying this is what it’s all about, but it sure gets a +2 from me.

The main problem with OWD is the communication. Shay, the new owner didn’t have anything to say for a while and when stuff started happening everyone was confused. The breakdown in communication was probably the main problem that I’m attributing to the eventual demise of OWD. As much as people would like to think they can co-exist, it won’t happen. People are lazy and aren’t going to submit the design to the best community and not both.

On the plus side, the Open Designs process for submitting design is better and you don’t have to wait forever to get your design up. Vanilla is already hooked up to the WordPress-powered site and everything is pretty much a go. There holding a contest for a site design and some of the submissions look amazing.

I’m not a psychic, so I can’t predict what’s going to happen, but I can get an idea. The way OD operates is much better than OWD so far (at least as long as I have been there). Only time can determine the fate of these two sites, but the better one will prevail, and in my opinion the better one is OpenDesigns.

Not that I’m against it, but I don’t like the fact that Google is probably forcing them to do it. It looked fine the way it was, why spend time and effort to make it look better? That’s my speil for today.

Though I don’t see this is the case with corporate sites. Most companies don’t make major or even minor changes to their site for years. They do this to keep their image, but images change. Recent examples include Intel and AT&T. It costs money in the corporate world for web site development, but I think it is well worth the time to give a site a slight makeover every once and a while. I don’t see why they still insist on making sites that don’t comply to web standards even though they don’t take as long to load and looks better cross-browser and cross-OS. Giving a refresh every couple of months will give users a surprise and lets them enjoy it. Not everyone likes everything, but making slight design and functionality changes will keep people coming back.

Even though I’m a coder at heart, I think a lackluster design will go over worse than little functionality. Most people will make a judgment about a site they open in the first fractions of seconds they are looking at it. Users really don’t care about what amazing coding job you did, if you have whitespace galore and a cryptic looking site. You can easily tell if a person is a designer or coder by just looking at their site. Have a look at difference between Linus Torvalds and HicksDesign. Hick’s site is much more pleasing on the eye while Torvald’s site is just a bunch of text. I still say it’s content over style, but you have to equalize that equation and bring some style into the picture.

Looking at it from the corporate standpoint, it takes time and resources, but it is beneficial and will bring customers coming with a fresh design and new functionality. Keeping that old image will not help you and it might even hurt if people get bored with it. If you look at websites that haven’t been changed since the 90s, you will look at it with disgust. It’s time for the corporate world to respect their websites and make more frequent design and functionality changes to keep users on their heels.

$_SERVER['PATH_TRANSLATED'];

No longer works on Apache 2. I figured out a way to get the paths and take out the actual filename at the end.

function getDir() {
$expl = explode("/",$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);
$count = count($expl)-1;
for($i=1;$i<$count;$i++) {
$id = $expl[$i];
echo "/".$id;
}
echo "/";
}

First, I explode the Request URI into an array. Then I count how many items are in the array, minus one because there is a 0 which is blank. Then I do a loop starting at 1 (since there is nothing in 0) and go until I get to the end. Then I added a “/” at the end to make sure it was a directory. To give an example, if I navigate to http://localhost/pictorials/includes/config.php, it will print out /pictorials/includes/

If you want to make it the full absolute path, you can use $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; if you want.

Enjoy!

PS: I am aware that you can easily do it this way:

echo dirname($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);

I just wanted to see how confusing I could make it. I like to obfuscate code

Many people bash Windows for it’s security concerns and bloat. Well, if you looked at how many people use Windows, it shouldn’t surprise you. I mean, if you had millions of people using your software, there is always going to be bugs. I figure the amount of bugs and holes vary directly with the square of the popularity of the software. If you would like an equation: y = kx². This would create a parabola that I think represents this phenomenon well. I commend Microsoft for being able to support such a large user base. Windows has probably the most software written for it too. Since it’s so popular, many people write software for it. If you look at a random batch of programs most of them run on Win32 exclusively, or have a port for it.

Now onto Linux. Everyone says Linux is the best thing since sliced bread. If you’re looking for free software that’s reliable I would go with Linux. I think the main problem with Linux is that there are too many distributions to choose from. First there was Slackware and then came a whole bunch. It went from none to such a large offering people didn’t know what to choose from. The most popular now is probably Ubuntu or Fedora. I think it’s mainly because of the ‘pretty’ aspect. It has to be functional and look nice at the same time for an enjoyable consumer experience. This is what both of those distros pull off. I’m pretty sure this market will grow, but I just heard that Microsoft is working with Novell on something involving Linux. I don’t know what’s in it for Microsoft, but I’m sure they have plans.

I can’t say much about OS X. I’m saying this because I’ve never owned a Mac. I know people who do own a Mac and I know they love it. I have to say they are a dedicated bunch. I figure Macs are mainly for graphics design and some high end video editing. I know there are some nice games and the interface is probably the best out of the three major operating systems. I always laugh when I hear the joke about how you can determine a man’s sexual preference based on his OS of choice. Macs have always had that reputation of being for the more ‘festive’ bunch of males. I know it’s a joke, but I think some people actually think it’s true, which it’s not. If you’re looking for ease of use and some cool hardware, you might want to look into a mac. I just saw an article on digg about Windows being easier to install on a Apple computer than on a PC. Nice job Apple .

Not much else to say. Stay Classy Readers!

I could never become a Futurist because they’re wrong too many times. Every once in a while they’ll get something right, but most of the time they’re wrong. For instance, DEC’s Ken Olson, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” That was in 1977 I believe. Could he have been any more wrong? Then there is Bill Gates which said…well, lets just say I have more RAM that I need, a lot more.

We are even coming up with more crazy ideas now. We are stretching the limit to what we as humans can understand. When we start asking questions like “Why are we here?” or defining consciousness. At least when we thought about us flying, we could make something (an airplane) and it worked. Hell, we could all be living in nothingness, without our minds, we wouldn’t have this world around us. We could be living in a make believe world that is entirely our imaginations. There is a Zen story that talks about a man that has a dream he was a butterfly, but when he wakes up, he doesn’t know whether he is a man dreaming that he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man. I say we figure out what an electron actually is and work from there. We haven’t even seen a clear picture of an atom yet, how are we suppose to understand how the universe was created when we don’t know how part of the atom works and what it looks like?

I am still awaiting stuff that will hopefully come in my lifetime. Like robots that go get a drink out of the fridge for you and clean your gutters. If they DO get too smart for their own good, we just send an EMP shock wave and destroy them all. Sounds easier than it will be, but it lets me sleep at night. There are other cool things on the horizon like Oxycyte (artificial blood) and gene therapy. I hope that the future is bright for the human race, but you never know when Armageddon is going to happen.

PS: I realize that I tend to ramble.

I still don’t think that IE7 will help regain some of M$’s market share. Firefox, Opera, and Safari are kicking butt right now and I think this trend will continue. I would say more, but my hand is weary…from typing. Need to get some rest now. My current draft post is called Where is my Hover car? I hope that leaves you with something to think about.

I’d like to start off saying that Windows servers can replicate most of Linux’s functionality (like using Perl and other programs that are meant for Linux). On the other hand, Linux can’t replicate most of what’s Windows specific (Access, ASP.NET). I’m not sure if Mono can be used on Linux for ASP.NET programming on a server.

I might seem like I’m heading for Windows here, but I much rather have a Linux server. My main reason is the stability/reliability. Linux servers have been known to stay up for months without restart. Windows servers need to restart and refresh every once and a while. Another reason I like Linux hosting is that it’s dirt cheap, at least for shared hosting. It’s cheap because the data center doesn’t have to buy licenses to Windows machines. Most large hosting companies run their own flavor of Linux (or at least customized from something like Fedora or Gentoo).

When you are looking for Linux hosting, I suggest you check what the features are and up-time are. You will probably be able to tell if they’re overselling by checking their up-time *cough* DreamHost *cough*. Not just them, but other companies and other non-professionals that use their own Cable connection for a server and just got a reseller hosting package. Those hosting providers usually go out within a month or two. That’s a good reason to backup data to YOUR computer not just the server. I tend to make full backups monthly of my whole home directory and all MySQL databases.

Usual features you see with Linux hosting are, PHP, MySQL, Perl, FTP, and some type of control panel. I think cPanel is the most popular choice, but their are free options like VHCS or zPanel. Usually these control panels come with some type of statistics program, but if you don’t have one you can always buy something like Mint. If you have cPanel, I would recommend you check out if they have Fantastico. It’s an automatic script installer, but the hosting provider has to buy it. I think its worth it to check and it’s pretty easy to setup WordPress installations and many other applications.

I would really only suggest Windows for certain things. If you have enterprise solutions that need some type of premium support, I would go with Windows. Most distributions of Linux don’t come with commercial support, with some exceptions like Ubuntu. Also, if you have a need for Access or MSSQL databases, then you need Windows. This going along with ASP. I’ve gotten ASP to work with Apache through Apache::ASP, but it’s really annoying. With Windows, you are probably going to get IIS anyways, not Apache. Most of the installation of IIS and the database is automated and quick. Unlike Linux, where you have to configure a lot of stuff, which requires some experience. With Windows, you just press a couple of buttons and its up and running. I’ve gotten Apache, PHP running, MySQL, and some other programs running on Windows that are mainly for Linux, but it defeats the purpose of running Windows when you install programs that work better on Linux.

The control panel that you get with Windows servers is usually something along the lines of Plesk. That’s the only one I’ve ever used for Windows. Although there is a cPanel version for Windows coming soon, I doubt that because it’s been “coming soon” for a couple of years. It’s rich with features and it’s easy to do administrative tasks.

So, if you are looking for servers, I would recommend Linux if you’re looking for cheap and reliable hosting. If you are looking for ease of use and enterprise-level support, I would go with Windows. The decision is ultimately up to you (or your employer). I hope this article helped with some of the decision making.

Apparently sploggers and and spammers think the Internet is just a dump-truck. They just dump all their advertising right onto the web. I can’t stand all this stuff anymore. I get about 30 emails every day that are just spam. It’s Japanese spam too, so I can’t read it, but I know it’s spam. I figure that most of these spammers live in China or Indonesia, or some places in Africa where they can make good money.

I think the problem with spamming and splogs is that it pays too well. I mean you might not like it, but these people get paid money to generate random words with links and put them on a page. So that YOU, the consumer, will hopefully buy their product. I’m 16 years old, I don’t think I’ll be needing Cialis anytime soon. Any potential for new and innovative ideas on the net will always be brought down by people who figure out a way to use it for evil.

I’ll take a look at wikis for example. It’s a great idea, but when people start editing the pages with spam and false information (I’m looking at you Colbert), it just becomes annoying and wastes my time. Any product has the potential to be abused in some way. Whether it be software or hardware, someone wants to copy, cheat, lie, and just generally screw over the public.

This post basically just turned into a spam rant. I know my words can’t do anything to help, but it will make people angry. That’s the kind of thing I like though. Nothing is ever going to be the way I or anyone else wants it. I guess it could be called a fact of life. Nevertheless, I still sit in my chair brewing. Which, by the way, doesn’t solve anything, but it wastes time, which I seem to have a lot of.

FOSS encompasses many programs and people. The people that work within the FOSS community are dedicated to what they do. Linux is a prime example of what can happen when people come together for a greater cause. What about the rest of the community though? Is FOSS as a whole really thriving? Or is it just a couple of big names and that’s it?

When someone says something about Open-Source, I instantly think of Firefox and Ubuntu. Most people don’t think of WordPress or Tcl or PHP. I underestimate the power of stupid people though. Advertising is the key here. If you don’t have big company with revenue supporting your project, you are probably not going to gain a large audience in terms of non-technical people.

Advertising basically convinces you to do something. Being convinced by an advertisement means you are stupid because you don’t have the smarts to look it up and check if you actually need it and compare competing products if you do. Ubuntu has been successful because it markets itself as user-friendly and easy to use. People want to buy products that just ‘work’ out of the box and don’t require that much of a learning curve.

If a radical change in mindset doesn’t change within the youth or anybody that uses computers and software, FOSS is going to go down the tubes. Although it’s idea in theory is flawless, the reality of it is the more security people feel from getting software from the professional development teams. The leaders in the free/open source software community need to stand up for the smaller people and themselves to say that FOSS can do on par or better than the big corporate giants.

I’m a liberal, so I am biased toward believing that big business is fundamentally wrong, but we can’t stop it now. It’s up to normal citizens to decide what’s right for them. I always try to point people in the direction of FOSS, but I’m pretty sure people would rather spend $300USD on Microsoft Office Professional than to download OpenOffice.org 2. Something I like to call the Microsoft Effect. More people prefer the term vendor lock-in to the latter though.

We all know that Bill Gates will be stepping down in 2008, but I think the direction of the company is already starting to change. IE7 and Vista are just there to bring along bigger and better products. They have worked hard on IE7 bringing up much of it’s compliance. Now, although it still has the worst compliance, we can all agree that it has gotten much better. The UI has also taken a step for the better. They don’t want to innovate that much now because they need to catch up to the rest of the pack. Once they are on-par with the rest of them (firefox, opera, safari), there will be new features added. It’s always going to be a game of cat and mouse. IE7 introduced an anti-phishing feature which wasn’t in any of the other browsers. Now FireFox 2 has that feature in it.

This is the same in Vista. Even though it may be a resource hog and take a lot of graphic proccessing power, it still has WAY more features than most operating systems. Although Linux is gaining steam, it will probably never catch up with the popularity of proffessional software.

With IE8 and Vienna, Microsoft should bring about a new age of innovation in the company and FOSS. As long as this competition exists and they are each a threat to each other, there is always going to be a new product or feature on the horizon.

Although Ubuntu is probably one of the better Linux distros in terms of polish, there are still plenty of other distros out there. People just hear of Ubuntu since it’s so well marketed. I’ve converted some people I know and they still do use Windows for gaming and such. If only I could get Doom3 to play on Fedora…

Off the record, this is the first post. I hope to keep this blog going for a while. My topics will range anywhere from life, the Internet, Linux, and anything else I feel that I need to bother someone else with. I might get extremely technical and I might get extremely dumb. If you don’t know me, go check out the about page, which is located on this blog and on my website.

I’ve been a fan of WordPress for a long time now, and I decided to create a blog on wordpress.com. I’ve set up many other wordpress blogs on my own, but I find this is probably easier. Installation is incredibly easy, but this makes it simpler. So, stay tuned, and watch your heads on the way out.