Month: July 2008

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Al Gore Did Not Create The Internet

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people laugh about how Al Gore said he created the Internet.  Not that I’m sticking up for him or anything, but he never really claimed to have invented the Internet, so it irks me when people perpetuate that myth.

As this cool Neatorama article entitled 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet explains, Gore actually had a hand in helping to legislate initiatives that allowed the Internet to proliferate, though he never claimed to have invented it.  The article is well worth the read, as it explains a bunch of neato things that you should know about the “information superhighway” (a term that Gore actually <em>did</em> invent).

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Geeking Out

Oh, the things you find stashed away in your friends’ Facebook profiles.  Thanks, Cassie, for reminding everyone of my dorkitude!

It looks like I just threw a big straight razor.

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Seeking Linux Admin

The company I work for is seeking a Linux Admin to work with us here in
Asheville, NC. This is a great opportunity to work on some really cool
stuff and gain good experience with the federal government.

Here’s the rundown of skills sought:
Must Haves:
2+ Years Linux Administration Experience (prefer Red Hat Enterprise)
Some experience with compiling code from source.

Must be a US citizen able to obtain a secret security clearance

Installation, configuration and management of the following:
Apache
Tomcat
MySQL

Nice to Have:

VERITAS Netbackup
Qualstar/Quantum Tape backups
EMC SAN / Navisphere
Fiber HBA installation/configuration
Fiber Switching (zoning etc)
Cisco Switches
PIX Firewall

If you are interested, let me know!

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OMFG it’s WordPress for iPhone/Touch

Out of all the awesome, free applications (and the crappy ones too) I’ve been trying out in the new Apps Store with my iPod Touch, the best by far is the Worspress app. I’m using it now to write this post.

It supports tags, categories, editing previous posts, post status, images, AND multiple blogs. I was floored when I read all that, and am more floored now that I’m using it.

Wow is all I can say!

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Office 2007 Mime-Types for Apache

Ran into a problem today where users were trying to download Office 2007
documents from a web site, but were prompted to save them as a Zip file.
Turns out the new extensions for Office 2007 documents (docx, xlsx,
pptx, etc) need to be added with a new mime-type for Apache to serve
them up correctly.

It’s a pretty simple fix.

In /etc/mime.types add this:

application/vnd.openxmlformats docx pptx xlsx

Save and restart Apache, then the documents should be handled correctly.

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Handy Geek Links for Your Wednesday

Why Linux is Better does
a great job of explaining the reasons for people who are not geeks. If
you find yourself trying to convince your grandmother to run Ubuntu by
using terminology such as “linux kernel”, “package manager”, or “sudo”,
give up and send her here.

And speaking of Linux, here’s a list of Linux Commands I Hardly Knew, some of which you may or may not
know. I found a few time savers I had never known. More good commands
can be discovered in the comments of the article.

If you are tired of creating HTML tables (for tabular data only, of
course) by hand, here’s a quick and dandy way to do it online with a
tool called Kotatsu.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you will know I am quite the jQuery advocate as of late. jQuery is
a JavaScript library that rivals (and beats the pants off of) libraries
such as mootools and scriptaculous, and can add all sorts
of dynamic, eye-popping and usability enhancing functionality to your
pages. Just one of the powerful, gracefully degrading things that
jQuery can enhance is the CSS dropdown menu. Check out this article describing how to enhance
the Suckerfish CSS dropdown menu with jQuery.

If you are interested in learning more about what jQuery has to offer,
check out 5
0 Amazing jQuery Examples.

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Cool Tool

I’ve tried various backup utilities for my Windows desktop over the last couple of years, including File Hamster and Microsoft’s own Synctoy, but I’ve finally found the one.  You know — the one that does everything you want it to easily, nothing more, nothing less, and is free.

That tool goes by the name of Karen’s Replicator.  It will run in the background and synchronize changed files at given intervals.  This makes it easy for me to do lots of work on client web sites, then rest assured that anything I’ve done is backed up to my spare external hard drive every day.

I learned long ago the value of making backups on a separate disk.  Unfortunately, I learned it the hard way, which is why I implore anyone reading this to make backups!  Hard drives do fail!

On a side note, let this be the first time I’ve italicized text so much in one post in all my 8 years of blogging.

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McBurger

Q: What’s wrong with this picture?

A: Many things, on many different levels.

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Time to Abandon Internet Explorer 6?

37Signals has decided to abandon support of Internet Explorer 6 in all
of their web applications (Basecamp, Backpack, etc). I think this idea
is superb. IE6 came out in 2001 and is an antique which is hard to
support in modern web applications and design. Yes, it still has
roughly a 20% marketshare, but it is quickly being ousted by IE7,
Firefox, and Safari.

What do y’all think? Ditch IE6 or still support it?

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Blogging by email

If you see this, it means I have succesfully made my first blog post
by email. I set up a cron job to check the blog email account
automatically every 10 minutes, and it takes anything it finds and
converts it to a blog post.

This has been a built in feature of WordPress for quite some time, but
I never took time to try it out until now.

If all goes well, I will be able to blog much more often 🙂

Sent from my iPod

clicky