Musings of an Engineer

Went to Van’s Warped Tour Friday, man was it fun! Just not so much when 220 lbs guys try to crowd-surf… 8O

Bands that we (Shane and I) saw included, Senses Fail, Less Than Jake, Motion City Soundtrack, hellogoodbye, Armor for Sleep, NoFX, and a few more.

We attempted to take pictures with a $20 digital camera, but it kept erasing the pictures from its memory (gotta love volatile memory for storing precious data…). So I ended up taking a few pictures from VX5200 phone, but the quality stinks. Regardless, they are posted in the gallery under ‘Warped Tour 2006’. I might see Shane has some better pictures on his Razr. I plan on going to Warped Tour ‘07, and hopefully armed with my digital camera.

There’s a really cool AJAX homepage service called Netvibes. It is quite functional, and has a great amount of “modules” including things such as Custom RSS Feed modules, Flickr and Digg modules, Gmail module and much more! Coupled with that, you can add Meebo to one of the tabs, and have AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and Jabber/Gtalk inside of Netvibes. In my opinion, Meebo is a lot better than AIM Express.

I found this interesting site on digg.com the other day called LikeBetter. It allows you to go through and pick which photos you like better of the two displayed on the screen. If you sign up it will keep your choices and you can see if people are like you. I haven’t really seen much of a purpose or ultimate goal for this site, but it’s fun anyhow.

So says Ed Whitacre from AT&T. He supposedly believes that there should be more of a business than just ISPs providing ‘free’ access to websites and services. Everything can be commercialized, and this makes it better right? WRONG.

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors. These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

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Well, first senator Ted Stevens makes himself look like an idiot, in front of all of Congress, now we have another idiot among the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, Comedy Central has some funny shows, and I’m sure that Steven Colbert can be funny at times, but this is just annoying. Colbert told the audience to find the Elephant article on Wikipedia and to change it to falsify information. He calls being able to change information to suit your reality ‘Wikiality’. All I have to say to him is, you are certainly a large douche. Thanks for trying to destroy what millions have worked hard to build. At least the antivandalism bots caught him, and the rest of the idiots trying to change the page. Not to mention, Colbert got banned.

Over the last week, I have been working pretty hard on this site to get it too look nice, and function easily. It has been a rocky road with WP Plugins, HTML, JS, PHP and server software.

I found a solution to my server crashes, WAMP5. This program is much better, in my opinion, than The Uniform Server. Not to mention, configuring WAMP is a whole lot easier.

Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis are going at it with remarks about each others sites. Just goes to show you how passionate these guys are.

Jason has offered to pay the top 10 ‘diggers’ from digg to find and post stories on Netscape. This has upset Kevin, and a lot of the rest of the digg community, since digg.com has always been about community submitted material. There are no ranks, labels or special rewards for digging the most, or submitting tons of stories. Honestly, that’s what I think makes it so good, and is part of the magic formula that makes digg function the way it does. Leo Laporte gives a recap of all of the stuff that has been going on in his article. Hopefully this will all end without bloodshed. :roll:

The web…

We all know it, and use it almost everyday. But I never realized how much work actually goes into a site, let alone the amount of work it takes to get MySQL, PHP and web server talking to each other. So, for now I am using The Uniform Server to host. This is running on a AMD K6-2 400Mhz OC box with Win 2000 (Yuck!). But I suppose for now with lack of cash being the word of the day, and no desire to move to Linux just quite yet. The only bad part is Apache in the build of TUS keeps crashing it seems like every time it writes to the MySQL DB. But I hope I can find the problem, because the alternatives will be a lot of work to implement.

I think i finally have a solution that will let me blog on the go!

-Tom

I have just ventured into uncharted waters, for me at least. I am now running my own web server, which consists of Apache 2.2 and PHP 5 and MYSQL, and on this I am running WordPress, which is what you are looking at right now.

I am quite astounded at what a little bit of free sotware can turn a PC into, but I am scared as hell with all of this new ‘stuff’ that I have no idea how to manage. I just hope my server is secure enough.