Modern day parodies of “It was a dark and stormy night” - these are fantastic 2005 Results

For example:
The assassin drew his dagger - a simple line drawing in black ink on rose-tinted vellum.

40 Things That Only Happen In Movies - Nostalgia Central

Everything is bleak.
It’s the middle of the night.
You’re all alone and
the dummies might be right.
You feel like a jerk.
My music at work.

Anyone who is in the development arena knows that one essential ingredient to a productive day of code is a healthy playlist. For those of you who don’t get to listen to music while you work, or have to listen to whatever the adult-contemporary-radiostation-de-jour is, I appologize. One of the best parts of any day is deciding the music to be the soundtrack to my next kick-ass webapp.

(whether or not listening to music at work hurts productivity….that’s a post for someone else to write)

We have this really sweet webapp that streams our music collection all over the place. So where ever I am, there is no need to carry my tunes with me. If they have an internet connection and some MP3 player that can handle streaming on http (Winamp, iTunes, even Windows Media Player), I am good to go.

But then I started thinking about it. Why stream music? I guess you could argue that it saves HD space. But it costs the company bandwidth. I figure, on a pretty good day, I could listen to 3 or 4 hours of music. That’s about 100MB/hr. Half a gig per day. 3 days are productive like that, so thats 1.5 GB per week, so about 6 GB per month. Not too bad. Until you spread that over a small company of 30 people. Suddenly, thats 180GB of traffic per month. Man….thats big bill. And you can bet the local sysadmin will catch on pretty quick.

One advantage I find with saving your music to your HD is sharing. iTunes has built right into it the ability to share your music across a network. Being the new guy at my office, this has its advantages. Suddenly, you can be judged as someone of some taste based on your collection of MP3s. I also find it interesting to see what others are listening to. And MSN hooks up with iTunes to display to those using MSN7 exactly what I am listening to at any given momment (so wonder no more!). With streaming, I would have a harder time showing off how cool I am. And the 1 time investment of downloading 1Gb of music will save the company money.

Let’s face it, you are just streaming the same songs over and over anyways.

I have been looking forward to writting this post for quite a while. I didn’t think I could do it before now, I wasn’t prepared. But now that I have done a significant amount of development using all 3 technologies, it’s go time.

Let’s break it down into a few categories….

Cost
This is an issue for everyone from the geek in his basement to the mega-ultra-maxi-corp.

1. PHP
PHP is the winner is this category. It’s free. Free as can be. And what gives it the edge over JSP? It’s easy to setup, upgrade and learn. That actually does translate into a lower cost.
2. JSP
Java is also free. Tomcat is free. It won’t cost you any money to get the software. It will however cost you time to get that damn Java connector working. (side note: If anyone has a good how-to on mod_JK or the connector between Tomcat and Apache, don’t hold out on me.)
3. ASP
ASP got last place for obvious reasons. It’s the only one that costs money.

Support/Documentation
Hmm…this was a close one. Very close. Almost too close to call really…

1. PHP
Why did PHP beat JSP? It didn’t really. It only barely beat it. Here is why. PHP.net is slightly better than Sun’s java website. Less adds, less digging around. Sometimes, I visit java.sun.com and all I can see is adds for SunONE and Solaris and some other crap-of-the-week Sun product (and those are 2 of the crappiest).
2. JSP
3. ASP
Even though support sucks for ASP, I don’t want to leave you hanging if you are infact stuck using it. Here is a website I have found useful in the past. But it’s just not that great. Why does ASP seem like some kind of secret while the PHP geeks can’t wait to show off their code?

Setup
I kinda already let the cat out of the bag on this one.

1. PHP
It doesn’t get much easier.
2. ASP
Setting up ASP was never the problem with ASP. It’s also quite easy to get running under IIS. I am told of a project out there to get ASP.net running under Apache, although, I haven’t personally seen it yet. I will need to bug my source a little more on that one.
3. JSP
Oh! The nightmare that is mod_JK! One day, I should show you how I did a little hacking in the httpd.conf using proxy-pass and subdomains to make Tomcat and Apache work together. It’s not pretty.

Robustness (wtf, is that even a word?)
This is where the flamewar begins!

1. JSP
Having worked on some pretty big systems, doing some pretty big things, I can tell you that my experience has shown me that Java is king in the enterprize world. So many tools are available to extend the web (JSP/Servlets, EJB, J2EE, Struts…..). It’s a full blown OO language, so it’s quite powerful, from an enterprize standpoint. Java is not the best at everything, but it is the best at something: Big systems, big business.
2. ASP
Since the .NET hype of 2001, I have come to realize that C# is really not that bad. C# still sucks because of lack of support (why is it a secret??? share!), but it has proven that it can handle big web projects as well as Java can. I guess it was unfair to rank it behind Java, but….meh, this is my post.
3. PHP
I am not hating on PHP. I like it, I love it, I want some more of it. It’s just not as robust (ha, what am I? a manager?) as the other 2 competitors. PHP5 is looking pretty sweet, giving us a shot at writting OO PHP, something I am a little new too, but if you have written OO Java, you’ll pick it up quick too. PHP is still good, it’s just a little behind.

….and the winner is
(3 pts for 1st place vote, 2 for 2nd, 1 for 3rd)
PHP - 3 first place votes, 0 second place, 1 last place for 10 points
JSP - 1 first place vote, 2 second place, 1 last place for 8 points
ASP - 0 first place votes, 2 second place, 2 last place 6 points

So there you have it. I’d pick PHP if I was starting a website today. This is not to say that the others are invalid, they have their place. But PHP is my winner.

I just saw War of the Worlds. Fortunatley, I benefitted from Brent’s post, which pretty much told me what to expect and not to expect.

I haven’t read the original work (is it a book?), so I don’t know what the original intent of the story was. But my impression is that the reason so many people dislike this movie is because they were expecting something different. And, in fact, I think they were lead to believe it. But I think this movie isn’t meant to be about the alien invasion … really that was just a backdrop to play with human emotion. How does just a ‘normal’ guy deal with an unbelievable tragedy? Independance Day was about the ‘leaders’ - the people in charge. This was about just the average person and what it would be like to survive.

Having said that, did I enjoy the movie? Well, I didn’t really ‘enjoy’ it, but I don’t think it sucks as a movie. It’s like tomatoes - I can appreciate that a tomatoe is really good tomatoe. But it still hate it because, well, it’s a tomatoe :) So, I think if you see this movie expecting an action flick about how aliens try to take over the world, you’ll be dissapointed. Once you think of the movie as something different than that, then the ultra-lamo ending doesn’t really matter. Having said all that, I don’t really know what kind of movie this was meant to be, or what the real point was. This is just what I took out of it.

Which, by the way, I thought the ending was kind of neat. It was just anticlimatic. But that’s okay because I don’t think that was the point of the movie.

What I’d like to rant about is the specific case where people are using systems like gmail or hotmail to store their email, and when those people store personal/private information on those systems. I think people use these systems without thinking about the risks involved.

This isn’t meant to say big email systems like that are stupid or shouldn’t be used. I think they’re great. All I want to say is don’t store private information on public servers. Treat them as untrusted. Store more personal info on servers you can trust - where you know or are the admin.

These systems are getting to be so easy to use that people aren’t thinking about what data they’re storing on them anymore. A GB of space on gmail? That’s insane. What that leads to is that people start storing a tonne of personal information in these systems ’cause it’s so damn easy. I mean, can you think of stuff in your mail box you wouldn’t want other to see? Passwords? Sites? Phone numbers? Financial info?

The main pro for Big systems is that they are very easy to use and to access from anywhere. Their systems are likely backed up, and their uptime is virtually guaranteed. That is definitely nice. They’re wicked if you’re signing up for accounts, booking things online, or joining mailing lists. They’re also great when you’re travelling or just need some email accounts that you can use for data that isn’t very personal.

However, Big systems store user information and data for thousands of users. In the hypothetical world - what if someone can compromise their systems? If they can get your user/pass? Does that give them access to other things of yours? What about your data? And it’s not only your privacy you have to worry about. What about information people send you about themselves? Do you have any account information on other servers stored in email?

I think this is a case of technology and companies moving so fast that the users are just doing what’s fast and easy without really thinking about what that means. Now we have to worry about these systems being broken into and all this personal information being sold accross the internet. I’m sure you’ve heard about incidents like that - there certainly are examples in University systems that I’ve heard about. This is just because we’ve decided to use large systems like this to store information that we probably shouldn’t.

The alternative? Set up a home machine. If you want to get kickass - set up a few servers with some friends, and have a primary server and use the others as backups. A home server can easily run off an old P200 machine, and you can grab a distribution off the net that will configure everything for you. By doing so, you then have a machine at your home that you at least have control over. Your data goes there, and only a few people have access to it. What’s most important is that you’re in control of your information.

If you have a machine, you can install a system in no time at all, and admin the box from a web page. Check this out, as an example -
e-smith

It’s also easy to setup your own server, but I’ll write an article about that some other time.

In my opinion, people need to be very careful what they use big email systems for. Be aware of the risks, and use an account on a server you trust instead, if you can. I’m sure most of you know a computer geek with a mail server out there anyway … :)

Well, I couldn’t resist.

Today Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out. I have my copy on the way, and it will arrive sometime soon. I can’t wait! I have been waiting for this book since about 2 days after the 5th one came out, I totally love the series. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Amanda for getting me this book, that’s just awesome.

Not sure how many of you are HP fans (I know Jeff is on the skeptical side, to say the least) but to those that are, I look forward to some discussions about this book!

Anyway - a Happy Harry Potter Day to all! And to all - good reading :)

So, last night I was looking through old photos I had on my laptop and got some inspiration to spiffy up the ol’ website a bit. Hooray for randomness. I am sure we will be adding more photos to the mix. So, tell me, what do you think?

If you want detail on how this was done, I could post it. But seriously, it would be a lame post. Not much to it. I am sure you can figure something similar out.

p.s. - I am aware the opacity is a little off in IE. So switch to Firefox!
(ok, ok, I’ll fix it!)

Ever use products like 3d Studio or AutoCad to design things? Blender is the Open Source version of that, much like Gimp is the OS version of photoshop. A great tool for creating 3d images or animation.

They even provide it (with source) for windows or Mac. Impressive…

blender3d.org :: Home

deviantART: where ART meets application!

I don’t know what that tagline means, but this is the best digital art website I’ve found - at least for picking backgrounds and stuff. Thousands of pics. Some are cool, some really messed up and weird, few are lame.

And it’s way better than digital blasphemy, which used to rule until they made people pay for it a couple years back.