Checking in from Wordcamp 2008 right now! Here for the day, hoping to learn and meet some people that I only know through blogs! There’s a nice mix of user and developer oriented talks, along with some delicious food so far. The Mission Bay Center is a very new and grand center, it’s a great place to host this event. I will check in later with some more reviews and info hopefully.
As mentioned, I attended Defcon 16 this weekend in Las Vegas and had an excellent time! Defcon is a computer security and general hacking convention. Vegas provides an excellent background for a pretty technical and semi-serious event. It took place in the Rivera Hotel, which is quite old and busted hotel, but it works fine for a bunch of nerds that just want to drink and hack all day!
We arrived around 6PM in LAS and checked into our room pretty quickly, just dropping off our things and then heading out to dinner at the Treasure Island hotel. Walking around outside in the Vegas heat is interesting, it’s like a hot sauna or something, but the dry heat isn’t that bad for short periods of time. We continued partying and enjoyed the night someplace, I don’t even remember.
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15872734259957058852
Google Reader lets you setup a shared items website, which then has a few neat themes, including ninjas and ice cream! This is awesome.
I’m importing some lost data tonight thanks to Facebook Notes. My FB Notes are subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed, it pulls down all my posts and re-posts them. It’s kinda of a waste to duplicate data, however, my friends are on FB and I get some hits from that. It has also saved my ass when my host crashes and loses all my posts! My posts exists on FB, however, due to the closed wall environment that FB has, you have to work hard to pull it out.
I attended Google IO over the past 2 days, chronicling the event on my Twitter and Flickr pages. I’m incredibly tired currently, barely running off coffee and my thoughts are a mess so I will wait until this weekend to post my thoughts, but quickly: it was an excellent event, well run with great food and great ideas all around. Here’s a shot of my swag below.
As an addendum to Shared Hosting Sucks, I’d like to share what my research found and where my new future host will be:
Slicehost.com is a small hosting company located in St. Louis that fits my needs perfectly. $20 a month gets you 256mb ram, 10gb storage, and 100gb bandwidth! Once you pay, you have a choice of several different Linux distributions, of which I chose Debian. It builds the image for you and then within 15 minutes you have a fully functioning server with an IP address and full root access. They have an extremely slick Rails management backend featuring all the important stats about your server, an AJAX command prompt tied to the hardware, rebooting and shutdown buttons, and a great wiki/tutorial section to get you started on securing your server. it’s all very clean and exactly what I need.
I’m a bit wired on coffee right now, but this is a rant that has been building for awhile. Shared hosting sucks. After years of experience with many different providers and situations, I’m fed up with it. The idea is great, a shared utilization of resources because usually one person on a server is not going to use 100% of the resources, but how the situation is with most providers is terrible. Recently, I’ve been coming around more and more to the idea of a VPS, a shared server setup, but not sharing just one system.
One of the interesting things I’ve noticed thanks to having a Blackberry now is how OCD I’ve become, checking the device constantly. I have it set to gently blink whenever new email comes in and only vibrate for an incoming phone call, but sometimes I find myself looking over to the device almost every 10 minutes, just expecting something to happen. It’s a bad habit to get into, getting dependent on this device.
The state of affairs in OSX with Blackberries is pretty sad. RIM offers a free program called PocketMac, which amazingly works, but sucks very badly. It hasn’t been updated in a long time and is not a Universal binary.
As part of my organizational work, I’m getting my contacts all in sync with Address Book in OSX, then dumping them to Gmail and my Blackberry. I have a PC with the RIM syncing software, which works fine and is a well developed piece of software, but i don’t want to add an extra middle man to my syncing. Overall, the software has a shitty installer, terrible Mac interface, slow performance, and lack of options and documentation. However, it does seem to work. I tried just doing a 1-way with my contacts, dumping them on the Blackberry, and syncing my Notes on the Blackberry to Stickies on OSX.
I guess it’s a big deal to me when I legally purchase software, because I just don’t do it very often. Piracy and other methods aside, most applications I use are actually open source or free. Free software is nearly as good or better than other software out there, for what I need generally. Coda though is a professional web designer solution that is totally worth paying for.
Coda basically gives you one simple interface for everything you would need as a web designer. Check their site, it has a nice design worth checking out purely for the visual effects, but it also explains its abilities better than I can. I basically love the ability to create a profile for a project/site, storing FTP and SSH passwords for easy access, then just focusing on the project, keeping everything combined and balanced in one window. You can have the remote server on side, ready to FTP files using the powerful Transmit engine and files ready to edit on the side side, using the likewise powerful SubethaEdit engine. You can visually edit CSS files and using Regex search for functions. If you want to really change things, you pop open an SSH window without having to login and you can just work.