philisha.net

User interfaces on the web will be as good as desktop applications. Just you wait. Or, if you prefer not to wait, take a look.

Coolness is instantaneous file transfer:

[phil@technomancer _{/Desktop/music/aerosmith]$} scp Dude Looks Like A Lady.mp3 thoth:
Dude Looks Like A Lady.mp3 100% 4138KB 4.0MB/s 00:00
[phil@technomancer /Desktop/music/aerosmith]$

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StopIE.com: Help stop Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular and worst internet browser.

What more needs to be said?

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Come one, come all: Planet Zacchaeus is open for business!

Planet is a nifty aggregator written in Python that grabs blog feeds from divers ends of the web and strings them together in one place. I was reading Planet GNOME and thought how great it would be to have my own. It’s really easy to set up; the only marginally difficult thing is setting up the “hackergotchi” heads that appear next to every post. (I like the idea of my head showing up to my post—I’m tempted to do it in my personal blog—but that would be too much ego.)

(Just realized this is going to look really dumb on Planet Z because I just mentioned this on the Zacchaeus Blog, so there will be two posts saying the same thing. To make up for my foolishness I fixed up a little script that takes Xanga RSS feeds (which are broken by default) (reason number I’ve-now-lost-count why Xanga is t3h suck) and returns something more reasonable that Planet can read.)

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I just remembered a story that’s kind of funny. Last time I was at home, I was sitting there when my brother came in. He was carrying a cup that looked rather strange. I asked him what it was, and he told me it was water with dry ice in it, all bubbling up and giving off vapours. I nodded, “Cool.”

The point of this story is that I found nothing strange in his answer. In fact, I rather expected it to be something like that, and I probably would have been disappointed if he had come in drinking just plain water. I just realized a few days ago that this was not, in fact, normal at all. The only conclusion I can come to is that my brother is absolutely insane, but in an awesome way.

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Come check out tele-pfhoto, my replacement for my old guthwine photo album. New exciting technologies hacked together in as yet unpolished ways. Marvel in awe as photos are shown without refreshing the page! Three geek points to anyone who can tell me all three reasons it’s called Telemonian Pfhoto.

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Ducks on campus.

And holy cow, GMail’s spell-check is amazing.

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Sorry for the interrupt in the program. (No, I’m not coding my web page in Assembler. The pun doesn’t work; sorry.) Anyway, philisha.net is back and better than ever. Well, it’s better than it was earlier today, that is.

The gory details: Apache was freaking out on most my pages and segfaulting without giving any indication why. It was awful. I did what I could, but I was having problems, and I was in over my head. (Penguinomicon, my server, was running FreeBSD, (the name is quite ironic) and I’m really much more familiar with Linux.) In the end I decided it was time to retire my good old Penguinomicon.

Farewell!

Penguinomicon began life as an eMachines desktop in the offices of Rancho Mar Realty. When its power supply failed, it was passed on to me and became my primary desktop after my Power Mac G3 Bahamut died. That was in August 2003. I was tinker-happy, so I ran it without a case. It just sat there with its components next to each other collecting dust. In retrospect, “because I was tinker-happy” doesn’t seem like a good enough reason for doing something like that…. Ah well, it was free.

In July 2004 I moved off Biola campus and got a real connection to the Internet, so I decided to host philisha.net from Penguinomicon. I also bought for the first (and only, as of yet) time in my life, a new computer to use as my main desktop. I wanted to try out FreeBSD, so I replaced the Debian GNU/Linux installation on Penguinomicon with FreeBSD and migrated my site from Jacob, Biola’s academic server, to my home.

Fast forward to yesterday and the problems I mentioned above. Today I got a new (er–”new”) machine named thoth and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it to replace Penguinomicon. It’s got twice the disk space, and is a bit faster as well. (I’m learning Rails without FastCGI, so the CPU increase is important.) It’s not that I don’t like FreeBSD, it’s just that at this point I don’t have the time to maintain two very different systems. FreeBSD has a lot of strengths, but the fact that I know Debian backwards and forwards kind of clinches this one.

So after PHP5 finishes compiling on thoth, I’ll be back to where I was on penguinomicon. (Storing all the files on an NFS share from my desktop helped speed up the transition.) I would have liked to keep penguinomicon around, but I just set up thoth in less time than I spent trying to isolate the problem on penguinomicon. There you have it.

Now that I included the option to hide tech entries, I feel a lot more free to blog about things that would be terribly dull to the random viewer. Don’t like this post? Fine, you don’t have to see it! Perfect.

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Googlewhacked on the first try: telemonian javascript.

The funny thing about blogging Googlewhacks is that once you do it, it’s no longer a Googlewhack. It’s one of those things you can only do once.

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