lithostech.com

A new development in the mobile operating system market brings an open source convert to the table. As of Symbian's announcement today, three of the five major players can now be considered open source systems. This pits Microsoft and Apple's closed systems directly against Google, Palm and Symbian in an epic battle of ideology.

The central valley buy local campaign probably began with the best of intentions. The idea is simple, get people to pump their hard earned cash right back into the place they live and work. If everyone did this more, the local economy would be much better off. It would be an easy way to stimulate the local economy and we'd all be better off for the benefits in public services funding.

Before I launch into my tirade which I'm particularly jazzed about, let me just start by saying that I actually like buying local and I even like the buy local campaign. I would go so far as to say that the campaign doesn't even come close to covering all the benefits the economy would see if we were all following along.

This blog entry is directed mainly at the body of web developers who have very little formal training but are trying to improve their own skill sets. As I've matured in my understanding of object-oriented software design, I've come to grips with certain realities. Often, I've found myself doing something that feels 'dirty' or 'hackish'. That's usually because I'm "doing it wrong" as smarter people say to me when I show them my code or describe my problem. When that happens I have two courses of action, but the only one that provides growth and self-improvement is to heed the advice of my mentors (usually a chorus of developers on IRC saying, "you're doing it wrong!").

In the early days of the web (the early '90s), when the first HTML specification was being adopted, CSS did not exist. Web developers and webmasters (do those even exist anymore?) were responsible for delivering their content, design and layout in one package. It worked great and everything was right with the world. That is, until things became more complex. The roaring '90s of the Internet brought new revisions to the HTML specification and new innovations to web browsers which allowed for increasingly complicated design elements and content delivery methods. The ever-increasing complexity made it more difficult to maintain consistent design across large web sites. That's when big stupid web design suites became popular. Software like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver became almost a necessity just to maintain page templates and edit pages in a wysiwyg format.

If you've been following along with my wifi radio posts, you may recall my problem of storage for the platform. I chose an ultra-low power and nearly zero storage device for my music collection because I planned to buy an external storage device and serve music from that device. I still think that's a good idea, but I'm too cheap to spring for the kind of device I really want. So I've been experimenting with cloud storage which has a number of big advantages which I won't get into here.

The nginx build in the official ubuntu package repository is somewhat out-of-date, so I built my own package from source using 0.7.59. I'm going to provide it here in case anyone else would like it. One of the new features I like is the try_files directive. Here's an example of what I'm doing using 0.6.35, the full post is here http://lithostech.com/lighten-apaches-load-nginx:

Since we've been on slicehost, I've been forced to play the role of system administrator since we don't have a real one. One problem I've run into is the long string of legacy applications that I have to support. Some of them I wrote, and some of them I inherited. For many reasons, they're often organized and run in sub-optimal ways.

Separating your static and dynamic content is a good habit to get into when you're building scalable web applications. Static content is highly portable because it can live without context. You can serve it from anywhere and nobody knows the difference. When your site starts to get huge traffic, you can easily offload your static content to a CDN if you host it in an easy-to-separate way using an URL like static.domain.com or domain.com/static.

It sounds like an outrageous claim, but I'm going to describe why certificate authorities are like a crime syndicate and why we should all refuse to pay protection money to them.

Most people who even know the term, think of open source software as software you don't have to pay for. I'd like to use my tiny blog as a platform to help eliminate that limited and even incorrect view. I think the best way to explain the reality of open source is to give an example of what makes it different from other types of software.

My first large foray into the world of GNU/Linux was with a tutorial for replacing a machine's operating system (RHEL) with Debian over SSH. I was successful even though I had no idea what I was doing, and since then I've done a lot of my learning this way. One thing I've picked up through reading tutorials is the varying styles of batch file manipulation. Often times, you'll see something like this magic: