Article

How needlessly complicated can you make one thing?

From Wikipedia: "An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as a joke. There is usually no intention of the language being adopted for mainstream programming, although some esoteric features such as visuospatial syntax have inspired practical applications in the arts. Such languages are often popular among hackers and hobbyists. This use of esoteric is meant to distinguish these languages from more popular programming languages."

It basically is just saying that we sometime do stupid crap, "just 'cause." This is one of those times. If you ever read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, you'll get this.

Nginx is one of those things that many people want to try but don't. Why? Because it's scary. Well... Nginx itself isn't scary, but all of the poor guides out there make it a nightmare. The first step in making Nginx work for you is to not follow 95% of the guides found on Google. That sounds backward from what you usually hear and I do hate giving that advice. While many of the guides out there will get you going most of the time in most situations, they tend to be suboptimal. Many of these configurations tend to focus on reproducing how Apache does things.

This is probably an odd concept. Maybe I'm alone. I really hope not.

I've found that online it seems many people announce themselves as Agnostic or Athiest. I used to be in that group. After meeting my girlfirend (soon to be wife) over four years ago, I started to attend church. Although I had very little religion in me, I chose to attend with an open mind.

With my mind open, I learned a great many things that opened my mind even further. Most noteably, I learned how to better manage my life. I also learned how those management techniques can help me get better with technology.

Every six months these articles become popular. I've been using Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) for a few months now and I thought I'd share what I thought.

For most users

Step 1:
Install Ubuntu 10.10

Step 2:
Install the little extras you might want, such as Thunderbird, Galeon, etc.

Step 3:
Enjoy!

For cli users

Step 3:

apt-get install aptitude
aptitude purge vim-tiny
aptitude install vim

Step 4:
Enjoy!

For psychotic users like me

Step 1:
Grab Alternate CD

We tech geeks start early. I programmed my first VCR at five years old. Many of my buddies dang near wrote their first C program before leaving the womb. I just referred to people I've never met as buddies.

I'm one of the tech types that never really spent much time socializing. My parents divorced when I was about 10 if I can recall correctly. What did this do to me? I could lie and say not much.

Do you ever use F1 to bring up help pages in Firefox? Do you find this feature useful? Do you like rhetorical questions?

Personally, I've never found this F1 function useful or helpful. The times I wanted some help from it I wasn't able to get the help I needed. So then this becomes a pointless feature. I bumped it some so I kinda of got irritated.

Here's what I did to make it useful:
Open a tab
Go to about:config
Search for app.support.baseURL
Right click
Modify
http://profarius.com/?

Building a secure setup is extremely hard. There's an old saying that's basically "build an idiot-proof system and the world will build a better idiot." That works two ways. If you build a hacker-proof system then you'll
find better hackers. Loosely defined use of the term hacker of course.

So, how does one make a secure web server. The easiest would be to use something like Nginx and server only static content with hundreds of layers of strong security to get to altering those files with only one fully

It's time for another post. Recently I've had issues with dropping network connections or wanting to connect and keep working on the same thing from other systems. Most of you probably already know the answer. You screen.

Sounds easy enough. My issue is that I'm incredibly lazy. I don't want to SSH into the system AND start screen AND detach AND reattach. That's just asking way too much of someone like me.

Here's the very simple solution. In my ~/.bashrc file I appended this section of code.

ssh() {
  command ssh "$1" -Xt screen -aAdr -RR work bash
}

What is Et cetera?...

Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: et·cet·era
Pronunciation: \et-ˈse-tə-rə, -ˈse-trə also it-, ÷ek-, ÷ik-\
Function: noun
Date: 1597

1 : a number of unspecified additional persons or things
2 plural : unspecified additional items : odds and ends

Let's think about that. /etc/ is full of random junk. It's pretty much the configuration for your whole system. Where do you configure defaults for the xxxx app? Did you check in /etc/? It's probably there.

I've been asked why I use Ubuntu a few times. When asked I ask why not. The answers to that are usually different but always follow the lines of, "Well, I was just curious because you know everything about Linux." That answer makes me laugh a little. My follow up is, I use Ubuntu because it works and does what I want it to. Thats not the only reason though. It's not that I haven't tried other distributions. It's not even that I haven't liked certain things in others more. The real reason is much deeper than that.

Compiled vs. Binary: