Nerdy Dork

You’ve all heard the horror stories. You go to boot up you computer, nothing happens… perhaps you hear a click… click… click…

This actually happened to me a couple years ago. Luckily my hard drive started working again just long enough for me to get a back-up before replacing it.

I recently heard of an acquaintance that had this happen to them. It reminded me of how vulnerable I am. I have no back-up plan!

I do however have a plan now. I’m signing up for mozy. Yeah, I’ve heard about about the great claims with Carbonite from all the radio shows (Rush, Dr. Laura, etc. etc.). We’ve even used Carbonite at work. I think its great, but when I did a search to see what other players are out there, I found mozy.

Why mozy?

I recognized their name. There are here it Utah. A couple years ago they sponsored a coding competition with a cash prize of $10,000. It was basically a recruiting effort to expose some of the best local talent.

But it is not just name recognition alone. I’ve done my homework and they are the real deal. Check out these videos:

So what are you waiting for? Get backing up! You’ll thank yourself someday. It’s only $4.95 for unlimited storage. If you can’t afford it, start with the free plan and back up your most important 2 GB (like your My Documents folder)

Mozy Online Backup. 2GB Free or $4.95/mo for Unlimited Backup. It’s simple, automatic and secure!

Oh, and one tip… If you are going to sign up for unlimited and decide to pay for a 1 year or 2 year plan, save 10% by entering “AUGUST” in the promo code (good until the end of August obviously!).

(This post is mostly for my own reference)

James Bennett mentions a Django style guide in his book Practical Django Projects. I couldn’t find reference to it, but the following is the order of things when it comes to models:

Wow, this really had me laughing out loud! Maybe because I just got a hair cut from another weirdo on Saturday. I really wish I could find a normal person that I could go to and get a haircut on a regular basis. Imagine captain Jack Sparrow as an old lady with pig tails cutting your hair… yeah, that was my Saturday morning.

Technorati Tags: haircut, barber, funny, practical joke, prank

I love cool tools! I wanted to start a new blog. So I registered domain, set up an account on my cPanel VPS, used Fantastico to create a WordPress blog, found a theme and modified some settings. Viola! - a new blog in less than an hour. Now I just have to wait for 1&1 to update the DNS servers. I think if I registered the domain at Godaddy I really could have the site live and ready to go in under an hour. (I use 1&1 simply because they are cheaper.)

Oh, and by the way. I made this post using ScribeFire, which is also one cool tool!

Technorati Tags: blog, wordpress, fantastico, cpanel, 1&1, godaddy, scribefire

Star Trek Meets Monty Python

Wow, someone definitely had a LOT of time on their hands! Thanks for the effort though. It was certainly enjoyable

Technorati Tags: monty python, star trek, mashup

After doing maintenance on a few PHP projects, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really need to use frameworks for medium to big projects. After looking at a few frameworks in a few different languages, I’ve run across a pretty cool website at sucks-rocks.com.

I plugged in a number of popular web languages and frameworks just to get an idea of what people are saying about them. The results are pretty interesting. First take a look at some language comparisons. Then, look at some framework comparisons. And finally, I thought I’d check out some Javascript libraries.

Conclusion: With Web 2.0 design, you can’t go wrong by picking a good framework and throwing in some ajax.

OK, Vader, you’re a real jokester… cut it out now!

I just need to give some props to Liquidweb. I have a cPanel VPS account there. I have been impressed with their “Heroic Support”. Recently though, they went above and beyond.

I’ve been having PHP mid career crisis of sorts and been looking at other languages and frameworks. Django and Python have caught my eye. I started developing an application, but I wanted to first see if I could deploy it to my server before I got too far into it.

I strugged for 3 or 4 days trying. I spent a lot on time on IRC and they guys there were quite helpful, but they couldn’t figure out why my deployment was not working either. Finally, after hitting a brick wall, I submitted a support ticket. Because it was 3 party software I wasn’t expecting much.

I was blown away by the level of service I got. The first person had never heard of Django, but she read the documentation on how to install it and pointed me to the right files to edit. Later she passed me on to someone else who was more familiar with Django. In all I got responses from 4 different people who worked on this issue. They got it up and running and explained what they did. Kudos to Liquidweb.

This post (like many I write) is mainly for myself.

When using CSS padding or margin, I generally will write margin-top, margin-bottom, margin-left, etc. I know there is easier syntax where I can specify all for with one line such as

margin: 0 10px 88px 10px;

The problem is, I can never remember which one is where. Know I’m not going to forget. It’s simply top, right, bottom, left… TRBL, TRouBLe, trouble. Who can forget trouble?

Sometime I want the top and bottom the same and the left and right the same. It is also a one liner:

margin: 10px 20px; /* top-bottom, right-left */

No, I’m not going to remember TBRL, that would be stupid. I’ll just remember to start at Top. See, no TRouBLe at all!

I find it quite annoying that whenever I read instructions that include adding an environment path variable you are asked to reboot your machine for changes to take effect. I know there has GOT to be a way to do it. Well, I know a way, but it’s someway kludgy.

Here is how I do it (I’m really hoping someone will comment and tell me a better way)

Continue reading “Update Windows Path Without Rebooting”