iPosture

Whatever device Apple is secretly rushing to market next year — the iSlate, iTablet, iPlank, or my preference, the iJayKay — it won’t be anything I need. Heck, no one actually needs any of the gadgets that the high-tech companies are shilling these days, but we sure want them. Lustrous, kaleidoscopic, cacophonous, expensive — who could resist?

However, in the ongoing matter of Want v. Need, the two parties will stipulate the following: what we don’t want, and what we certainly don’t need, are any more vapid mouth-breathers clogging our sidewalks and stairways while thumbing obliviously on their hand-held “smart” devices.

The troglodytes aren’t completely to blame. To be useful, these devices have to be primed with subscription plans and add-ons. To justify the resulting cost, the devices have to be used, routinely to the point that additional plans and add-ons (there’s an app for that) are inescapable.

Somehow, Bell Mobility’s marketing brochures fail to mention this consequence. It’s as if the term “exorbitant death spiral” never occurred to them.

I’m not immune to the siren call of these pandorean gadgets. I’m simply waiting for a model that is useful without my having to, uh, use it: one that buzzes me awake after I’ve nodded off during a meeting; one that points out the good sandwich places nearby when my stomach grumbles; one that highlights my scarf and toque when the temperature has dropped; one that alerts the authorities after I’ve fallen into a crevasse on a lonely trail; and one that electronically jams the signal of anyone in my vicinity attempting to text, tweet, poke, or telephone.

In other words, a device to make me feel connected, informed, secure, and, yes, more than a little smug.

“Because there’s nothing more valuable than a used computer book.”

I took the measuring tape for a spin and it turns out that I have 27 linear feet of computer books weighing down various bookcases around the house. Every year, I try to eliminate at least a foot or two from my collection — chiefly to make space for the new arrivals.

In years past, I’ve not-so-secretly stashed these discards in random cases throughout the College. This season, I’m offering the following titles to anyone that wants them. I will deliver within town, and, if you ask nicely, may even ship them to your not-so-far-away address. Otherwise, they’ll go straight into the bin the next time I’m down at Raven.

Java

Ah, Java: duly-celebrated successor to COBOL. So much promise to those of us mired in the Visual Basiocrity of the early 90s.

• Java Servlet Programming 2^ed
• JavaServer Pages
• Thinking in Java
• Java Threads
• Java Tools for eXtreme Programming
• Mastering AspectJ: Aspect-Oriented Programming in Java
• Data Abstraction and Problem Solving with Java: Walls and Mirrors

Ruby on Rails

There are bandwagons, and then there is Ruby on Rails. But I’m now aboard the latest wagon.

• Rails Recipes
• Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy
• Rails for PHP Developers
• Ruby for Rails

Security

When was I ever that interested in SSL?

• SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems
• SSL and TLS Essentials: Securing the Web
• Intrusion Detection with Snort
• Real 802.11 Security: Wi-Fi Protected Access and 802.11i
• Web Security, Privacy & Commerce
• Hacking Exposed: Web Applications
• Web Hacking: Attacks and Defense

Miscellaneous Programming

• Advanced PHP Programming
• The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right (I’m reading the 2^nd edition now)

Miscellaneous Computer Stuff

• Windows XP Hacks
• The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction 2^ed (Oh Gawd.)
• Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

Not a computer enthusiast? Most will also serve as wonderful, though potentially blue flame inducing, fire starter.

Computer programmers, rejoice! With 2010 nearly upon us, we can celebrate that all of the fundamental problems in computer science have been put to rest.

What’s that, you say? Try a search for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on the Roger Ebert page of the Chicago Sun Times site? Well, okay…

Only 22 more years until Casablanca premières.

So, searching for a very specific film title matches the intended review on the penultimate line of the third and last page of results, while adding a surplus century to the date. Oh, and articles that aren’t reviews are displayed as though they were very bad reviews.

Attaboy!

Update, October 16th

Looks like the Sun Times wunderkinder fixed it, apparently by rolling back to the old search code.

Ignoring my pledge to buy an Apple Macintosh, I yellow-bellied my way to the Dell site last April and bought one of their unstylish yet bell-and-whistlesome models. Yes, I am weak. But at half the price of the comparable Mac, I saved enough for that spine and guts transplant I’d always wanted.

For three months, all was peaches and edible oil based dessert topping. Not two weeks before I was scheduled to leave the territory for the entire summer, the screen goes black. The kind of hazy green-tinged black that suggests nothing but frustration and expense.

The diagnosis, from my College colleagues who have fixed a broken computer or two, was that the screen backlight had blown. Prognosis: I would be sending it back to Dell.

Yet with days to go before my trip, I figured it best to lug it with me and deal with Customer Support once I arrived in one of the big cities on the itinerary. Decades of computing experience has led me to despise customer “support,” so postponing that hassle was okay-fine by me.

Following several further postponements, I sat down with my computer, the telephone, a pen, my purchase invoice and warranty documents, and steeled myself for a couple of hours of intense “support.”

After a few introductory explanations and the reading of many multi-digit numbers across the line, Sunjit, my support technician, said “Sounds like the backlight. We’ll ship a box for you to return it in this afternoon.”

Really? They do that? I had assumed that I’d be responsible for “all packaging, shipping, and unexplained ancillary costs.” I was also flabbergasted to find that my warranty was for a full year, rather than the typical ninety days.

I thanked Sunjit profusely, and, later that afternoon, packed up my laptop in the box that arrived just as promised. It was shipped back less than a week later, with a fully restored screen and everything else just as I had left it (including my non-supported Linux dual-boot setup).

I have recommended Dell to others for years, and will continue to do so after this episode. I have heard horror stories of Dell support and product quality, but only anecdotally or on the web — if it’s spellchecked, it must be true. My experience continues to be positive. Good on ya, Mike.

Google got me.

Oh, I can still muster distrust in that Yankee corporate overlord of the Internet, but it was the spam that finally punched my ticket. Running my own e-mail server lo these past eight years had become a terrible burden. Each week, another thousand exhortations would duck my carefully tuned filters.

Hands held aloft in exasperation, I pledged allegiance to Google Apps Premier Edition, ceded my yukondude.com mail exchange forwards to Gmail’s grasping servers, and surrendered some seventeen thousand messages dating back to the millennium.

By my calculations, I have another 155 years of indentured mail service before exhausting my quota.

Every so often, I get the chance to do some good ol’ website development. Bright, crisp, and attractive design is not exactly my forté though, so I generally get paid very little, or nothing at all. Within the latter category, you would find the redesigned website that I prepared for the Ottawa-Gatineau chapter of the Society for International Development.

For the past couple of years, I had been volunteering a little time every few weeks to update SID-OG’s website with events and announcements. Trouble was, the entire site was a Dreamweaver dinosaur: multiple out-of-sync design templates for the English and French portions, and more redundant and contradictory <font> tags than you could count.

Upkeep was a tedious process. Adding a new event required: creating its page, adding a link to the new page in the upcoming events list on the home page, and adding another link to the upcoming events page itself. Then you had to do the same for the French site. Once the event had passed, there was even more work to remove it from the upcoming lists, add it to the past event lists, and insert links to event summaries and documents. Oh, and then the same again in French.

Enough!

This past month I spent a week or so rebuilding the entire website from the ground up. Simple layout, CSS styling, and a good dose of PHP programming to simplify — if not outright automate — the content management.

As the site ran on from a donated — yet painfully slow — Windows Server account, without access to a database or webserver-modifiable directories, my content-management options were limited, so I settled on a file-based system. Adding a new event or announcement is merely a matter of FTP-ing a directory of event files to the server. Provided the directory contains the event or announcement’s date, the code takes over and shows it in the appropriate upcoming or past lists, and even takes care of most of the French tasks (other than translation).

Truth be told, most of the site’s code is devoted to handling the English-French switch. From any English page you can click the Français link to view the same page in French, and vice versa. The French page names are properly translated too, so the observant visitor will see /fr/accueil.php in the address bar instead of some bastardized franglais version: /fr/home.php.

Why the extra attention? French wife.

If you were curious about the colour scheme, the new site borrows heavily from the old one:

I find that my design’s not as cheery, so I’ll continue tweaking the colours, but the new maintenance features sure do contribute to my good cheer.

Carole brought home a shiny new MacBook Pro from school the other day. Apparently they just give ‘em away to teachers. Students too — the older ones — from what I can gather. It’s all in French, of course — even the keyboard — but it’s extrêmement slick.

(In my school days, we weren’t even allowed to use the mimeograph machine unattended. Uncap a fresh dry-erase marker under your nose for a reasonable approximation of the full Mimeo Experience.)

I’ve wanted a Mac ever since the 1984 “hello” screenshot. I couldn’t afford one until graduating a decade later, and by then had fallen lockstep behind the Microsoft Standard-Issue banner: “Windows is all you’ll ever see on the corporate desktop and, as far as you’ll ever know, it’s the best thing ever.”

Of course, Apple was having a tough go of it in those days. Run by a sugar-water executive, Macs were rendered into expensive soulless beige blocks.

By the time Jobs reappeared at the helm with his “crazy good” designs, I was neck deep in Linux, and not interested in anything that cost that many clams and didn’t have a UNIX-style command prompt.

But then Mac got a command prompt. And a BSD UNIX one at that.

The switch to Intel chips, accompanied by various emulation techniques, meant that Mac could also dress up as Linux and Windows when called upon.

Still pricey, though. But good design commands a certain cost. My current laptop has the feeling of having been assembled in the cargo hold as it was shipped. It works well enough, but awash in the glow of the MacBook’s illuminated keyboard, its awkward plastic mouldings and intentionally-rough edges are evident.

It’ll be a while yet before I can justify retiring one of my current computers and shelling out for whatever gee-whiz gizmo Cupertino has got in stock. It’ll have an English keyboard though — I need that slash key back where it belongs.

Two mouse buttons wouldn’t hurt either.

For those wondering about the title of this post, I present the following purely wonderful NFB animated short, The Cat Came Back:

It’s such a rare and pleasant experience to find exactly what you were looking for. Just his past week, I asked here and elsewhere for a recommended VPS hosting company. I didn’t get — nor did I expect — many responses, but at least a couple suggested SliceHost. Positive and detailed reviews of their service were easy to find. I have now moved my various web properties, including my e-mail server and this blog, to a new SliceHost “slice” down in Missouri.

For just $20 per month, I’ve got complete control over a virtual quad-core server with 256MB of memory, 10GB of disk, and 100GB of monthly bandwidth. It’s everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. Ubuntu OS? Check. Root access? Check. DNS zone control? Check. Reverse DNS? Check. Extra IPs? Check ($2/mo extra).

It’s early days yet, but so far SliceHost has lived up to its rave reviews.

Now, unmanaged VPSs aren’t for everyone: I had to install the webserver, database, e-mail server, and my own klondike firewall and scripnix utilities. But Ubuntu and apt did most of the heavy lifting.

With all that out of the house, I can finally ditch my static-IP business internet plan and switch to a cheaper residential one. I can also turn off my spare-bedroom server without fear of losing incoming e-mail. That’ll come in handy shortly as I have to fix the bathroom fan which is on the same circuit.

(It’s always a bad idea to run computer equipment from the same circuit as noisy electrical motors. I have specific rules — often ignored — specifying into which outlet the vacuum cleaner can and can’t be plugged. A dedicated circuit just for the computer equipment would be a fine idea, once the bathroom is finally finished…)

I host four of my own sites from a cranky old Celeron box in the spare bedroom: this blog, Carole’s blog, my brother’s site, and my company site (including staging areas for client projects). The bedroom server also handles e-mail for those domains.

If only to cut down on the number of cables to trip over, I’d like to move these all to a hosting service somewhere. I’d also save some pocket change by switching from a commercial to a residential internet package with WHTV NorthwesTel.

Trouble is, setting up individual cheapo accounts for each would end up not being so cheapo in the aggregate, and I’d lose the ability to configure services just the way I like them, and to run my own programs for various purposes.

The ideal solution would be a dedicated server running from somebody’s rack enclosure down south. Far from cheapo, those.

A nearly-ideal compromise is the concept of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) — a “pretend” computer that is actually just a portion of a divvied-up real computer, but runs like a normal computer anyway, just a little bit more slowly. An unmanaged VPS is one where they give you the root password, a command-line connection, and tell you not to call unless you need a reboot. You have to set up and maintain the web server software and everything else yourself (I wonder if they set up reverse DNS?). Nothing I haven’t done a few dozen times before.

After a quick look, I’ve seen prices ranging from $5 to $150 per month, but I don’t know any of the companies. Has anyone out there tried VPS? I’d prefer to deal with a company in Canada, or at least one aware of the Yukon and not governed by the US Patriot Act.

Early this morning (I was up at 4am to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies), I received an invitation to the beta of Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for computer programmers.

Since that time, I’ve already amassed a total of 95 nondenominated points and five “badges” (one, just for filling in my personal info). All that for asking four questions and jotting ten answers.

I’ve been awaiting this site for some time now. Founded by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software, Stack Overflow is akin to sites like expertsexchange but without the double-entendre domain name, hideous appearance, and annoying registration hurdles. (Block the “experts” from your Google search results with Greasemonkey and the Google Filter.)

The content seems a little Windows-centric thus far, but I asked a Linux question (and then provided my own answer — more points!) and got some reponses from folks that clearly know their way around a bash prompt.

From the looks of the site — and the fact that I was invited — I’d say that it’ll be ready to go public pretty soon. At first, I suspect it’ll be a good place to find answers since the point whores will be out in force trying to reach #1. After that, it’ll depend on the same type of prolific and tireless contributors that make Wikipedia so darned useful.