I ran across this site today and wanted to share.
thebroken is an underground technology show with a hacker mentality that caters to the elite (or wannabe 1337) computer user using a mixture of seriousness and irreverent comedy … If it’s shady or underground, it’s thebroken.
I thought Ramzi’s tips were especially useful. Very funny … and educational. Some of the videos in the other sections of the site are worth a look too, so check those out.
Learning new technology can be very frustrating for users. Thank goodness for the patience of skilled technolgy folks who can gently guide them along thier way.
Take a look at what I mean here
Hey, I think I’ve worked with some of this guy’s descendants!
Since I ‘moved out’ of the data center several months ago I have come to rely on remote desktop connections to the Microsoft Windows servers that I manage. The fact of the matter is that even when I was sitting in the data center I used these tools. After all, there’s no point in walking three feet unless I have too, right?
Up until now I have been using the Windows Remote Desktop tool. While this tool has certainly met my needs, I wanted to tell you about another tool I ran across yesterday. Visionapp Remote Desktop (vRD) is a free (a concept not normally associated with Windows tools) application from Visionapp which allows the management of RDP connections to one or more Windows servers.
One of the things I like about this tool is that it allows you to set up connection-specific settings and login credentials in folders/subfolders one time and apply them to one or more organized RDP connection settings. It also allows you to easily change desktop size through a right-click context menu and also includes options for connecting local drives, printers and other devices. In addition, the overview screen provides thumbnail views and tabbed browsing for all current connections.
If you currently use or are thinking about using an RDP client to manage your Windows servers, you might want to check this one out. Did I mention it’s free?
I like cheat sheets. Depending on what I am working on, I may have several on my desk at any given time so that I can reference them quickly.
One of the best technical cheat sheet resources I have found to date resides at ilovejackdaniels.com. Dave Child has created a dozen or so, all in pdf format, for your pleasure. Dave has done a fantastic job with the layout of these sheets to include the maximum amount of information possible while keeping them readable. His latest sheet is a reference for regular expressions (which happens to be what I was looking for this morning. Thanks Dave!). Others include MySQL, PHP, CSS, javascript, ASP, mod_rewrite, and several more. He has even created a cheat sheet for World of Warcraft for you gamers.
Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend Technologies, announced earlier this week that Zend will be collaboratiing with Microsoft toward the common goal of making PHP run faster and more stable on the Microsoft Windows platform.
Andi commented on his blog that “There are now people at Redmond who understand that supporting interoperability between open-source software and the Windows platform will have benefits to their customer base. 4.5M PHP developers are hard to ignore, especially when so many PHP developers actually do their development on Windows”. It was refreshing to hear that Microsoft was open-minded enough to change thier plans for IIS 7 to support a FastCGI implementation in an effort to meet the goal of improving PHP performance on Windows. They had apparently not originally intended to do this. The official Zend press release indicates that this collaborative effort has already made huge improvements.
I am glad to hear that Zend is committed to improving the performance of PHP for use on mulitiple platforms (PHP has run on Windows for some years now, just not as well as it should). It is also great that Microsoft is giving notice to the open source community.
I currently develop on Linux and that is also what my production servers run on. I am extremely happy with this arrangement and will more than likely not be changing to another platform (ie; PHP on Windows).
What about you? Will you consider migrating your PHP *nix servers to Windows based on this news? Are you currently running PHP on Windows and if so, what are your thoughts on this?
I came across this on Tech Republic this morning. I haven’t seen some of these machines for a _very_ long time and I’ve never seen some of them.
How about you?
Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from 1980-1983
The 1980s was a decade when cool cops patrolled the streets of Miami and Reaganomics drove US fiscal policy. It was also the decade when PCs went mainstream. This gallery showcases several 1980-1983 machines from Steven Stengel’s vintage computer collection.Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from 1984-1989
As the year of George Orwell’s totalitarian future passed us by, PC technology took tremendous steps forward-including the first GUI. This gallery showcases several 1984-1989 machines from Steven Stengel’s collection.
I haven’t posted in a while (has anybody even noticed?), so I thought I might get back in the game by telling you about several Firefox extensions I have been using.
There are MANY extensions available for Firefox and I certainly have not even began to review them all. However, I have come to love and adore several of the developer extensions. My thanks goes out to those who have written these extensions and made them available for us to use.
BTW, these are listed in no particular order or ranking.
Firstly, I really like the Web Developer toolbar. This extension installs as a Firefox toolbar and includes many tools that a web developer might find useful. While there are still several I have not explored, I have really enjoyed the CSS tool.
Secondly is IE Tab. This tool allows you to open an embedded instance of Internet Explorer inside a Firefox tab. You might ask, “Why would you want to do that!!?”. Well, many people still use IE for browsing, so this is handy for checking how IE will render a page without ever leaving Firefox (I shudder at the thought).
Thirdly, the HTML Validator tool is very slick. This tool, based on HTML Tidy (which is apparently embedded in Firefox), allows you to quickly validate HTML on the local machine. No need to submit the site to a third party server for validation. The report is really useful. If there are any errors in your HTML (gasp!), you can select an error message and the extension will highlight the area of code that is problematic. No more counting lines! The extension even has an option which will allow Tidy to attempt to fix any invalid HTML for you (although I haven’t tried that yet).
And lastly, but not leastly, there is the View Formatted Source tool. This addon features the ability to view the formatted and color coded source code of a web page. It even has a code collapse feature and also allows you to selectively view only the portion of the page you are interested in.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the the extensions available for Firefox. It is simply a list of several that I have found to be useful. Who knows, maybe you will too.
This may be a little late for some of you, but I’ll post it anyway. If you will check out (I believe) any php info page, you will see that the php logo has been replaced by a cute picture of an animal.
Adrian pointed out this php easter egg a few months back and gave a nice write up regarding how to see this behavior on a php info page (Adrian, I’d link to your post but it was on the old AA blog. Sorry!).
Today is the one day out of every year that you can see the zend/php easter egg without any effort! Just pull up a php info page. My suspicion is that you will most likely see a different image depending on the version of php you are running .
Check it out and happy April Fool’s day!
A few days ago I didn’t have much to do, so I fired up Netstumbler out of boredom. I was curious to see what I would pick up around my house. I was shocked at how many unsecured networks I was able to log from my living room. Now I was really curious, so I jumped in my car with my laptop (still running Netstumbler), drove about two miles, and logged about 60 unsecured wireless networks. That is absolutely amazing!
Do people just simply not care about security? Do they not read the manuals that come with their wireless equipment? These days, even most of the quick start guides walk you through how to configure . Do they not understand the importance of this?
Any thoughts or opinions as to why people just don’t seem to get it?
It appears that Microsoft has been very busy catching up with Google in the area of internet searches, mapping, etc. You can see the latest from the Windows Live team here: www.live.com