Posted 3 months ago at 6:24 am. 7 comments
I’m becoming a city biker. I love it. I’ve always loved biking, and when I bought my bike a month or so ago I promised myself I would ride it every day, and I do. I ride it to and from work every day, which turns out to be a little over 9 miles round trip, and try to ride long distance on the weekends as well.
I have a timbuk2 laptop commuter bag which is technically my first bit of cool biker shwag. I got it a few months ago right after I moved down to Hawaii. I just stumbled upon some REALLY cool Zero Per Gallon (ZPG) stickers online and ordered a handful. I also ordered a rad biker belt made o bike inner-tubes. The picture above (stolen from the site, I don’t get pwnt for stealing that image) shows a Kryptonite ulock in the cool inner-tube belt. I struggled for a few days to find a nice place to keep my ulock but found the top loop on the timbuk2 bag does a pretty good job.
That’s a shot of the totally uber-rad sticker that I ordered. Should be here soon, and then I’ll slap it right onto my bike frame :) It will match my yellow water bottle cage and yellow State of Hawaii bike registration sticker. The bike is all black, so I am going for the Black/Yellow look. It’s purely coincidental, but my timbuk2 bag is also black with yellow stitching. Rad.
Check out the Zero Per Gallon site here. Order some cool goodies!
Posted 3 months ago at 6:14 pm. 1 comment
I’m chillin at a Safeway market in Honolulu right now. It’s brand spankin’ new with all kinds of sparkly and shiny things inside. It even has a sushi bar. The coolest part about it though, is the free wifi. The entire place is covered in Wifi and its 100% free. You’re greeted with a Safeway page when you first fire up your browse, and from then on out get pretty fast and free wireless.
I’m even torrenting at around 60kb/s right now, without a hitch. Pretty rad.
Posted 3 months ago at 10:47 pm. 4 comments
Not very long ago my buddy Anand told me about a great electronic band called The Flashbulb. Ever since getting a hold of a couple of their albums on iTunes, I’ve been hooked. The tracks on their albums are quite diverse from one to the next, and never cease to hold my attention. It’s great rythmic and deep electronic music, that gives off a calm and relaxing feel almost like Jazz. But it doesn’t sound like Jazz, so don’t get confused, and certainly give them a shot.
Why give them a shot? They released their latest album on BitTorrent, and you can download it for free. I am listening to it right now and am simply amazed. As Benn Jordan, the man behind The Flashbulb explains, this album is a lot more cinematic, melodic, and less electronic than his other albums. Definitely one of my favorite electronic groups. My fellow coder broheem out there will really appreciate this kind of music, it helps you get jammin’ pretty good and won’t distract you.
Download the album here.
I put it on Box.net because the tracker is private. There is a nice html README that the album comes with, which surely deserves to be read. While you’re at it, check out the blog of The Flashbulb. You also might want to throw a donation their way.
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 5:32 pm. 3 comments
Just moved the ’salad over to a brand new dedicated box. 64-bit Ubuntu 7.10, 4200+, 2GB of ram, Yeeehaw. Still rockin’ Nginx.
Let me know in the comments if you see anything strange going on. New server is on the same netblock as my older one, with the same host. Layeredtech is definitely the place to go for awesome unmanaged dedicated boxes.
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 2:27 am. 1 comment
I happened upon a pretty cool site today built in Django and focused on the Django community. It’s called Django People, and it’s a giant community of… people who use Django! They did a really good job with the site. It actually really impresses me with how much functionality they packed into it. It’s nearly a full fledged social network. There were fun new things to do around every corner.
The first step, which is the primary feature of the site, is choosing your location. The interface is a little buggy and kludgy for my tastes, but after a few tries I managed to get my location down right. You can upload an icon, add sites that you have worked on, add tags for your interests (nginx is of course one of my tags!), specify whether or not you’re open to work opportunities, and a ton more. It also gives you ways to get in touch with others near you, as well as ways for people to get in touch with you by showing things like your Twitter site, your AIM account, and other things.
Overall the guys (should I say, guy and gal) who developed Django People did a great job. The design, although sufficient and easy to use, isn’t very gorgeous at all, but it’s fun to use and should prove to be a helpful tool as more Django developers begin to use it.
Check out Django People here, and view my profile here!
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 9:03 am. 2 comments
Not too long ago, a good friend of mine and I were sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of Honolulu. We were trying to think of a small and fun project we could build together. After some thinking we both decided to bring CSS Thesis, an old and very popular CSS gallery back from the dead.
CSS Thesis was once a popular online gallery which featured some of the nicest and cleanest sites on the web. I mean, come on, the one and only Whalesalad was featured on it at one point. Haha. But really, it was a clean site with a very defined focus: show designers really awesome websites, and let them vote very easily. So, we decided to build it from the ground up.
The new site is built on CodeIgniter and runs on Nginx in a teeny 256mb slice from Slicehost. We’re running it through its paces and so far its handling pretty well, but we’ll see. A review of Slicehost is sure to come. Hopefully they don’t become slicehosed like DH and MT.
Go check out the new CSS Thesis, and submit a few sites!
Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 7:38 pm. 3 comments
I’ve been hearing a lot about Comet recently. Comet is essentially a type of AJAX which works by having the server constantly sending data to the browser, rather than having the browser constantly polling the server for more data. Things like Gmail’s Chat functionality and Meebo are perfect examples of Comet-like technology. The main difference between AJAX and Comet applications is that Comet applications deliver data to the browser any time, whereas AJAX applications require user input (for example a small refresh icon).
I stumbled upon an awesome Asynchronous Comet server for Django today, called django-evserver. The video shows two different browsers showing a chat log, where each browser automatically shows new messages when the other submits data. Pretty cool stuff, and seeing this running with Django is totally awesome. Note to self: This is all related somehow to WSGI, which is something I definitely need to get my tiny brain wrapped around. I’ve heard lots about WSGI and know of a few things which are beneficial to me regarding it, but don’t know too much about it.
Hopefully I’ll work on a project one of these days that can utilize technology like this. +1 for Django!
Check out the blog post here, which contains a video demonstrating the technology.
Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 1:09 pm. 7 comments
Today I found a pretty cool blog post discussing PHP vs Ruby performance. A lot of people in the web community are suggesting that Rails is slow and it doesn’t scale. A lot of these people making these accusations happen to be PHP people, and so in suggesting Rails is slow and cannot scale they are in essence suggesting that PHP can.
In the article they benchmark PHP vs Ruby, as well as Python, Perl, and C++ for comparison. It’s important to see the distinction between Rails and Ruby. I work at a Python development house (rockin’ Django) and it’s cool to see all this crap hitting the fan all over the interwebs from Rails. Ruby itself is a great language. It’s also cool to see Python, the little quiet guy in the corner of those charts, smoking the pants off of everyone with the exception of C++. With Psyco (a Python JIT compiler) Python was even quicker than C++.
Check out the post here.
Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 12:57 pm. 1 comment
Radiohead is broadcasting live right now in London, England. I’ve got the web stream open in VLC right now.
If you want to watch too, open this stream in VLC.
mms://live.wm.radiohead.servecast.net/hosting_wmlz_radiohead_160108_300k
Posted 3 months, 4 weeks ago at 10:55 pm. 0 comments
One of my readers, Matt, recently discovered a syntax bug in the Elixir theme. I’ve updated all of the themes and put them on the server. Happy downloading!
In case anyone was wondering, the error was on line 8 of header.php, where the ending <? } ?> needed to be changed to <?php } ?>.
View the official Elixir page here. (That’s where you can download it)
