The Personal Blog of Michael Whalen
Michael Whalen is an 18-year-old web developer working in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. He loves Web Apps, Django, CSS, JDM and Euro cars, and his beautiful girlfriend Elan. More »
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)
Like the jock at school admiring the creepy girl over in the corner (Juno reference, hah) I’ve been hiding in the shadows and observing Slicehost from the distance. Slicehost is the new kid at Hosting High, and offers VPS hosting for developers. A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is the “ultimate mix of price, performance and power” according to Slicehost, which gives you nearly all the benefits of your own dedicated machine, without the hassle and cost.
There are quite a number of popular bloggers and web developers out there who evangelize Slicehost with credit on their blogs, and it’s certainly working. So much so, that I don’t even need a VPS, and I want my own slice. Whalesalad runs on a dedicated server fully configured by me. It’s running on the blazin’ fast Nginx web server and has never suffered a moment of unexpected downtime on this machine. A great breath of fresh air from Dreamhost back in the day, and even (mt)’s grid server. Despite all of that, the thought of Slicehost powering Whalesalad sounds pretty cool in my head.
So why do I want a pice of the Slicehost pie? I’ve been marketed, virally. In three letters they’re simply rad. They offer services designed with the developer in mind, and the guys they host have nothing but killer things to say about them. They have a strong community which seems to be growing exponentially, and they give back to the entire web community with articles on everything from Capistrano to Subversion.
Every cool kid at the web designer lunch table is rockin’ a creamy portion of Slicehost goodness. Slicehost is so successful that not too long ago, I remember they had to cease fulfilling new server requests right away because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. In a world full of “Wordpress Cannot Connect To Database” shared hosting hell, Slicehost is quite the breath of fresh air. I’ll definitely be giving them a shot with some sort of project, sometime soon. That $20 a month slice is lookin’ mighty tasty.
It’s a shame their website looks like it was made by a ten year old with a CSS book on christmas morning. Hey Slicers, if you’re listening, I’d love to give redesigning your site a shot. You could surely use a sleek and sexy new site to match your explosive expansion.
Update: I’m now using Slicehost for two of my web projects and couldn’t be happier. I hope to post a review soon, but Slicehost is powering my CSS Thesis website (http://thecssthesis.com) as well as a pre-production staging server for Schoolrack.com.
I really love Barack Obama’s new website. I’m not too sure about my stance on him leading our country as president, but his website definitely kicks ass. Visit The Site Here
I recently stopped using Firefox on my MBP and started using Apple’s latest Safari 3 browser included in Leopard. I was never a very big fan of Safari because I came from a Windows world where Firefox reigned. Plus, I use Firebug essentially daily, for anything from actual web work to just hacking little bits of web pages to work properly.
Safari is much, much faster and also uses significantly less memory than Firefox. However, it certainly would be nice to have some web debug tools built right in to Safari. It turns out that Safari does include debug tools. Traditionally I used Webkit to take advantage of the debug tools Safari had to offer, which is actually the development version of Safari. But, Webkit also has its problems. Luckily, there is a very simply way to get the debug tool from Webkit, in your standard Safari browser!
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Run this in your terminal with Safari not running, startup safari, and then you’ll be able to run the Debug tool in Safari!
Curious as to how you activate the inspector? Just right click anywhere on a web page and then select “Inspect Element”.
I’m not quite sure what’s going on over in Dragon’s neck of the woods, but he’s brewing something up in his lab. All of his sites are pointing to what is apparently being code named Aphelion. It seems to be counting down. As of now we’re 13 days away from the big release which should occur on December 22nd. Check it out.
24ways is back in a day. I’m pretty excited to see what is gonna come out of it this time :)
A friend of mine recently told me about a CSS property to remove the annoying dotted borders surrounding links. It is called outline. If you simply set a { outline: none; } somewhere in your global CSS file, it will remove all of those nasty dotted borders from all of your links. This might be old news to a lot of people, but I sure am glad that I know about it now.
This might seem as common sense to many, but I have had a few conversations over the course of the past few weeks with friends of mine regarding Ron Paul, and this issue has come up a lot. Many people tell me that they love Ron Paul and want him to be our president, but shortly thereafter explain that it would be a wasted vote because he certainly will not win. All of the people who have told me this have got me thinking about the issue. If everyone who wants Ron Paul to become president decides that their vote might be better spent somewhere else, that might very well end up being the momentous he needs to win the election, and the reason he might lose!
So if you have thought about using your precious vote elsewhere, don’t! We all must unite, hold our ground, and vote for who we think is best no matter what. If Ron Paul follows through with his commitments, he will redeem this nation, bring it out of debt, and make me proud to be an American. Think about it this way, if you don’t vote for Paul, then when Giuliani takes over and starts WWIII you won’t have any excuse to bitch and moan.
Glenn Wolsey got pwned pretty hard. A hacker known as malcor decided that Glenn Wolsey’s blog was more of a disgrace to the Mac community than anything else, and took it into his own hands to do something about it. I have to say, I am on malcor’s side here. I too am sick of all the little fanboys flaunting their crap all over the internet. What is even more bothersome is all of the people who eat and enjoy the shit sandwiches that Glenn and others create.
Everyone is assuming this is an IIS or SQL exploit, but the irony here is that he is hosted on Mediatemple, and is one of their featured clients. Someone who makes regular DB backups, and has their code somewhere safe shouldn’t need to worry about anything like this.
I wonder who he is gonna hit next?
Like most mac geeks I spent my Friday evening installing Apple’s newest release in their OS X series, Leopard. I ordered Leopard and a 320GB backup drive a week before the release date to make sure everything arrived by Friday. I had planned from the beginning to do a 100% clean install because for one, my Tiger install was getting a little dirty, and I prefer the clean slate approach. Plus, I wanted to avoid all of the strange upgrade shenanigans going on all over the place. My broseph Jason suggested that I make an image of my drive, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that on my own.
Creating an image would give me a 100% bulletproof backup of my system. Once you have the image, it’s literally an exact image of your system. If something was to go wrong during the Leopard install, I would simply have to restore the image to my Macintosh HD and reboot. If Leopard successfully installs, it’s a simple double click of the image file to mount it as if it were an external drive to drag your files into Leopard. Creating an image of your drive is truly the best way to backup your system, it kills an entire flock of birds with one stone.
It’s really easy to create an image of your drive. Simply boot into the Leopard (or Tiger, both work but I had the Leopard CD right in hand obviously) installer and launch Disk Utility from the menu-bar. Make sure to connect your external drive prior to booting into Leopard’s installer, I am not sure if it’s intelligent enough to detect drives being plugged in after the installer has initialized. I don’t have the camera on hand I used during my Leopard install, but the Disk Utility included with OS X is exactly the same so my screenshots below are from inside Leopard.
Once you’re into the Disk Utility, select your Mac’s local hard drive and click on the “+ New Image” button in the upper toolbar. I dialog will pop up asking where you would like to place the image (This is where you select your external drive), whether or not you would like compression, as well as the option for encryption. I have a 120GB drive in my Macbook which was approximately 80% full and using compression without encryption everything was compressed 47% leaving me with a nicely sized 59GB .DMG file.
Once this is complete you can boot into Tiger and check the DMG just in case, but I tend to not always take the best safety precautions, and I simply went on with the installer. Once Leopard installed (which went 100% smooth and clean) I mounted my DMG and began copying files back into my system. It was a total piece of cake. I had every single file from my Tiger install (Including my /usr/ directory with all my Apache configuration files!), without a single install problem. Plus, if I ever wanted to restore my Tiger installation (which I contemplated many times when dealing with mod_python) it would be extremely simple. I can even boot directly into my Tiger install right off of my external drive if I wanted to. The drive imaging method is certainly a quick, easy, and bulletproof backup method for those of you moving to Leopard.
Next time I’ll go into gory detail on my intimate Saturday evening with Leopard and getting Django installed! Leopard does not play nice with mod_python at all.