Hosted!

So I would just like to pen another ode to technology. I have these moments when my faith in society ebbs to the point where it collides with my admiration and sometimes-astonishment at the amount of technological progress in our world. Think about hosting a website from your house.

1) have a computer (figuring out how to build these was no small feat)
2) plug that computer into the power grid (also incredible - in our country we have virtually endless sources of electricity running to everyone's house - think about it next time you plug in)
3) plug that computer into a flat screen monitor (remember CRTs??)
4) plugin in your wireless mouse and keyboard (yeah, no wires)
5) Plug into a router that can broadcast your signal wirelessly, or via a wire
6) Plug that into your router that translates signals coming in from your cable wire (yeah the one that also brings in TV)

So you did those 6 simple things that took way longer to type than to actually do.

Now you are on the internet (no shortage of amazing there), and ready to figure out how to host a website. This is the part about society. The internet allows all these people who have done what you are trying to do (pretty much everytime you do something, someone else has tried it, unless your last name is Newton, Da Vinci, or Einstein), to write about their experience. So I figured out that I needed a static IP address, which was no problem, once I got rid of Verizon. OK, now I punch in "host website at home" into google (another pretty awesome thing that people take for granted). I got a few thousand results. I decided to check the first one that came back:

http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/hostmyown.html

I notice that the instructions include a router that is very similar to mine. So I follow said instructions to point the router to my server on the ports that I want. So far so good. Now it should work fine, but wait! I need a web server. That's going to be a pain in the ass, right? Nope, all I have to do is download apache and build it and install it (following 5 simple steps - note - this is way more complicated because I am running Linux). OK, now I start the server.

It all works. I can go to my new site. It just works. With another couple of steps, I can make an arbitrary string (the domain name) point to my computer.

This all took about 45 minutes. Incredible. Sorry if everyone out there doesn't share my enthusiasm for all this. I think when you work in the technology world, you are interfacing with these technologies all the time, and you begin to take for granted that they will just work (which is a very good thing, means they DO work), but sometimes you have to stop and think about all the amazing problems that man has encountered and defeated. Anything can be done!

Hi Ubuntu!

So anyone who follows this rambling mess of a blog would know that I got a new laptop a few months ago then got a MacBook Pro for work. So now, I am in this sort of computer heaven, as I have the old laptop serving as a desktop replacement upstairs, a little Dell Server now running my hosted site, and my two fast little dual core laptops. When I installed linux on my server, it was kind of a pain in the ass getting everything up and running correctly, and I was never able to make wireless work on it (just tried for kicks, really). Getting the monitor to display correctly was brutally painful, etc. It shook my faith in the potential for linux as an eventual 'real' desktop OS alternative.

Fast forward 1.5 years to last night. I freed up some disk space on my new laptop and downloaded Ubuntu's latest release, 'Hardy Heron'. I created an installer CD from the image that I downloaded, and ran the installer. It took about 15-20 minutes. Once it was done, lo and behold, the computer started up, found my wireless router, and I was up and running. Sound card worked. Everything worked. It's FAST. So now I have OS X, Vista, and Linux running on laptops. Sweet.

I must say I am pretty amazed by the ease of install, and I really like the way packages are handled on the Ubuntu OS. Wow. Most impressed. Anyone who wants their computer to run faster should run and install Ubuntu right now. Seriously. It's great so far!

Fresh + Clean

Well, I finally got my new laptop. I think it's pretty incredible how far this technology has come along. I ended up getting a Toshiba, as the feature-to-price ratio seemed to be in line. I got the Core 2 Duo 5450, which is not ideal, but still WAY better than my single processing Pentium M that I have in my current laptop. It's pretty light (5.3 lbs), has a big (200GB) disk, and 2GB of RAM, which I haven't come close to taxing yet.

It's a relatively attractive machine, with a nice quiet keyboard, great bright video, and pretty decent speakers (not the Harman-Kardon speakers that the more pricey Toshibas come with), but I don't honestly use the laptop speakers very often. The complaints I saw in reviews centered around the touchpad, but I think it's really just fine. Maybe the one I have now sucks so bad that I am preconditioned to think that touchpads always suck.

I got subversion setup for my side venture this week. I used wush.net, which offers plans costing only $20/quarter. This gives you a web client, RSS feeds for changelist tracking, and a pretty decent amount of space and transfer bandwidth. So far it's been plenty fast, and they offer unlimited user access to a single repository, which is good enough for us.

This leads me to a "Wow technology is cool!" moment:

It's always amazing to me when you can sit on your couch on your laptop that costs half as much as the laptop you bought 2.5 years ago that sucks in comparison, programming in a free IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans that is full-featured and full of neat little tools that someone donated to the world out of pure nerdness. Finish your work for the night on the laptop that is not tethered by any cords, and commit your changes - then sit back as the changelist floats through the air to your router, where somehow those packets of data start their enchanted journey to an IP address that is mapped magically to the DNS name you specified. It gets there and checks itself in to this repository in god-knows-where using source control technology that is open source and freely available. You can then hop on the internet and see what you just did. Now we, as 'Web 2.0' users, do this every day, like this blog. I just take for granted that what I wrote before hitting "Publish Post" will show up exactly as it was when Iwrote it. That's a testament to the amazing intellectual creations over the past few decades - that you just know it'll get there, because all the incredible technology that is involved in that data getting from your fingertips to its destination is nothing to sneeze at. Fascinating.

Hmm, what else is there to talk about. Well I finished my Dick Francis rag, and now I am onto the next batch of books I just got from Amazon (they take A LOT of my money). First up is Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott. So far it's interesting in a "Tipping Point-like" well-done statement of the obvious. I will let you know when I get further into it if it's as good as people have told me it is.