Content & Technology Crossroads

I've had a hosting problem for awhile. I have a $8 or $9 shared hosting account at Lypha.com. It's pretty cool. Its has PHP, MySQL, Python and other stuff running on it. The thing is I want to run PostgreSQL on it. Can't do that because I can't install anything. I also can't compile any source code on it. I don't have root. I want a lot more control, and I want root.

Other solutions I was looking at were a dedicated server or co-location. But those are much more expensive. Yesterday I was talking to Aaron Parecki and he told me about virtual private servers. A hosting provider can have an operating system that runs many other operating systems on top of it. Each OS separate. And it is much cheaper, like the same price I'm paying now for shared hosting. So you get your own virtual private server all to yourself. It's like having your own server except with limited resources (CPU, RAM, hard disk). And you get root! That is so awesome. I wonder why I never heard about it before.

Here's a definition of virtual private server from wikipedia:

Virtual private servers or Virtual dedicated servers are a form of virtualization that splits a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. The practice of partitioning a single server so that it appeared as multiple servers has long been common practice in mainframe computers, but has seen a resurgence lately with the development of software and technologies such as VMware, Xen, FreeBSD Jail, User-mode Linux, FreeVPS, and Virtuozzo.

I'm looking at buying hosting from Unixshell.

I'm really impressed. The scroller doesn't work on my mouse so I search the alt.os.linux.slackware newsgroup for an answer. I find an answer and apply the solution and now it works. Easy.

So then I'm like, okay, can I fix the sound now? Because I wasn't getting any sound, and if I'm going to make a complete switch to Linux, I'm going to need sound. I search the newsgroup and I don't find anything to help me. So I start a topic about it describing my problem. Some guy -- Jorey Bump -- writes down exactly what I need to do to fix it. So I do exactly what he says and sound works beautifully. Easy. I'm impressed.

I thought this was really smart and changed how I view statistics. From Tim Bray:

There’s a word for companies that base all decisions on ruthless quantitative ROI metrics: Bankrupt. I’m an engineer and value numbers, but in business, sometimes anecdotal evidence is all you’ve got, and the anecdotal evidence that blogging produces good results for some companies is pretty voluminous.

I am now completely switching to Linux. I've been running Slackware 10.2 for awhile. I've been mostly using it to program using Kate in KDE. I really like Kate for programming and text stuff. But I've been using Windows XP on my other computer for web browsering and chatting and Skype. Well I'm going to move all that stuff to Slackware and just use Slackware. I had just planned to keep a Windows XP box around just for web design perposes, to make sure web pages look okay there.

But I've been going back and forth between Win XP and Slack and it's been driving me crazy. I think I'm filling out a form and I'm actually munging code in Kate -- crossing up keyboards and mice, having two of everything. Ick. No more. I really like slackware, but what has really bothered me for awhile and has somewhat prevented me from making the complete switch earlier is that the scrolling feature of my mouse wasn't working. Very annoying. But I got that fixed tonight by looking in a newsgroup for slackware.

I copied this mouse configuration from Morten L, which fixed my mouse so it scrolls now. Whoo wee. Now I have to figure out how to install Skype on Slack.

Haha! Google does dating.

I have a hunch that a major reason many people never really understand many computer tech buzzwords is because they simply have no idea what programming is.

These terms that float up into the business world: AJAX, XML, SOA, Web Services, Open Source, Web 2.0 etc. are really programming terms. They may be used in marketing or whatever, but they really represent or indicate actions in programming.

So much confusion about them, non-understanding, miss-understanding etc. Well if you don't know what a variable is, of course you don't really understand XML.

You hear these analogous, or really incomplete descriptions. And the person still doesn't really undersand or has a really incomplete understanding or a wrong understanding. It just doesn't make sense to such people, or they just don't see what the big deal is.

These things aren't hard to understand, just like programming isn't hard. But these things are programming things, so I just don't see how anyone can understand these things without at least knowing and being familiar with the basics of programming. Basics like variables, loops, and conditionals.

Describe XML? I say go learn a simple programming language and learn the basics. And try parsing an HTML file!

Timothy's blogger blog won't let me comment on it because he's turned on moderation, and blogger only excepts comments from people using blogger when moderation is turned on.

So here's my response to his post, "Where has all the good information gone?"

I think I know what you mean. There definitely needs to be more and better resources on the Internet for programmers. Dave Winer once said there should be a news sites entirely about technology, that doesn't include the business of technology -- which so many tech news sites are loaded with. Also, check out krugle, which is supposed to be a search engine only for programmer things. Here's a wired article about it. Hopefull that will be useful when it launches.

I create a new file, put in the necessary stuff for it to work as a python CGI file, and it doesn't work. This is like the third time this has happened. My eyeballs start protruding out of their sockets; looking for what's wrong. Nothings wrong damn it.

Finally, a day later I realize. I need to make the file executable. Duh. Now it works. Hopefully now that I've blogged about it, I won't do it again and have this problem again, and if I do, I'll know where to look.

Here's the steps to make sure a python CGI file works:

Include this at the top: "#!/usr/bin/python"
Next line: "import cgi, cgitb; cgitb.enable()"

The cgi module is obviously needed for cgi. The cgitb and cgitb.enable() is needed to display errors in html on webpages and I don't know what else it does if anything.

IMPORTANT: Make sure that the permissions of the file are set so that it is executable. How to do that? "chmod 755 file.py" in the linux shell.

I'm still used to writing php, where I never set files as executable.

Opera has some advantages over Firefox. I use both, but I like Opera better.

Here are a couple reasons why I like Opera more than firefox:

Opera already has most of the functionality that I want right from the beginning. These days there is functionality that I just have to have in a browser, like tabbed browsing. In Firefox, when you download it, it is really plain and simple, which definitely has its advantages. But you have to go off and find and study and install extensions if you want any functionality, and that can be time consuming and a pain. It's especially a pain when the extensions screw stuff up and you have to uninstall extensions and otherwise debug firefox. Good luck!

It is actually really easy to customize Opera, but Opera is already really nice right from the install.

The other thing, I just really love, and is surprisingly hard to live without, is the way that you can pull up the sidebar for bookmarks etc. in Opera. You just pull your cursor all the way to the left and left click and it pulls up the sidebar. Simply brilliant. Love it. I'm so addicted. I also really like how Opera has organized the various things that can be shown in the sidebar and also how it handles bookmarks.

I use three browsers a lot, IE, Firefox, and Opera. But Opera is definitely my heavy duty browser, for serious browsing, and my favorite.

I've been really frustrated before when putting html page together because sometimes IE and firefox treat CSS and HTML a little differently. Really annoying. Tomothy wrote a rant about it yesterday. Also, HTML really only gives you two building blocks for building web pages, the block, and the inline. Or the div and the span. What if you want something inbetween? That's a bit of a problem and has lead to unusual solutions -- which have lead to them being usual, like tables, and using the famous 1px image and stretching it out to space text.

Hopefully the future browsers can help solve this stuff and agree more about things. As time goes on they are agreeing with each other more and more, which is really great. I need to check out IE 7 sometime. It's in beta.

I can't wait until browsers fully support SVG. Thanks to Opera for starting to support it. Die Flash. Also, I haven't read up on it, but isn't it really scary that Adobe now owns Macromedia, and Macromedia has Flash. This is scary because Adobe has the only SVG plug in for IE that I know of!

Banshee says that she's going to take up PHP programming. I also heard a rumor that she's got a book about building linux distros. I hope she writes about it.

Timothy Rhodes has an interesting perspective about the FCC.

Steve Yegge writes a long post about math and programming.

What if someone took the best stuff from Ruby and Python and created a language called Pugby?

Python (done), Ruby, C (partially done), C++, Java, Lisp, Perl -- and other programming languages that I don't know about yet that I need to learn.

Read a poignant article by Steve Yegge about some programming languages.

It seems to me that the really good and experienced programmers that I have found on the Internet, that at least seem like they are really good and experienced, and I really think they really are, are rather very critical of a lot of aspects of programming and programming languages. And I think this criticalness also sometimes extends into the business and environments of the programmer. Just read some of The Career Programmer.

Very critical. This language sucks, that sucks, this sucks, etc etc. They do highlight good things and things that are good in and about programming. Programmers love crappy technology that replaces crappier technology. Their talk shadows the computer programming field, making it appear pretty bleak sometimes. And actually, I think it is.

That's okay though. There is a lot of trouble with software -- I've seen a lot of non-tech people grumble about their computers. Just imagine how much grumbling a programmer does, or an IT manager. I guess that's why there is this word, bagbiter. Though I don't think a programmer does a lot of grumbling about software applications. He grumbles about the code and the tools he has to use to make the software. And he grumbles about himself.

One of the things I've noticed in my little experience in programming, is that programming turns on a huge drive to do a really good job in what I am doing. I become extremely critical of my programming and how I might do something, because I want it to be really good. I also look at the programming language and tools I'm using and look for imperfections. I want what I create to be understood, clear, work perfectly and be beautiful -- anything less than that is unacceptable. That's what programming turns on in me.

When I say beautifulness, I don't mean the external appearance of a software application or graphics or website or something. I highly disdain people who primarily judge a program by its external looks. To be hackneyed, it's what's inside that counts, right?

Anyone that does anything with computers knows, computers suck, software sucks. Things go wrong. It's really crap. While my idea of complete beautifulness and workability is an absolute, software can be sooooo much better than it is today, code can be sooo much better. It really can be, and should be. It can really be beautiful. These good, experienced programmers out there always inspire me.