Software

I was waiting at the Honda dealership the other day, and reluctantly picked up the copy of the Metro News there after having read the other papers. Several pages in, there's a column by a fellow named Paul Sullivan called A massive effort to create a giant nerd.

Diaspora, the project started with the aim of building a decentralized social network has had its popularity dropping like a stone. It may not be dead, but after all the hype that was promised the alpha lacked a lot of what was promised, and the software had major (but perhaps not unsolvable) security problems.

This is part two of a series in Creating the Modern Website: You can find part zero ("Introduction") here and part 1 ("Fundamentals") here. This part covers Software, Open vs Closed-Source software, and Security.

Source: open, closed and free software

This is part one of a series in Creating the Modern Website: You can find part zero here, which outlines the goals of the series and materials that I'll cover. This part covers the fundamental elements of modern websites and how they differ from websites designed in the past.

This post is the first part in a series about building a modern website. I'd appreciate feedback on what other topics people would have me cover. If you have any ideas or any other feedback, please leave a comment at the end of the article. I also recommend that you subscribe to my RSS feed, which will inform you when future posts are made.

Reasons for this Series

There are many old website still on the web. Many but not all are bad: some are just old and tired.. Perhaps you're reading this because....

With every new Internet explorer release, Microsoft makes many statements concerning their 'commitment to the web'. It's not true. While reading a TechCrunch story, the computer program that everyone refers to as 'Internet Explorer' or 'IE' iswas called Microsoft Internet Explorer. That's fine: it's a bit long-winded, but it's fine to put the name of the company that makes it in the name of the software.

Today I received an email with the subject 'Sun Microsystems brings MySQL Training to Eastern Canada'. So where is this mythical 'Eastern' part of Canada? Well, the locations are as follows:

Ottawa
Montreal
Montreal
Toronto
Ottawa
Montreal

So much for the 'east' part of Canada:

This is probably obvious to the system administrators out there, but it's interesting to note the impact when you don't pipe the output (both stdout and stderr) of a cron job to /dev/null.

Every time the task runs, it emails its output to the account owner. If this happens every 5 minutes, that's 288 times a day or about a hundred thousand after a year.

If you intend that server -- and the cronjob running on it -- to be running for a long time without intervention, do yourself a favor and send the output to the null device. Or else you'll wind up with gigabytes in /var/mail.

I'm not normally one to talk politics, and I regard it as distasteful (and annoying!) to deal with, but I do pay attention. Harper might have solace in his minority-majority, but eventually he's going to annoy enough people as to discredit the Conservatives -- much like the Liberal party has now -- for many years to come.

It's interesting to note that you can apparently make free toll-free calls with skype, even if you don't have an active subscription to their service, or even any credit.

Might be useful if you're stuck without a phone and need to call one. Or for using those long-distance calling cards.