December 22, 2006 – 9:40 pm
Here is a great (animated-GIF based) progression that illustrates the beauty of CSS based web design.
Now all we need for contrast is to show the same end result using an old-fashioned table based approach. 
December 20, 2006 – 12:11 pm
How long does it usually take for them to e-mail the pictures from that Buzz Lightyear ride? I haven’t gotten mine from yesterday yet, so I’m thinking maybe I typed in my address wrong.
December 9, 2006 – 10:48 pm
A cautionary tale…
I’d urge anyone considering signing up for Media Temple’s Grid Server plan to read through this post and the associated comments and links before making your final decision.
December 7, 2006 – 9:44 pm
I heard about something that is quite cool today, at least if you are a geek. This will sound a bit like an advertisement, but I can assure you it’s just my uninfluenced ramblings about how great I think this product is.
Anyone who has been paying attention lately to tech issues knows the virtualization is really “hot” right now. It’s all about providing a layer of abstraction so that you can build something that will run on a variety of platforms exactly the same way.
rPath is a company that offers you the ability (for free) to create an account and use their web based system to build your own virtual machine. You pick the packages / applications you want installed, and it will build a custom trimmed down Linux installation which includes only those packages. Then you (optionally) add your own software and other customizations, and package it all up. You can then download the generated images (in a variety of formats, Xen and other VM systems as well as raw hard drive images or tar files) for installation anywhere. They also host the images for you, all for free.
If you want more info, check out their flash demo on their pages. It’s more focused on packaging software applications for distribution, and doesn’t go into many of the techie details, but what’s really happening behind the scenes is actually pretty cool.
December 7, 2006 – 10:20 am
About a year ago, I posted about how I was starting to use the “Keep the Change” program at my bank.
I was checking my accounts the other day and noticed that I had about $200 more than I was expecting to see in my savings account. Turns out I got a deposit the other day that included the promised matching contribution (100% for the first three months and 5% thereafter). I had forgotten about that part of it until now, so it was a cool surprise.
After being on the program for about a year now, I’d have to say that I’ve found it very worthwhile. Even if they didn’t do the matching contribution thing, I’d still use it, since it’s nice to just see your savings account gradually build up without even thinking about it.
December 4, 2006 – 10:30 am
It’s been a while since I posted on comment spam, and since it used to be a regular topic, I figured it might deserve an update.
It seems like it’s been on the rise lately; I’m averaging about 300 spam comment attempts per day on here. Obviously most of them get caught, but due to the increased volume a couple have slipped through in the last month or so.
I’m currently using a combination of Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 to filter most of them out, and that seems to work pretty well. I disabled the Akismet plugin a long while ago because of false positives, and for a while after that I was using a Spam Karma 2 plugin that used Akismet as just one source for karma, but I eventually ended up disabling that as well. I may go back and use that again once I get a chance to modify it slightly. I want to make it still give negative karma points for comments it identifies as spam, but I don’t want it to give positive points for comments it says are not spam, because (in my experience) too many slip through the cracks that way.
