I’ll keep this brief and won’t include any spoilers. Out of 10 Star Trek gets a 12. The movie didn’t just beat every last one of my expectations for the movie, it flat out obliterated it. I was really impressed by how much different it was from the old series, yet not. For those trekkie fans out there, you’ll definitely notice the things that are the same from the original series & movies, and will hopefully like the fresh perspective and view that its taking to make it different from the past. Cheers.
Personal
While working on one of my consulting projects, I was having a difficult time finding documentation anywhere online on how to use the Dojo Drag-n-Drop (dojo.dnd) features with forms. I wasn’t too keen on making JSON calls or writing a whole-lotta JavaScript to solve my problem. Well, luckily I managed to derive a solution rather quickly. Read on for more details.
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PHP dojo, javascript, PHP
I typically only install Mozilla Firefox plugins that I find really useful and help improve my browsing experience. Because I’m a hardcore Linux geek, I also love applications such as vim, which is a text-based, high-performance editor. When I head about Vimperator, I immediately grabbed it and started using it. The plugin was amazing in that it really helped me move away from that dreaded mouse and back to my keyboard, improving my overall efficiency.
Well, Vimperator recently released an upgrade to 2.0. This upgrade really overhauled the performance and indicates that the developers are serious about making sure this plugin is useful for its audience. It did, however, break compatability with one of my other plugins, Tab Mix Plus.
Tab Mixx Plus is a great tool in that it can help manage your tab bar and do cool things such as make all tabs a fixed width and spill tabs over to other rows (so that if you have 40+ tabs open like me, you can still stay somewhat organized). Additionally, if you open new tabs from a link inside an existing tab, the color of the tabs will change so you can see which are related. However, upon reading about Vimperator 2.0 and Tab Mixx Plus, I found that the Vimperator team doesn’t prefer Tab Mixx Plus because of the way it interfaces with Firefox.
Their alternative is Tab Kit. In addition to being more standards compliant in terms of how it interfaces with the tabs in Firefox, it also has more features than Tab Mixx Plus and also is more efficient. This is another plugin that I’ve found helps improve Firefox performance, since I was hell bent on reducing the amount of memory Firefox consumed on my 4GB system.
Hope this helps.
Systems Administration firefox, memory, Systems Administration
When Mozilla Firefox was still in Beta stages (e.g. pre-1.0), I fell in love with it. The browser was light-weight, standards-compliant, and much more secure than Internet Explorer. Ultimately, the thing that won me over was the fact that the browser had multiple tabs to allow me to browse multiple web sites without having to open a dozen different windows, yet still consumed very little memory.
Flash forward to today and we find that Firefox 3 is a bloated monster, especially on anyone’s computer that has more than 2GB of RAM. Why? Well, everything points to the caching that Firefox does behind the scene’s to make it have accellerated performance. However, after a certain point, this performance drops not just the browser, but the entire system. The caching algorithms by default use a percentage of total memory. Thus, the more memory you have, the greater initial percentage taken up by the caching system. So, on a system with 4GB of RAM (such as mine), I easily see Firefox consuming > 1GB of RAM - even with only 12 or so tabs open and things like Flash blocked.
I believe I have found a Firefox plugin that has managed to bring that memory bloating under control. The plugin is called RAMBack. So far on my Linux system, Firefox has gone from consuming ~25% of memory (~1GB) to just 4-6% (roughly between 175MB and 225MB). I’m going to try this plugin out on different platforms and see how it compares, and I encourage anyone else to do the same if they want to see immediate performance.
Systems Administration firefox, gentoo, memory, Systems Administration
So, one of the things I’ve been working on is getting a nice Virtual Mail system setup for Cerberus’ Enterprise Hosting Solution. One of the things I’ve come to be really annoyed with is the lack of being able to apply procmail filtering to my mailbox (getting ~100+ e-mails from systems logs every day really makes my phone’s battery drain trying to download them all). After scrounging around, I managed to find a nice solution for my virtual mail hosting.
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*nix gentoo, linux, mail, maildrop, postfix, Systems Administration
No, I didn’t get neutered, for those of you with a sick sense of humor. I got my hair cut. How much? Let’s say about 12″+, e.g. almost all of it got cut off.
Why, do you ask?
- I couldn’t sleep right - I kept rolling onto it and yanking it
- I hated how much shampoo and conditioner I had to use to keep it sane
- I hated when I didn’t wash it because I woke up late
- I’ve been yearning for some sort of change
- I felt like giving some charity - I decided my hair could go to a good cause (Locks of Love)
I’ll post pictures of before and after soon.
Personal
I was on a quest. You know, one of those quests of “I can save myself close to $200 if I can figure out how to fix this.” types of quests. It involved trying to replace the chip on my color toner cartridges. My first attempt at replacing a yellow toner cartridge with a magenta chip failed (presumably because I scratched the chip). On my way back, though, my foot slipped off the little ledge in my garage and onto a box of nails - where one of them proceeded to go about half an inch into my foot.
Needless to say, blood, pain, and some betadine was in order. On a positive note, however, my yellow cartridge is printing again - so it wasn’t all for not. 
Personal
I’ve been working relatively quickly to try to get everything moved off of one of my servers in Dallas so that I can turn it into a virtual server. One of the things that had to go is my blog. Rather than hosting it inside of a VM (when the space, memory, etc. would be better sold), I decided to package it up and send it over to DreamHost. So far, my experience has been pleasing, and it was a surefire cannot pass-up-this-opportunity thing when they had the 777 deal - 1 year of hosting paid up-front at the amazing cost of $9.24.
I’ll be sure to blog about them on down the line. Not too much though - I’m still a hosting provider too. 
Personal
Because of the need to have Active Directory operating over SSL, Active Directory Certificate Services were setup in our environment.
For those unfamiliar with Active Directory Certificate Services, it is essentially a Public Key Infrastructure for a Windows Environment that cleanly ties into IIS, LDAP, and anything else that needs to request certificates and have a parent certificate authority seamlessly sign requests (real purpose is shortened for brevity).
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Windows java, ssl, Systems Administration, Windows
When you ask most people, the common perception of the role of a university is to teach students, perform research, and help the community. The latter is certainly one that I find many people (especially in university roles) don’t throw up as an answer, despite it being an important role of a university. It’s clear that this mentality runs rampant amongst individuals, especially software developers, at universities because of the lack of open source (or freely licensed) software that is provided by universities across the nation. Certainly, some have contributed more than their fair share (Virginia Tech, University of Washington, just to name a couple). However, many others, especially those who pride themselves on being one of the world’s most premiere research institutions, fail to meet up to the same standards as others. It’s about time that developers start banding together and becoming more creative and collaborative across the campus so that we can keep things moving forward.
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Political, Software Development
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