April 2007 Archives

At the bottom of my sidebar, you might notice a new item, my del.icio.us tags. I have recently begun to actively use this on-line bookmark and bookmark sharing service. When I see something on the web I want to share with my associates and co-workers, or even my friends, I can use a button installed in my browser to store, and tag a bookmark in my on-line del.icio.us account.

Readers can browse my bookmarks, or look at bookmarks I have given a certain tag. Let me know what you think of this idea, do you use del.icio.us? Have you ever visited another user's bookmarks?

If you look very closely, you might notice a tag down there today that most people would find unusual for me to have used: kids I remember being fascinated with programming when I was a kid and wishing for access to a computer to learn. Hackety Hack is an interesting sounding tool to teach your kid how to program. (Hack is not a bad word, no matter what the news media would have you believe.)

If you are interested in manifesto's and such, you are encouraged to read the Hackety Hack Manifesto. I thought this "bylaw" was great:

Also, helpful sentences. Preferably short and with a period.

I was surprised when I found this, because it is written at least in part by _why, who I have heretofore found to be a little difficult to read. I really liked reading his stuff, just don't think the why's (poignant) guide to ruby is for kids 13 and up, which is the described age range for Hackety Hack.

I'm making some design changes at AdvisorBits. And the first step is to get naked. I love to have a reason to say GET NAKED, naked is a great word. By GET NAKED I mean that I am going to shed the CSS for a while.

But you needn't fear, my good friend Jesse is going to help me get things decent again.

Trackbacks are gone. Too much surface area for attack. The ratio of value to abuse was almost none, on this blog. (YMMV)

Comments are less hidden. Previous indexes did not indicate comments if there were none, which may have lead people to believe this I didn't encourage comments. I do.

Subscription will be via FeedBurner, and I'll be sharing my Del.ico.us bookmarks with you. (Oooo how Web 2.0 am I?)

My old college friend Michael Scaramozzino has celebrated the 20th anniversary of his award-winning interactive multimedia studio, DreamLight in Woburn, MA. Over the years he has successfully produced a large body of impressive projects for a variety of clients. To celebrate his business' anniversary, he has created BlastOff! The film, which he made with his family, is an animated short which has been shown at numerous film festivals thoughout the country.

The story begins at dawn with a child's wishful drawing of a space ship. During the day his father builds him a custom designed space shuttle bed and fills his room with toys. As the sun sets, one of the child's toys, a little green alien, comes to life and is excited to play space ship pilot. As his imagination soon takes over completely, the room fades away and the shuttle bed blasts the little alien out into space for a wild rocket ship ride through the rings of Saturn. The alien finally comes crashing back to reality as the child returns home to find his room is a complete mess.

If you are interested in seeing this family film or buying a copy you should head on over to the promotional site.

Its recently come to my attention that a certain competitor of KinetixHosting.com (blatant plug) has servers named UGH and one named SHEKEL.

I just wanted to remind everyone that it could be worse.

http://www.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/technet/images/archive/winntas/support/xng_d05a_big.gif"

I almost hate to poke fun at the folks from Redmond about this, because I think for its time Windows NT Server Resource Kit was an awesome document. As the diagram above shows, naming conventions might not have been the Kit's most enduring contribution to networking, or my understanding of the subject anyway.

RFC 1178

If you are like me, you'll want to know what the RFC on the subject is. Its a good one, especially if you're a history buff like me you'll appreciate the reference to the growth of Internet domain name servers and the slow decline in the use of host files. It got me to thinking:

1) Do you know what your computer is named? (without looking?)

2) Does the name make sense in some naming scheme, or does it just have the name of the person who unpacked the box? (My Macintosh computer is actually named John's Computer, yes that is an apostrophe and a space in the name, and it has nothing to do with anything. Go ahead, laugh.)