iTechnology

While wandering around the web, I somehow accidentally came across a free service that allows people to monitor their servers for free. Free has always been a nice "selling" point for me... Anyhow, this service allows me to send HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, TCP, UDP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, PING, and DNS all for a specified IP or domain (and/or subdomain). I can create reports, allow more than one person to view the resulting information (I think), do some benchmarking, subscribe to feeds on my data...and it can contact me in various ways in the event of any failures:

Contact Options:

1. SMS (cellphone)
2. Email
3. ICQ
4. Yahoo
5. MSN
6. Google Chat

...sorry, no AIM (yet)...

Continue reading "Server Monitoring"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

...but I (accidentally, and messily) tore down the blog earlier today after I realized my feed wasn't working properly due to "pretty urls" not being turned on after I did the clean install. I'm going to try to get this back to where it was before the move (again) and hopefully I won't kill it (again). Once again, I've no idea what happened, all of a sudden it just started getting 404 errors. I don't know if a setting was changed on my server or what, but my only fix for it was to force my domain to use PHP5 instead of PHP4 (which works for me since I prefer it anyhow). Unfortunately, I only guessed at that potential solution.

Continue reading "I had so much to talk about..."

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I've been reading a lot about internal turmoil within the ranks of different departments within the W3C, but other than the infighting and argumentative discussions, not much has been seen (by me) in the way of actual progress with things. Today, I have seen the light! The validator has a revamped look and feel, and a new design as well. Not only that, but errors and warning messages have been reworded to sound clearer! It will actually let you know that if you used a background: transparent; setting, that you may have done so, and just make sure it's legible. Awesome!

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I'm going to try to shorten my blog entries' initial lengths and place any extra content in the article's dedicated page from now on. This will allow me to keep more articles on the main page and have a cleaner looking site.

Our Director walked in to our office today and took note of my RF/GPS Atomic Clock that's sitting on the mantle. I had originally brought it in to test the temperature of the office to figure out the problem with the heating/cooling settings to prove that there's a problem, but that's not the point here... In our library, we have used RF/GPS Atomic clocks for a majority of our building's clocks. Unfortunately, anyone that's ever owned an Atomic clock knows that they are not the greatest at keeping time. In fact, they sometimes grab the wrong time.

Continue reading "WiFi controlled Wall Clock"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I've not posted much to my blog recently due to a few reasons. I have been taking time to myself, trying to understand the Zend Framework, MVC Authentication Design Patterns, Free MMO Asteroids-esque gaming (with Geometry-based eye-hand coordination and a new twist on multiplayer strategy fun mixed in), some beginning AJAX without any frameworks (that doesn't seem to work for me...), and a few other things...like sleep.

However, during the hiatus of non-posting, I've come across some interesting things:

1. Mike Cunningham, a scholar, gentleman, and fellow developer - though three times my senior (in terms of knowledge and experience)
2. An interesting way to complete a milestone with all involved stakeholders (I really like this simplicity)
3. "Veracon", the amazing 15 year old who has already made his mark on the internet society with his CSS Thesis site (a website dedicated to showcasing semantic, standards-based web designs) is going through a gradual see-it-as-it-happens website update. Somewhat fun to watch. Oh yes, and his blog is created with a completely home-spun Python based blogging system...and no, not Django (the [Ruby on] Rails of Python), straight Python.
4. MyMicroBalance, a free (donationware) application that can be used to track financial information has been released with an English language pack. When a fellow forum member showed this application in German, I had to ask if an English version was available. He requested it be made, and he updated me today with the news! Any other alternative programs (free or otherwise) have seemed to be either huge overkill, have a horrible interface, or just didn't seem to work.
5. Microformats and the interesting abilities they pose when coupled with things such as IBM's "Operator" Firefox extension to not only notify of found microformats, but use them and test/help create them!
6. Firefox Extension Sage for a small and lightweight feed reader (thanks, Mike).
7. Mozilla's Firefox Search Engine Plugin Code
8. Mozilla's use of OpenSearch for the new plugin code (which works for Firefox v2.x+ and IE7+) (as of this writing, there's nothing newer than FF v2.0.0.1 and IE7)
9. SearchPlugins.net - a repository for search plugins (and creating your own). Too bad I found it late...as of right now their upload function isn't working either.

Oh, by the way, I don't know what caused it, but an invalid character from within the database was causing the feed to be faulty. The RSS parser still should have (at least in my mind) removed it, but it didn't. It was easier just to modify the offending blog post and fix the corrupted character than to figure out why the script didn't remove it. I still need to edit the RSS parser to omit object/embed type tags and replace them with the URL instead (and be sure that multiple tags referencing the same URL are not duplicated). So, fret not fellow Serendipity users awaiting an update.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski