I was 16 years old in 1983 when my high school physics teacher, Rocky Trembly, carried a little white box into the classroom. He fired it up and the dark screen lit up and said, "Hello." I didn't know it at the time but that moment turned out to be …

via Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese.

Nǐ hǎo 你好! Permanently on my desk, and everywhere I go is an iPad/iPhone app called Pleco, which has my custom flash cards that I use to quiz myself about 300 Chinese (Mandarin) characters. I’m getting pretty good …

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thats as true for Web servers as it is for work around the house. This overview explains the pluses and minuses of the obvious candidates — IIS and Apache — and suggests a few alternatives worth exploring.

via Picking the …

Not everything is best suited for the cloud. I've used Evernote for a few years and always thought their performance was impressive.

http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2011/05/17/architectural-digest/#

Take aways:

• Shards – protection in silos
• Single-tier architecture; No remote storage
•  Evernote's business model and cost structure. Evernote is …

A great article and simple way to take advantage os Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk service even if you don't work in Java. I'm working on integrating this approach with Eclipse's AWS Toolkit to access all the server management tasks close to my code. I'l post and update if it turns ugly …

http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

The SPDY project defines and implements an application-layer protocol for the web which greatly reduces latency. The high-level goals for SPDY are:

I've been doing a lot of Python work lately to manage a butt-load of Linux servers and I've been using the Fabric Library to help me connect remotely and securely. I had some problems getting the library and dependencies to install on my Mac laptop so here is what I …

I'm always looking for better ways to find the disk hogs... there are a ton of one liners and tools but this is the first time I've heard of "ducks". Thanks A.P!

Where has the space gone?

Although time consuming, the following procedure can be used to track down …

System Administrators SAs need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have …

Here is an excellent article on the merits, install and use of NGINX and PHP

NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome

via NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome.