The Get Down is a Netflix
miniseries about a group of kids in the Bronx New York during that
summer of 1977 when Disco was dying and Hip Hop/Rap was being born. Life
was hard in NYC in the '70s. The Bronx was burning and you had to
hustle to survive.
Systems Operations is not like dodging bullets in the boogie
down but
you do need to be street smart and hustle to survive. Urban decay,
absentee landlords, abandoned buildings are synonymous to technical
debt, out of date legacy systems, and orphaned applications and tools.
You don't learn in school about containerization, cutting edge
automation and working with your crew. You learn those things by busting
your ass, doing your work and keeping your eyes and ears open.
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 the cornerstone to a lifetime of exploration and discovery.
Throughout my life I've earned a living as a art director, writer,
technology manager, web master and systems engineer and none of it would
have been possible or probable without that single moment. Now as the
screen goes dark I'd like to say thank you to Steve (and Rocky) for
making my world and the whole world a better more different place.
"Goodbye"
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.
via PHP on AWS Elastic Beanstalk \| Cameron Stokes's Blog \<http://cameronstokes.com/2011/01/20/php-on-aws-elastic-beanstalk/\>__.
While Amazon claims they’re working on other platforms, initially
Beanstalk only supports Java applications deployed in the Apache
Tomcat 6 container. However…using Quercus, a “100% Java
implementation of PHP 5″ from Caucho, we can run PHP using AWS Elastic
Beanstalk. All it takes is setting up a simple Maven project.
| 1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is
by a factor of 4.
| 2. echo is faster than print.
| 3. Use echo's multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.
| 4. Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.
| 5. Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.
| 6. Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload
| 7. require_once() is expensive
| 8. Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on
resolving the OS paths.
| 9. If you need to find out the time when the script started executing,
$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_TIME’] is preferred to time()
| 10. See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of
regex
| 11. str_replace is faster than preg_replace, but strtr is faster than
str_replace by a factor of 4
| 12. If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both
arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list
is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement
statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of
code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments.
| 13. It's better to use select statements than multi if, else if,
statements.
| 14. Error suppression with @ is very slow.
| 15. Turn on apache's mod_deflate
| 16. Close your database connections when you're done with them
| 17. $row[‘id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]
| 18. Error messages are expensive
| 19. Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x
< count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time.
| 20. Incrementing a local variable in a method is the fastest. Nearly
the same as calling a local variable in a function.
The first in a series of posts about how to run a startup and develop a
product, written by guest author Matt Rogers of Aroxo - a
person-to-person trading exchange for consumer electronics, computer
gear, whitegoods, and more.
The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it
into a professional and functioning business on a low budget. This is
typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential
pitfalls and dangers. But when done well it can really help get a
company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to
give up much if any equity - or bankrupting themselves.
This is the second post in our series on how to run a startup and
develop a product. In part one, How To Bootstrap Your Startup, we
outlined the process of bootstrapping your company into existence. In
this post, we show you how to go from idea to specified product. By the
end of it, you’ll know how to build a mock-up of your business idea and
write the most important document you’ll write for the company: your
functional specification.
It seems like Ive been interested in security since I started playing
with computers. It was always about trying to push the limits of what
could be done. As I moved through the various phases of an IT career my
interest just grew. At the University of Georgia and then in enterprise
environments that I worked at when I first got out of school there was a
lot of infrastructure being built out, but not a lot of interest in
security. This is about the time that I found Def Con, 2600 and Black
Hat, and became part of that community. Once I got a little involved in
those the interest seemed to grow exponentially. Then, when I got
involved in networking Macs in the Entertainment Industry, these
interests came together. Now I see the hacker community somewhat of a
protector, finding flaws so they arent discovered by people with bad
intentions and helping to make systems more secure for everyone.
| macosxhints.com - OS X VPN client and Cisco
ASA
| Summary: This hint is for Network Engineers who want their firewalls
to accept VPN connections from standard OS X L2TP / IPSec clients
(should also work for Windows and Linux clients). If you are not a
network engineer, but are having trouble connecting to one of these
devices, you can also forward this tip to your company's "firewall
person," so that they can fix it.
| PHP 101: PHP For the Absolute
Beginner
| This area is intended for everyone new to PHP. It opens with a series
of informal, entertaining tutorials written by Vikram Vaswani, founder
and CEO of Melonfire. These tutorials build on a previously-published
5-part series which has now been updated and extended to embrace PHP
5, making parts of it suitable for those of you who already have
worked with PHP 4 in the past.
Ever since the Newton came—and went—in the 1990s, a small but vocal
group of Mac users have clamored for a tablet Mac. At least to this
point, Apple has shown no interest in getting into the tablet business.
So it’s up to third parties to come up with a product that may finally
determine the level of demand for a Mac tablet computer.
I had a dead, clicking hard drive. It would not mount so most repair
utilities and Apple Disk Utility couldn't see the drive to repair it.
Data Rescue II and DiskWarrior (even advanced recovery
mode)
would run for a while but eventually error out.
dd_rescue
(read third comment) is a linux utility that is very powerful and
persistent but wouldn't compile for me in Mac OS 10.4. I finally had
success with a similar linux tool
ddrescue and this
article.
At times, I will run hints here which are pointers to third-party apps
that seem to do interesting things. The decision as to whether to run
such a hint is purely subjective; if it seems like the program does
something interesting, then I'll usually run it. If it's open source,
the odds are even higher, as perhaps someone will learn something by
looking at the source. And almost always, these apps will be from small
one-person shops, who typically have trouble getting the word out about
their programs.
I created the following scripts to mimic the ipconfig /all functionality
found in the Windows NT operating system. In the unix world, all of the
info is available, but not in one place which is where this script comes
in handy. It concatenates all of the various pieces of IP configuration
into one easy-to-read display. The bonus is all of the functions used
are contained in a separate file, which can be sourced into your shell
environment and used individually.
Someone on IRC pointed me to this CSS generator, and the number of
options and output are impressive. The ability to have verbose comments
in the CSS is a nice way to learn what browser hacks are being
implemented (and gives you an easy way to pull them out if you like). I
can take no credit for this tool, so props to the appropriate party...
read
more | digg story \<http://digg.com/design/Handy_CSS_layout_generator_for_web_developers\>__
Installing Alfresco to create workflows and manage your documents
Alfresco is a fun open source project that I've been playing around
with lately. It's similar to EMC's Documentum, which if you've never
played with allows you to create workflows for documents. It's billed
as a "content management solution" but that term is very overloaded
with all the web CMS systems out there. For those of you still confused,
it allows you to manage all of your documents, such as MS Word files and
such, and create workflows with them.
| Live Report from MacWorld NY
2003
| Check back for live coverage of Macworld New York 2003. AppleMatters
will be reporting live from the keynote address by Greg Joswiak, Vice
President of Hardware Product Marketing starting at 9:30 am. Bookmark
this page and see you then!
| 7:49 am
| What a difference a lack of Steve makes...I was last at Macworld NY
when Steve Jobs announced the cube in 2000. Then the line was
literally out the door at 7am. This morning, at almost eight o'clock
there are only 20 odd...
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