Adam's Blog

As a general rule, 15% of any online community is comprised of ninnies, fools, and jerks. On some sites, this percentage is much higher, and for others, it's slightly lower. But every community has them and too often, they are impossibly loud and attention seeking. On the whole, I find OSNews to be way above average. The noise ratio is generally low, so it's really only the trolling - both intentional and unintentional - that gets people riled up. But the rule still applies. Recently, I had a user incredibly angry at me because I "forced" him to use the mobile site on his mobile device. I reminded him that it's been that way since the first day Eugenia rolled out the code, but he was having none of that. I told him that most devices won't support the site and he said his did. Finally, he uploaded a video of his usage and saw him using... an iPhone! The best part? The iPhone is not served the mobile version. So he was going to mobile.osnews.com and them complaining that we served him the mobile version! Then yesterday, in an admittedly heated discussion about KDE4, I was discussing how I...

Some time ago, I told my collegues, "Forget Digg, you need to start using Reddit." Reddit was much more fun then, even only about a year ago. Since then, I've noticed a disturbing trend - massive brainwashing groupthink overtaking rational discussion and interesting links. Reddit really let me down. These days, it's mostly XKCD comics, snarky images, Ron Paul stories, anti-Reddiquette polls, pro-Atheism articles, a mash of comments complaining about subreddits, and most disturbingly, a real anti-Israel swing. It's not that I'm anti-Atheism (I'm definitely not) or pro-Israel (because I'm really not), but the absolute anger the redditors have for Israel and religion is not only a little scary, it's also unquestionable. If you do question it, and you will be modded down - silenced, if not mocked. This serves not only to stifle good conversation, it drives the opposing views away until everyone is just verbally masturbating each other. There is a bandwagon that travels from story to story, and when I read comment after comment about how bad PHP is, but only about 5 comments have any substance, I realize I'm probably dealing with a mix that includes several 15 year olds in there. Recently, I was modded...

I consider myself a bit of an amateur chef, as some of you know, and although it's really just a hobby, a year or so ago I started taking pictures of some of my favorite dishes. I have a few things I still need to capture, but many I've preserved for posterity. Either way, I have decided to move all my "food" pictures from Picasa over to Flickr. First off, there's a Slashfood group there, to which I plan to contribute, and secondly, I grow increasingly tired of Picasa Web's ridiculously non-scalable interface. Also, it's a little weird to have so many food pictures intermingled with pictures of my family. So... yeah. If you're interested, check out my food pics here.

This morning, I began wondering to myself: "If asked the best Phish song, what would I respond?" I thought it over, and I have some thoughts. I've pondered over my favorite Phish songs before, and ultimately, I've never been able to settle on one. But today, I'll give you what I think is the "best." First, we've got to agree on what "best" means. Does it mean most well liked? Most representative? Most iconic? I am choosing to define it as the song that best captures and satiates fans, be they new, old, or even future. And the runners up are: You Enjoy MyselfThe logical, most obvious select for "best" phish song is the classic You Enjoy Myself. YEM, as we Phishheads call it, was debuted in 1986 and was featurd in more Phish setlists than any other song - ever. YEM includes a structed composed part, a loose jam part, and has led to some incredible experimentation, including the vocal jam. While YEM is an awesome song, a load of fun, and arguably the quinessential Phish song, I don't think it's the best, and one of the reasons is that it's just too chaotic and hard to understand...

This morning, I began wondering to myself: "If asked the best Phish song, what would I respond?" I thought it over, and I have some thoughts. I've pondered over my favorite Phish songs before, and ultimately, I've never been able to settle on one. But today, I'll give you what I think is the "best." First, we've got to agree on what "best" means. Does it mean most well liked? Most representative? Most iconic? I am choosing to define it as the song that best captures and satiates fans, be they new, old, or even future. And the runners up are: You Enjoy Myself The logical, most obvious select for "best" phish song is the classic You Enjoy Myself. YEM, as we Phishheads call it, was debuted in 1986 and was featurd in more Phish setlists than any other song - ever. YEM includes a structed composed part, a loose jam part, and has led to some incredible experimentation, including the vocal jam. While YEM is an awesome song, a load of fun, and arguably the quinessential Phish song, I don't think it's the best, and one of the reasons is that it's just too chaotic and hard to understand...

After reading a ridiculous post on "surviving the Digg effect on a shared host," (and then laughing ridiculously at it), I decided to write a real tutorial on real-live ways not only to survive the Digg effect, but also a simple but powerful way to improve your site's performance. Read more within. The fact is, it's rarely PHP that crashes a website. It's usually overloading MySQL and/or bandwidth limitations. Obviously, we can't do much about bandwidth. If you're on a really cool host, they may be psyched for your Digging or Slashdotting, but most are not particularly keen on you using too much processor, too much bandwidth, or too many MySQL connections. Although MySQL is capable of amazing scaling, rarely do web hosts leverage it properly, and even if they did, rarely do most programmers know how to read into slow queries, find inefficient code like loops within loops, and debug a site performance before it's too late. The site linked from Digg shares a very lame trick, let's examine: //put this code at the very beginning of your page, before anything else $randomdigg = rand(1,4); if($randomdigg != 1) { exit("Thanks for visiting, but the site is under a great...

For Christmas, my wife gave me the new Airport Extreme. As a result, as of yesterday, we are now officially 802.11n in our house. Unfortunately, the iPhone degrades it back to 802.11g. However, I must say, the speed before I connected it was immediately noticeably faster. This was not "it feels snappier." Right away, the effect was staggering. Web pages loaded in a tiny fraction of the time they used to. Made me wonder if there wasn't something wrong with the old D-Link g router. Anyway, I highly recommend 802.11n to anyone thinking about taking the plunge. Incredible difference.

After several months with the iPhone, I feel I'm ready to share the "best sites optimized for the iPhone." 1. Facebook The Facebook iPhone site was not only online very early, but it's extremely slick, performs pretty quickly, retains "back" button function, and feels native. 2. Picasa Web Albums Google's Picasa Web Albums has certainly been a bittersweet experience for me, but their iPhone interface is sweet. This slot really should go to Google's entire "M" suite, which includes Search, Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Docs, and more. 3. Bloglines Bloglines' new iPhone interface is very cool, and although it only loads 5 stories at a time, it works extremely well. I've used it to catch up on literally hundreds of items without a problem, and I've been very happy with its performance. 4. Food Network I bet you didn't even know these guys had an iphone interface. The Food Network not only built this site with the iPhone navigation feel, but they successfully implanted their own style onto it. What makes it so cool? How about an entire video library in iPhone-compatible mp4 format? 5. Amazon.com Ah, Amazon. Although you have certainly been a jerk at times, I still love you....

Thom posted an article on OSNews.com yesterday called Vista's Mythical Cut Features. It got me thinking; I left a few comments on the article that really hit the heart of the matter, but Thom's responses, and those of others, questioned whether or not the things I mentioned were cut features or not. Longhorn, years ago, was presented as delivering on three pillars. The pillars were: WinFS, a metadata based, database-like file system; Avalon, a new .NET graphical subsystem; and Indigo, a new communications framework. WinFS is in beta now, but delivers in a far different way than originally posed. Avalon, renamed Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF was delivered with Windows Vista and is available on XP. Indigo, retitled Windows Communication Foundation, is available in Vista as well. Initially, this lends some credence to the editorial, which suggests that it's virtually impossible to name individual "missing features" from Vista. But upon further thought, it goes further than "which feature is missing?" Because there are loads of things that are "missing" in the sense that they ought to be included. Ultimately, where Vista fails on a large scale is delivering on the promise it made. Microsoft, not only via promo videos, but...

Some time ago, I wrote an application for my company. Like most weblets I've written, this used PHP and either MySQL or MSSQL for the backend. This particular application logged all phone calls. As part of the record, it would record the caller's account number, which is a 5 or 6 digit integer. So, I got a phone call from the director of our customer contact department this week. He was concerned about the reports. He made a decision last week that when a call came in that was a lead - in other words, a non-customer, that his people would fill the phone number from the caller ID into the account number field. But when he ran his export reports, he found that hisn techs had entered this phone number for ALL of the calls: 429-496-7295. That's weird, he said. So he called me and asked why that was. I checked all the calls and most were from one woman, so my first instinct was "Check if her browser has autocomplete turned on". But he swore that he tried it too and gotten the same result. I checked the database and sure enough, it was right there: 429-496-7295, in...