Adam's Blog

I just started putting together a series of articles I will be publishing on OSNews. I've only roughly sketched it out, but in short, it's going to discuss how OSNews works, how the PHP is structured, why we made certain architectural decisions, why we don't use tried-and-true CMSes like WordPress, Slash, or Joomla!, and how, during peak traffic times, we have survived 30,000 unique visitors per hour on a single server. OSNews didn't happen by mistake: over a series of months, arguably years, we took a constant read of performance, hits, server load, and usability with the mission to continually improve load time, performance, and UX. We've just recently begun testing some new data presentation methods that I intend to include in my little exposé. If you're interested in some revealing behind-the-scenes info, feel free to ask questions now.

Just read an article on how Miss California has launched a campaign to protect "traditional marriage". It makes me laugh a little. Are people so naive that they actually believe that gay marriage is not destined to be accepted in just a few years time? The parallels to other moments in American history couldn't be clearer if it were outlined in Sharpie. Within a decade (two if we foolishly put a fundamentalist in the White House... God Forbid), gay marriage will be seen as no different than interracial marriage. I think back to how our country, not so long ago, felt that alcohol was so bad that we banned in our constitution. We Americans are so short sighted. In time, we'll look back and laugh at ourselves for this even being an issue. Furthermore, let's be serious, why does gay marriage bother anyone anyway? It doesn't infringe upon any of your rights. It's truly a case of "this doesn't affect me, but I insist you don't do it." It's holier-than-thou nonsense. The fact that these so-called protectors of traditional marriage feel strongly perplexes me: Burt Bacarach is still right: "what the world needs now is love, sweet love." Those...

sethadam1.com is now live on our new server, proudly hosted by smallaxesolutions.com. Yes, I'm now running my own hosting (shameless plug: I can host you for cheap, including installation of WordPress) and I have migrated all of my domains over. That means my old host will be offline in a few days, once I'm sure DNS has fully replicated. So far, I'm hosting about 5 domains with another one potentially in the pipe. I'm giving everyone cPanel access, which means MySQL, phpMyAdmin, mailboxes, forwarders, Fantastico, and much more. You shouldn't have to do anything: your feeds should remain intact and you should see no interruption of service.

Slashgear, and many other sites, are today posting a story about "Jibbler," the alleged code-name of the voice control subsystem present in iPhone OS 3.0. If this is the case, let me gently and professionally say "HALLE-FRICKIN-LUJAH!" It's about time the most amazing and groundbreaking mobile device ever had a proper hands-free solution.

As spectacular as she is, I think I've heard enough about Susan Boyle for a little while.

Many people are complaining about Lost's wacky twists this season, many with good reason. In order to prepare for their big reveals, it's time for them to start telling the real story, and much of it deals with time travel, which is always a sticky subject, given that its entirely science fiction. But it's tough, because we have all envisioned a perfect mystery, and it's likely that some things won't make sense. I'm still on board, I'm still hooked. Here are some things I feel I can predict in the storyline of Lost, and some things that are standing out. I think the "Incident," we all can guess, has to do with the bomb called Jughead. I suspect it has some sort of detonation or radiation leak. I think that Pierre Chang will instruct his wife and child to leave the island because he knows that the Incident is coming, possibly because Daniel tells him so. I think it would even cooler if Miles told Chang to clear them out, for obvious reasons. Then Miles would have spent his whole life hating his father for doing what he would eventually tell him to do. I think it's possible that Miles'...

Update: Please see the bottom of this post for the latest. I am feeling spurned. I used to follow my local news station, Central Florida News 13, on Twitter. A few days ago, I realized that I wasn't seeing their tweets anymore. Anyone who knows Twitter knows that its performance has been a huge pile of suck lately, so I figured it was one of those Twitter bugs. I went to their page and it was full of garbage: pages and pages of the same nonsense message. Had they been hacked? Caught that Twitter worm?I tried to follow them about 5 times, but it wouldn't let me. Broken Twitter. Nothing new. Today I saw that they had posted a new update because someone re-tweeted it. So I navigated over to their page and found that they had protected their updates. I hit the button to request to follow them, only to be greeted with the following: What the eff? They blocked me? Why? Why would they block me? So let me ask: in what case does it make sense for a corporation or business to block a normal user. I must say, I am pretty upset, upset enough that I...

I think once something airs on TV, it's no longer a spoiler. It's just what happened. It's courtesy to wait a bit for the West Coast, but if they're bright enough, they'll know to tread cautiously online until they've watched something big. I'm thinking Lost, House, ER finale, etc. I think it's fair to wait until a movie is available on DVD for a bit before assuming everyone who wants to watch it has. I think it's proper to say "Spoiler Alert" when talking about a movie twist. I think twist endings in books should always be properly notated. Books don't generally have must-see-it-now appeal, so it's always a potential spoiler. It's unfair to force people to not discuss something fun and current, like "last night's Lost," simply because you were too tired to watch it. Yes, it will ruin the surprise. If it's important to you, either watch it or remove yourself from the conversation. It's not a spoiler once it aired. It's just what happened.

All goddamned day I've been getting this goddamned whale on Twitter. I've also been trying to change the background of my stream, but although it always reports successful (when it doesn't fail due to capacity problems), it never changes. It either replaces my background with nothing, or it uses the background I had three or four changes ago. God damn it, Twitter, get your goddamned act together!

Something happened today that I never expected in a million years. I am in contact with a few Google employees on Facebook and Twitter, and in the course of conversation, I shared an idea I once had about a PHP application. We talked it out, I coded the first tidbits, a friend helped with some Python, and, a few short weeks later, Google decided to buy it! But not just the code, this afternoon, we finalized the deal that includes them taking over the domain sethadam1.com, since the code is currently running as a daemon on my server here. As a result, this will be one of my last blog posts. Effective tomorrow evening, the domain will transfer to Google and it will become the host for a new Google app (which I'm still hoping will be called "firsttube"). Also, by the end of the week, I will be a full tim Google employee, which is very exciting. For now, I'll still be working and living in Florida. Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, I am unable to say any more, but trust me when I say that most of my friends will have immediate use for this site! Check back...