trisweb.com

I’m off to Yosemite for the weekend! I haven’t been camping in two years (last time I went was the two weeks before my first year at Cal). This trip will be short, but hopefully relaxing and fun. Lots of hiking.

I also just acquired a new monitor (thanks Robyn!). It’s a Trinitron 19” CRT, and it’s crystal-clear and gigantic. It also makes a good space heater. I spent a while tweaking the colors and such, but now that I’ve got it down, the colors are fantastic. I’ve never seen such clear color from any monitor.

Okay, my dad says get my ass out of here now.

I realized today that my Caps Lock light decided to die. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I know that it no longer tells me if I am in caps lock mode or not. Fortunately, typing one letter does this quite well, so I’m not crippled, but I think it’s generally a good idea to look into a new keyboard when your caps lock light dies.

Actually, my keyboard is a piece of crap. It came with my second real PC, which I must thank my grandpa for buying for me (footnote: my first was an Intel 486DX/66, which I got when my parents still had a 486/33, and I thought it was the coolest thing at the time to have a computer twice as fast plus a DX than my parents’ one). It was an AMD K6-2 333MHz (a large upgrade), with a keyboard to suit. The thing works just fine, but it’s loud, big, beige, and uncomfortable. My computer now is more modern; an Athlon XP 1700+, which is very fast when backed by 3/4ths of a gigabyte of RAM (I like saying it that way). But the keyboard leaves much to be desired.

Now, I’ve been saying for a long time that I want IBM to take the keyboard off my ThinkPad and plug it into my desktop. The IBM ThinkPad keyboard is the best keyboard in existence. Anytime I have a lot of typing to do, I use my ThinkPad. I really want a desktop keyboard exactly like it, and I’ve found only one promising canidate: Zippy Keyboards, by Keyboard Master. Any others ideas?

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1600×1200

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1600×1200

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1600×1200

Help downloading wallpaper: Just click the appropriate link (if in doubt, just click the thumbnail), right-click the image and choose “Set as Wallpaper” or equivalent. If you want to save it, right click the image and choose “Save image as…” or equivalent.

or, Why Laptops Make Perfect Web Servers

I’ve been using my laptop as a testing server (for this site and others) for quite a while now. It’s an IBM ThinkPad R31 running Apache2 with PHP and most of the useful extensions. I have a dyndns address for it, but I’m not going to tell anyone what it is because it is running Windows, after all, and I’m not confident that it’s the least bit secure. But I have come to realize that a laptop is an ideal web server for several reasons:

• It has a built-in battery. That means that if the power goes out (aside from the fact that my router will turn off) the server will still be running. Also, and more importantly, it means that I can arbitrarily move it to anywhere in the house without having to shut it off, and,


• It has WiFi, which means that if I move it around the house, it never loses the connection. It’s fully self-sufficient for up to 3 hours (ish). And 11Mbps is 10 times faster than my connection, so no bottleneck there.


• It’s really really small. I mean, you could fit 4 of these things in a 1U rack. That’s pretty compact. I keep mine standing upright in the crack between the desk and the wall, and access it with TightVNC.


• It uses very little power, by design. It has to run off a battery, so its drain on the power line is tiny compared to a desktop or rackmount server. A standard APC battery backup could last for days for a laptop (guessing). And then you get 3 hours of battery after that!


• And the built in screen is nice. Never have to worry about which systems display is which; it’s attached!

Of course, there are many drawbacks—performance being the main one. Dual processors are most definately not an option on a laptop. Neither is a RAID array of redundand hard disks (speaking of redundancy…). And even memory is limited, though you can probably pack a gigabyte of RAM into most laptops these days. I doubt we’ll ever see laptops in data centers working as servers, but if you’re looking for a good testing server, slap Apache and PHP on your laptop and stash it in the corner.

I have officially been blogging for two years! Going back to read some of my first posts is very interesting, to say the least. I think it takes time to learn how to write decent blog entries.

In honor of my 2nd anniversary, I unveil the new trisweb.com (or, “http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~tharward/”) as it may be at the moment (trisweb.com still redirects though) (or, it will tomorrow).

Please explore, though I warn you that I’m not done. Many more things are on the way, and a lot of little bugs need fixing. But for now, at least your eyes can rest upon a nice new design, uncluttered and readable like it should be.

More things will be coming this week, like an insider’s article on the design process, and really nice desktop background images with that nice new logo up there on them.

trisweb.com is going to undergo a complete overhaul in the coming weeks. It’s not just the weblog—that’s just the beginning. The design is updated, of course (see 3 posts back), but the code is going to dramatically change as well. No more separate static web site. I’ll be designing and implementing a custom PHP content management system, and I’ll move everything into a MySQL database.

The reason weblogs work is that they’re easy to update. There are other reasons of course (on which I’m writing an article for later), but that’s a big one. If you had to update a static HTML page every time you wanted to add a post, would you even bother? I mean, weblogs wouldn’t exist—the human race is too inherently lazy! My friend Jake started a blog with a simple CGI script that added his post to an HTML file, and eventually improved it all the way up to a custom PHP blog program (with some nice features I might add, like comment stats). It’s simple, but it’s very robust, and it makes it easy for him to add content. I want to do the same thing to all the static content that currently resides on “triswebpage” (I’m ditching that name, by the way) so that it gets more attention from me, who will not edit code to make frequent changes to my web site.

You’ll see the blog and some secondary pages get the new look first (this week), followed (maybe much later) by the deep content. Trust me, it’ll be cool when it’s done.

Warning: anti-Bush political post. For the love of our great country, go see this film. Michael Moore says a lot of stuff, and, to quote Donnie Darko, “I pray that this is merely a work of fiction.” But I know that at least part of it is factual, and I will say that even if 10 percent of the facts in the movie are true, then you have every reason not to vote for President Bush in the November election. God knows he has the power to win it, and for that very reason we must not vote for him. I’ll say one thing more:

I was sitting in the car with my father after seeing the movie. I asked him what we do if Bush gets reelected. I said, he could get out of control.

“He’s already out of control.” he replied, which of course, is true.

And I can’t finish this conversation, because I just realized that if I publish what I was about to write, I could get labeled as a terrorist and Bad Things could happen. And that is one more reason. Please, if you trust that I am a rational intelligent thinking person, incapable of subversion and brainwash (and I am), trust me. We must vote for Kerry. Not nader. Not anyone else. Kerry. Because, frankly, I don’t care what Nader has to say about our party system, a vote for anyone but Kerry is a vote for Bush.

This is not an extremist view. I am not being “too serious.” I am not blowing this out of proportion. Please watch the film, especially if you are planning on voting for Bush. I give you this argument: I, a non-christian, saw The Passion of Christ. You, if non-democrat, have the same obligation to see F9/11.

Rational Addendum: I know that F9/11 is a conglomeration of truths misleading the viewer into thinking there is a big conspiracy—we have to remember that we’re not getting Bush out of office because of anything like that—his views on the environment, economics, terrorism, oil, and mostly the war in Iraq are fundamentally wrong, conspiracy or not.

They Might Be Giants has done a great thing—they have made all of their (recent) albums available for purchase and download without DRM. As in, as non-restrictive mp3s. 256 kilobit LAME encoded mp3s. Now, I’m hesitant to pay anything for Apple’s 128kbps AAC iTunes songs (and I haven’t yet, and I’ve told them why many times), but I’ll jump at a chance to download great music for the same price at very high quality. Their latest single you may know from a certain flash movie, and it’s a great song worthy of a download. Especially for only 99 cents. And all the cash goes directly to the band—no record company or popular music store in between. It’s just good music and people being smart about it. Go take a look.