This weekend swarms of hackers, Linux gurus, network enthusiasts, exploit mavens, and just plain ol’ geeks will be congregating in Las Vegas for Defcon 15. Several of my friends will be going but unfortunately I have other plans that involve heading home until school starts up again. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you probably know all about conventions and conferences Continue Reading »

I normally try to avoid server/unix jargon on this blog but as you can tell I have become infatuated with Amazon’s affordable storage solution, S3, as of late. We all know that it is important to keep recent backups of anything you value at all, so why not automate the process? Until I started tinkering with S3, my server Continue Reading »

AT&T recently launched a service called Video Share that fully takes advantage of their 3G network. As the name implies, you can actually send live video from one Video Share enabled AT&T phone to another. This is the type of thing we’ve seen in Japan for years now and it’s finally migrated stateside. However, from watching the usage videos on the video share site, it is apparent that there Continue Reading »

Up until now there had been only a few tools to help web developers assess the speed and optimization status of their websites. Primarily, there is the Net tool of the ever-popular Firebug add-on for Firefox. The Net tool can tell you what a website is loading, how long it takes, if it’s cached, headers and similar items. Yesterday, Yahoo! released their own add-on to Firebug called YSlow. Continue Reading »

With my last few posts on website optimization, one of the larger areas of focus was reducing HTTP requests. By reducing the number of requests your browser must make to retrieve all of your website, you speed up your site’s loading time with less overall HTTP latency for requests. Continue Reading »

As an update to my flickrSLiDR slideshow tool post, I’d like to announce that I have sold flickrSLiDR. It is now owned by a guy in Sweden who bought it from me for a cool $3,000. Not bad for a weekend project if I may say so myself. As part of the deal, the flickrSLiDR graphic will appear in my sidebar for the next 3 months. If you have any flickrSLiDR-related questions, please direct them to AdMarket. Continue Reading »

Put this into perspective: it’s 9pm on a Friday night and you’re out in San Francisco at a bar when you get a text message, your friend tells you your server is down for whatever reason. Normally you would be hard-pressed to fix the issue while out on the town, until now. MediaTemple will be launching a hosting Continue Reading »

I’ve been so busy during my stay here in San Francisco that I haven’t had the time to post much - less even go online, other than to upload pictures to Flickr. I’ve been leaving the house around 8am in the morning and getting back at around the same time the next day. I did however get to visit a ton of companies and startups in the area. Continue Reading »

When it comes to high-performance, speed and optimization, I’m there. I have written several articles about this subject in the past with 5 Ways to Speed Up Your Site, How To: Optimize Your CSS Even More and a brief look into image maps to reduce HTTP calls and bandwidth usage. However, similar to modifying a car there is always something more that can be done. Continue Reading »

AMD’s innovative 50×15 program is determined to accelerate the adoption of the Internet to 50% of the world’s population by the year 2015. The program has been around since 2004 and has already helped countries considerably with a variety of robust partnerships and technical solutions. Continue Reading »

Just an FYI to everyone that reads, subscribes and checks this site incessantly, I recently entered the ranks of the Top 100 blogs as tracked by Technorati, out of 70M+ blogs. Technorati takes into account unique links within the past 6 months, or at least that’s how they used to do it. Continue Reading »

This past week Fortune magazine held an invite-only tech conference called iMeme, where business executives met to discuss current issues regarding how technology is vital to the future of their company’s growth. Prior to the event technology editor David Kirkpatrick asked some of the speakers Continue Reading »

Recently the social web browser company Flock rolled out a milestone release, version 0.9. While it’s not a 1.0, the new release totes some awe-inspiring new features that put it on a different level than the last major release, Beta 1 (my review), almost a year ago. Over the last year there have been Continue Reading »

Belkin has been good at creating hype for their wireless “cable-free” USB hubs utilizing Ultra-wideband. As you might remember from my review in February, Belkin sent me their $199 4-port wireless USB hub to review. I essentially deemed it an utter failure. It only worked with Continue Reading »

Chances are that if you use Gmail or Gmail for your domain, you are also a devout user of Google Notifier to let you know when your inbox needs your attention. Also, chances are that if you read this blog you have been on your neighbor’s Wi-Fi an insecure Wi-Fi network a few times before. Continue Reading »

If you have read this site for more than a day, you will know that many of my articles contain screenshots of various applications and websites. For the past two years I have been relying on a simple Dashboard widget called Capture. I have never had any complaints with it other than having to open up the Dashboard whenever I wanted to Continue Reading »

Alex Faaborg from Mozilla has written an insightful, usability-centric article on the Mozilla Labs blog. He talks about something you are probably already familiar with even if you don’t use the GKUI acronym - Graphical Keyboard User Interfaces. The GKUI term envelops applications, such as QuickSilver, which afford the capabilities of Continue Reading »

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, SysAdmin Day on July 27th of course, OpenDNS is holding a contest. The first of four challenges ends later today and they’re looking for a funny SysAdmin story. You don’t even have to use OpenDNS to win, they only ask that you are an actual System Administrator. Continue Reading »

With computers evolving from purely productivity machines to multimedia powerhouses, people have begun using their computers to do everything. One way to use your computer to watch TV is to install a local TV tuner but that lacks the fundamental ability Continue Reading »

I logged into my Google Docs account this evening to organize some school documents when I noticed that the Docs Home was revamped. The new structure, which I rather enjoy, makes it easy to view all of your documents as well as organize them by type, folders and collaborators. Overall, Google Docs now has a feel close to that of GMail. Continue Reading »

From the that-is-pretty-damn-interesting department comes an article explaining how TiVo CEO Tom Rogers flies back and forth from California and New York every week. Rogers’ family lives in New York and his job resides in California, so he makes the 6 hour flight twice a week. Continue Reading »