Website Development

Reflections on new technology development

The Windows Life: Reboot, reuse, recycle

A Windows day at work. The CSS for one of our sites was broken in IE 6. For those of you who aren't in the know: only in IE 7 has Microsoft finally adopted best practices with the CSS specification.

So after a few short hours I successfully moved one box. All I needed to do was uninstall IE 7, reboot, start all my programs again, then test and play till things looked right before installing IE 7 again. What a waste of time.

Always buy two (different) computers for mission critical applications

The mantra "always have a backup" is a good phrase to live by. This past Friday my computer parts arrived and what followed was a hunt to find all the proper drivers. After a day I was back in order and everything was blazing fast. In the planning stages of this project I recognized that I would be buying something other than commodity hardware: I wanted a quiet energy-saving version of a computer that could fit on my bookshelf. So I bought two.

Upgrading the Debian way

With the summer beginning to fade away I've run into a couple small snags during my hardware upgrade fiesta. My old Debian box needed many software upgrades for me to continue working and as such, my blog lost it's categories.

Once again, without much sluething I was able to find the solution (though clearly it has not been implemented yet). As always, notes related to the software were located in /usr/share/doc, a directory tree I used to ignore but has become my lifeline.

New hardware coming soon

Well after many deliberations I think I have finally decided on my new computer. I'm going to buy a mini-itx case on eBay and a small motherboard to match it. The unit will have a riser card so I can plug in an alternate sound card, tuner card, or network card should the need arise.

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