The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field. A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject.

A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. If you’re that type of person and are looking for a few extra skills to pick up, or if you’re a newbie aiming to get a handhold on the honor that is geekhood, read on to find out what skills you need to know.

1. The Meaning of Technical Acronyms

I told him my personal websites were hosted at Dreamhost, but that I use one of the PS servers, due to load issues on my sites, so I wouldn’t qualify what I’m doing with Dreamhost as “cheap” even though it’s a fantastic value and that he should look at 4cheapwebhosting.com as I’ve heard that have a great list of the Best Cheap Web Hosting options available.

They have a great list of good cheap hosts, on their front page, but the real power of their site is their search engine of cheap web hosting companies and plans. I found a few good free plans for him: some really good ones in the $5/month range, and a bunch of good options in the under $10/month range. But they don’t stop with just “cheap” web hosting plans. They also have lots of dedicated server plans in their database too, which while I wouldn’t consider “cheap” per se, I value the ability to find all of the options available to me in one place.

I’ll definitely look at them if I ever need to find a cheap web host again.

Click for larger

Sucks for the site owners, and for me. This kind of thing is why I just don’t rely on any outside party, other than my hosting company, to host anything for my sites anymore… There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking a link in my RSS reader and getting an error…

A common rule of thumb I tell people is to target their performance goals in application design and coding so that their infrastructure (not including people) is ≤10% of an application’s revenue.

Does that mean if I’m spending 5% of revenues on application infrastructure, I’m way underspending, or making more money?

If you’re looking for a new shared hosting plan, you really ought to check out Dreamhost.

They just started a new sale this month:

From: support@dreamhost.com
Subject: [Announcement] New! All Shared Hosting Disk Space Doubled!
Date: September 1, 2005 4:26:34 AM CDT
To: John Engler

Hey Happy DreamHost Disk Hogs!

Starting Monday we began a new sale.. double (the starting) disk space on
all shared hosting accounts. As we’ve been known to do, we’ve also
applied this to all existing shared hosting customers as well!

Keep in mind your overall disk quota total may not quite double, because
of any additional weekly growth your plan may have undergone since you’ve
signed on. BUT, we’ve also doubled the weekly growth rate on all active
shared hosting plans to the following:

Level 1: 40MB/week
Level 2: 80MB/week
Level 3: 120MB/week
Level 4: 160MB/week

There is no action for you to take to get this increase… everything’s
already happened.

I’m not going to detail all of the stuff they offer with each plan, but I’d highly encourage you to check their sale our. Their “one-click installs” of some super useful software alone make it a really great hosting package. I mean where else can you buy a hosting plan for $8 a month, and get up and running within about 15 minutes of starting your hosting plan?

Their super easy to understand and use account control panel is also pretty damned spiffy.

They also pay referral fees for anyone that says you referred them when they sign up (yes, if you follow these links you’ll credit me with the referral). But that’s not the only reason I’m singing their praises… my diskspace with them is going up by 200MBs/week (I have two plans with them). That’s reason enough to sing their praises. Thank you Dreamhost.

Check ‘em out and tell them I sent you .

update: Ok, nevermind, I figured it out. I had a problem with my PHP code that was causing more than 3 Adsense ads to be written to the page, so I fixed that, then waited a few minutes to see the code take hold… all is good now.

Yes, I’ve added more Google Adsense ads to the pages, hopefully to drive a little more revenue.

I used to earn around $150/month from this site, but since I moved servers and changed my url schema, that’s gone way down… like 1/3 of that or so, so in the mean-time (while Google recrawls the site I guess) I’ve added more ads to the pages… Shouldn’t affect regular readers too much, as the new ads are further down on the page, but new readers, or people coming in from search engines will have more ads presented to them… hopefully driving more revenue for me in the short-term.

This move is completely based on the idea of me saving money on my hosting (from $150/month ot $8/month thank you very mouch) bills… not on making the transition as smooth as possible. So, things will be broken for a short period of time (maybe a week) … for that I apologize.

There are also some other things happening in the background that I love about WordPress, and will share with you all, as soon as I get everything back in order…

70% spam this month. Sucks.

Time to seriously consider installing a server-side spam filter.

We have recieved reports of spam originating from this server. Please investigate, address the issue, and update this ticket with your action(s).

Due to the nature of this issue, failure to resolve the issue and update this ticket within 48 hours may result in service interruption for the server.

So, I immediately emailed Apokalyptik, my trusty server admin.

Apokalyptik quickly started poking around the server, and determined that the problem was most likely the exploit of a mail script that was accessible via apache… so, I told him that it was likely PHPnuke or MovableType, as those are really the only pieces of installed software on the box that include mail scripts. The MovableType install on this box is MT 2.64, and I’ve never seen any warnings or messages about MT being too easily hacked as a spam server, but the PHPNuke installs (englers.org and bellvillehighschool.com) on the box are pretty old (likely version 6.0 or so) and PHPNuke is known for its vulnerabiltiy to hacks.

After a little more digging in my apache logfiles, I determined that the spammer was indeed hacking into the PHPNuke module that allows WebMail access to the server somehow, so I renamed those files, restarted Apache and QMail and sure enough, the spam is gone.

The bad news: My box was acting like a spam-relay for a few days, maybe even a week there. Load on the machine was consistently high, and in general, the box was pretty sluggish.

The good news: The problem is solved for now, and I’ll be migrating those PHPNuke sites to MovableType soon. And once again, Apokalyptik comes through as a savior of the server for me.

xsonnerie.com
riaa.com

And… I won’t be voting for John Kerry

blog.johnkerry.com

Those three sites have been spamming my referrers for the past month or so…

They just got added to my referrer spam list in my referrer scripts… oh, I also don’t montior blogspot.com sites anymore thanks to the recent rash of weird blogspot.com referrer spammings that made the circle lately…

This is ridiculous. In the past week I’ve received at least 4-5 times more spam than I did in a week last year…

I’d like to install a server-side spam filtering system that’s compatible with qmail, but I don’t have the time or knowledge to actually get it installed… especially since I’ve been considering buying a Handspring Treo 600 to check my email more regularly…

Although, I wonder if I’m getting more spam because of the social networks I’ve joined in the past couple of weeks? Hmmm… I’m going to change those email addresses now…

Anyone want to install a server side spam filter system for me on the cheap?

Setting: We’re both on the couch, about to watch some Saturday morning College Football, when a commercial for Office 2003 comes on the TV.

She said something like:

“You know the new Office 2003? It sucks. It sucks because when I open a new message, Outlook decides that it needs to display the fonts in like 18, or 20 point fonts, and I can’t figure out how to get it to not do that. I’ve played with the settings for at least 3 or 4 hours since our IT department installed it, and I can’t figure it out.”

You have to realize my wife is a civil engineer, and very smart… great technical skills, and generally able to figure out on her own how to get a computer to do what she wants it to.

Then she tells me more:

“There’s this guy at the office that owns Macs at home, but is pretty supportive of Microsoft at the office because we use a lot of products that are Windows only, and he hates the new Office 2003. It just changed all the behaviors that we were used to. Why did Microsoft do that? Office 2003 Sucks™”

At this point, I start laughing, because if my wife is saying this, I wonder what others are saying? I know my best friend is flirting with switching.

She then says (totally un-prompted):

“You know that commercial when the IT guy gets asked by the guy giving the new employees a tour of the building ‘Tell them about what your department does, but keep it short’? And the IT guy says ‘We just installed Active Directory, which will save the company a lot of money’?”

I responded that I knew what she was referring to.

“One of our IT guys showed us that commercial in a presentation about the ‘new network enhancements’ that they just made, trying to teach us all about the enhancements. We’d all been using the ‘enhanced network’ for a week at the time that he showed us that commercial and we just laughed. You see, the new ‘enhanced network’ is a piece of crap. We can’t check our email from outside the network reliably anymore. We can’t get to the servers in other buildings like we used to be able to. We can’t share files as easily as we used to, and Office 2003 Sucks™. Sometimes I think IT departments make upgrades to make their jobs easier, not to make the company more profitable, becasue they don’t take into account the time and effort that the profit makers will have to exert to learn and use the new technology with the efficiency that they use the old technology.”

It’s clear that the wife’s not happy with Office 2003, and it has driven a wedge between the employees of her company and their IT department. I personally feel that change is good, but not when it’s so disturbing to the people that have to deal with it in the trenches that it disrupts their daily work. Some of this animosity by the workers that have to use the new tech could have been subdued by the IT department telling the workers about the enhancements and likely problems that might come during the ‘upgrades’ before they started rolling them out, instead of after.

And supposedly, Microsoft cares.

We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow we�ve been convinced that indoor computing should not.

And in the follow up “Dynomite!“:

Complexity is not an excuse for low expectations. We�ve strapped men into giant rockets loaded with jet fuel, propelled them into space, and landed them on the moon. That was complicated. And our expectation was that we�d get them back.

Why we don�t expect our email to work is beyond me.

In reading Gruber’s articles, I reflected on the few IT staffs I’ve had experience with in the past:

US Army: At my level (I was a junior officer) we were completely Wintel centric, but relied very, very little on the PC. No one in our 140 man unit had email except the commander (Director level in most large organizations). Everyone else got their orders by memo, face to face meeting, or voice over the radio. Viruses never stopped our organization from running, though they did impede our operations for the first 12 hours or so until someone higher up the chain said “fuck the computers, we’ve got work to do” and we all just got back to work until the one or two IT-trained guys in the 600+ man unit got things working sufficiently again.

MacNN: Small 3-5 man operation. No IT staff (just consultants every now and then). We all used Macs for our desktops and Linux or FreeBSD solutions for our servers. We talked to each other a lot, used email to schedule meetings, and operated pretty virtually (one person in San Fran., one in Iowa or somewhere close to Iowa, one in Texas and one in Washington State, with a few more contractors spread across the internet). We never had virus problems except for when the internet succumbed to a virus epedemic, at which point, we all took the day off anyways (ok, everyone but the owner who never really worked all that much anyways).

Bestfares.com: Small entreprenurial company. Staff: 120 people. IT Staff: 1 Full time guy, sometimes 1.5 guys (depending on the second guys schedule). We survived with an Outlook/Exchange set-up because again, only 30 people or so in the company had email. Everyone else was a real worker. Those of us with email and calendaring got used to not having an internet connection for at least 2 days per quarter because our IT guy was really good at pulling the plug on the company internet connection if he so much as sniffed a virus coming in. That, and the company was too cheap to upgrade to a more full featured version of Exchange than version 4.x or 5.x, so that we really didn’t have all that much whiz-bang features to being with… And when email went down, I usually got to go home early, so I didn’t complain.

Current job: Large media company. We’ve got two IT staffs: one Mac centric and one PC centric. The “CIO” is a Mac guy. Our internal servers are a mish-mash of Sun boxes, Netscape solutions, XServes, and Linux or FreeBSD solutions. Half the staff uses Netscape Mail and Calendaring. Some use Outlook on Wintel-based desktops. Some use Entrouage on Mac OS 9 or X. And a good amount never use computers in their daily work. We have in-house written spam and virus filters, and yet, our total IT staff investment is tiny… maybe 1% of the total staff in the company works in IT. It’s got a decent budget, but it’s all in hardware and software, not staff, and things work well. When Macintosh desktops break down (pretty infrequent) the Mac staff fixes them (if the operator can’t fix it first that is). When the PCs break down (pretty often) the IT staff tells the operator to reboot and see if that fixes the problem, and if that doesn’t work, they pull it off the desk, take it to a room where they ‘operate’ on the machine to diagnose the issues and then fix it, returning it to service after 24 or 48 hours… We don’t have Exchange installed, and instead use IMAP-based Netscape mail for everyone.

That said, I use a PC at work, and hate it most of the time. Especially since I have Outlook, and not Exchange. And since not everyone uses Netscape Mail, we don’t have a common calendaring solution that we can use to invite people to email reliably… But you know what? I also find that I’m not glued to my computer as much as I used to be.

The premise was to create a cookie-crumb trail URL scheme so that anyone could read a story:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/14/acuna/

and by deleting the directory (or crawling up the directory structure), they could read all of the stories for that day:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/14/

or month:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/

or, that if they wanted to they could browse the category archives more easily:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/leadership_management/
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/marketing_advertising/
though I still need to build the master category page that should reside at http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/

After reading this article against file extensions on the web, I also didn’t want people to have to know that I was using PHP, though I don’t mind them knowing, so I really wanted everything to look like it was sitting in a directory (even if it’s really a file, or it’s really sitting in its own directory). It should be transparent to the user, and still Google friendly, and user friendly… so:

Here are the steps I used to get my URLs straight, and not lose any traffic from old links, or search engines (GoogleJuice) that haven’t updated their links (stolen largely from Olivier and improved in a few places)

1. With the individual entry path still set at <$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1″$>, replaced the individual entry template to:

<?php
$NewUrl = "<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>/";
$NewUrl = "http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/" . $NewUrl;
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $NewUrl");
exit();
?>

This is so that all of the old inbound links will get redirected to the proper place which will be created in a few steps.

2. Rebuilt individual entries. (This took a bit of time, but not too long. As Olivier’s example states, at this point, old links aren’t working anymore, but we’ll fix that in a few steps)

3. Changed the individual entry path (in MT’s archiving settings) to:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.php

Note: This is different than Olivier’s approach, as I didn’t want to have a whole lot of individual directories to maintain in the filesystem, but rather one directory per day in each month containing however many posts were created that day.

Also changed the daily archive’s entry path:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/index.php"$>

the monthly archive’s path:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/index.php"$>

and the category archive’s path:
categories/<$MTCategoryLabel dirify="1"$>.php

4. Replaced the individual entry template with my old template.

5. Rebuilt individual entries. (At this point, old links almost work again because the redirects set up in step 1 now point to directories much like the files created in step 5, but not quite… I’ll fix that in a minute with a mod_rewrite trick I learned… read on.)

6. Added the following lines to my .htaccess file to redirect monthly and category archives pages which were easy to handle through regexp thanks to their previous structure.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule weblog/archives/200([0-9])_([0-9])([0-9])_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/200$1/$2$3/$4 [R=301]
RewriteRule weblog/archives/200([0-9])_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/200$1/$2/ [R=301]
RewriteRule weblog/archives/cat_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/$1/ [R=301,L]

(formating note: each line in the .htaccess file starts with “RewriteRule”, ie. there aren’t any breaks in the code when it’s in the real file on the server)

7. Added the following rule (taken from Keith’s “no extensions” entry) so that category pages (which are technically category_name.php) can be delivered as directories (among other page types)

RewriteRule ^([^.]+[^/])$ $1/ [R=permanent,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/]) $1.php

8. Added some code to all of the internal links (depending on which type there were that replaced the ‘.php’ or ‘index.php’ with ‘/’ (as appropriate) so that all links on the site go to the correct place:

<?php echo str_replace("index.php","","<$MTArchiveLink$>"); ?>
<?php echo str_replace(".php","/","<$MTEntryLink$>"); ?>

Oh, and if you’re looking for a decent mod_rewrite primer, here’s one at Kuro5hin.

One last thing, Olivier, since you’re stuck on IIS as your dev platform of choice, you’re probably going to be looking ISAPI_rewrite which I pointed to back in November of ’02.

One of the team members, Olivier, found this code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.up2speed.com/$1 [R=301,L]

at WebMasterWorld. He then showed me how to test your redirects using this redirect tool.

One thing that’s lacking is the documentation, but Noel’s pretty responsive to email.

I needed to install the GD Image Library tools, but had no idea where to start, so I asked Apokalyptik to upgrade PHP to version 4.3.1, and to make sure that the GD library worked.

Took him about 20 minutes from when he said ‘yes, I’ve got time’ until he was done.

Great sys-admin that guy… if you need something done, or someone to take care of your server, talk to him. (thanks again to Scott for turning me on to him).

…

And without further ado, I give you the my photos.

That wasn’t at all sufficient in my mind. I have broadband at home. I purchased a WiFi card with my own money for my laptop. I stay at a Wyndham on purpose (because the broadband connection is free if you’re a ByRequest member). I wanted to have access to the company intranet via broadband without any hassles.

I asked many times if this was possible. Each time I got a slightly different answer, ranging from a ‘no’ at first to a ‘yes, but we have to come to your house to install a firewall’ as the latest answer.

I finally got fed up with excuses and asked my boss for access to my email outside the office via a broadband connection, so that I could check my email while I was at the Wyndham in Atlanta yesterday and today. That was a week ago last Friday. It was still the SFA Manager’s job to get the request processed, but at least now he could do so with some authority.

On Monday of this week, as of 10:00am I didn’t know how to access the company email servers from the Wyndham yet, so I asked the SFA Manager’s immediate supervisor why I didn’t have anything set up, or taught to me yet.

Within 10 minutes, an IT person was in my office with a floppy disk with some VPN software on it, and a print out of instructions on how to login to the network via VPN.

I let the IT person do their job: installing the software, setting up the basics of the VPN account, and walking me through the process… and when that IT person ran into an error, he said he thought the error was something with the VPN server that he was going to check.

Now, I only had 30 minutes before I had to leave the office to catch a plane, so I didn’t follow up with that person before I left for Atlanta. I assumed everything would ‘just work’ when I got to my destination.

After checking into the hotel later that night, I took a shower, ordered room-service, and enjoyed the season Finale of “The Practice” before trying to log into the network via VPN over the Wayport connection in my hotel room.

Hmmm…. same error I was seeing at the office.

I called the tech that set up the software on his cell phone (he told me to call anytime).

The tech called his boss and they talked about what the problem might be, and his boss called me. He got my voicemail for some reason, and I didn’t ever touch base with him.

After a few tries at logging in via the ‘default’ setup I was given before I pulled out the instructions and read them.

The tech had set up the VPN access incorrectly. There was no way I was ever going to login using the default connection he’d set up, so I fixed it myself, and all was hunky dory.

The lessons here:

1. IT folks should check everything for the people they support. (If I’d been a less technical person, I doubt I could have figured out the problem). (If I’d have been a more senior manager, I’m sure I could have raised hell about the poor setup that the tech did).

2. If someone had stolen my computer, they could have easily hacked into the company’s VPN after breaking my XP password (it’s pretty easy to do I’m told) and the instructions for logging into our VPN were in the side-pocket of my computer bag, because that’s where the tech told me to put them, and I’d placed my keys (with the RSA keyfob) into the computer bag for easier traveling through the airport security.

3. XP has a built-in firewall option (or at least that what it looks like in the ‘Advanced’ tab of a LAN connection. (Not that I pretend to know a damned thing about XP).

Can anyone shed any light on why a firewall is needed on a computer that has a VPN client running connected to a VPN server?