A quick blog post – just thought I’d put a list of things out here. A list of things. A list of things I am currently digging.

• IFTTT: If this, then that. A deceptively simple website that lets you do ALL kinds of internet automation tasks. For instance, I have it setup to send a post to FaceBook and Twitter when I blog something. It also checks the weather each night, and sends me a text that says “Bring an umbrella!” if the weather forecast says it’s going to rain the next day. It’s hypernerdly, very powerful, and very easy to use. Exactly the kind of thing I dig.

• Instapaper: Another web service that’s deceptively simple, Instapaper is a “Read It Later” kind of service. Drop links there so you can… read them later, either on your computer, phone, or tablet. It beats creating a bookmark file a mile long.

• Drafts: Drafts is a really cool little iOS app (not universal, there are separate iPhone and iPad versions). It’s basically a quick-entry text dumping ground, with optional sync between iPhone and iPad versions if you have both those devices (and buy the corresponding app for each). The really powerful bit about Drafts, though, is the “actions” you can define for each Draft you compose. Through actions you can define a whole bunch of custom behaviors, including passing off Drafts to other apps. This enables Drafts to be your sole entry point for any type of writing – from blog posts, to Evernote entries, to tweets. It’s pretty powerful stuff, once you get your head around it and play with it. For instance, I have a “Journal” Draft Action that will drop a Journal entry into a file I keep in my Dropbox, as well as copy that entry over to Day One. Speaking of Day One…

• Day One: Day One is an amazing journalling app for the Mac and iPhone/iPad. It’s got a great UI and has some great add-on features to make each journal entry more rich, such as capturing your current location and the current weather. Plus thanks to Brett Terpstra’s app, “Slogger”, you can use it to keep track of other things like social media postings and Instagram pictures.

• LG HBS-700 Bluetooth Headphones: Picked up these headphones on impulse at Best Buy for like $39 one day. They aren’t the newer HBS-730 model you can find out there for like $65 – the main differences between this older pair I got and the newer HBS-730 are that the 730’s got an improved Bluetooth encoding method and voice prompts for things like battery level. But I hear reports of crap range with the HBS-730, and these HBS-700s have GREAT range. I can practically leave the phone on my desk at home and wander into the back bedroom and the music still plays. Plus they work as a headset for phone calls, and get great battery life. Not bad for forty bucks.

• Ulyssesand Daedalus Touch: Two newish text editors from the “Soulmen”, for the Mac and iOS respectively. These are minimalistic editors made for folks who love to write in Markdown, plus they’ve got all kinds of cloud integration (both iCloud and Dropbox, if you swing both ways). I’ve switched to use both of these editors for my writing, just because they get the hell out of the way and let you concentrate on putting words on paper.

• Samsung ARM Chromebook 3G: It’s a $329 laptop with built in free 3G for two years and runs Linux. It’s awesome. I still love my iPad, but damn, a near disposable laptop for hacking? Neat. I’d get more into this now, but I wrote a review on it for Linux Journal, so I’m clamming up.

• Cloud Storage: I’ve got Dropbox, Box, Cubby, and now Copy cloud storage services. Kinda overkill, but you can never have too much cloud storage, if you ask me. By the way, if you sign up using my Copy referral link, we each get a bonus 5GB for free. So c’mon, pimp my Copy. ;)

• Timbuk2 bags: If you need a bag, check these folks out. Amazing build quality on their bags. I got a Commute TSA Messenger bag at Christmas time to replace my 10 year old laptop backpack, and was so happy with it I grabbed a Pisco Backpack to haul my iPad around in. The Pisco in particular is neat - it’s bigger inside than it looks. I use it at conferences because it can carry a fair amount, but it’s still light and tiny. It’s got enough space inside to hold a 13” MacBook Air (or an 11” Chromebook) AND an iPad, along with the chargers for both, and have room left over for other things. Plus, Timbuk2’s support is great - I had to deal with them for a defective Kindle cover and they just made it right, no questions asked. Good stuff, all around.

Finally, I want to talk briefly about Octopress. Holy cow, this has made blogging fun again. Now that I’ve got all the initial look/theme/feel laid out and out of the way, I can just go ahead and put fingers to keyboard and not worry about whether or not I have to figure out if I have to update WordPress or any of its plugins… again… Since the blog is just static HTML sent straight of an S3 bucket, I also don’t have to worry much about any vulnerabilities and the like. All the content and config is contained in my git repository, so I don’t have to worry about backups, either. Peace of mind – it’s a good thing.

Found a decent little vim cheat sheet, so I’m stashing this here for future reference – I’m sure it’ll be handy for a few other folks too.

You may notice that this blog has gone through a substantial revamp. It’s not only a cosmetic revamp, but an architectural one as well. You see, dear reader, I got totally sick of dealing with having to update Wordpress every few days because of a new vulnerability, so I decided to migrate off of it.

After looking around for a new blog engine and not finding anything that sounded really neat, I finally stumbled on Octopress. Octopress is totally different from Wordpress, in that you write posts in Markdown, and then kick off a Ruby script that will massage the structure of the Markdown posts and crank out static HTML, which you then can upload to your choice of web host provider.

I’m addicted to Markdown at the moment, mostly because it lets you use a lightweight markup language to do basic formatting, but stays out of your way while writing. I’ve also got a fair amount of tools that ‘speak’ Markdown now, and after lots of pondering, I decided to move things to Octopress. What you see now is the fruit of a couple of weeks of messing around.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of this migration (at least, not yet), but I will say one thing that I think is cool. Instead of needing a bunch of infrastructure on the server side like Wordpress does, all I need for the site now is a simple web server. Matter of fact, I’m not even using a ‘real’ web server – this site is now being delivered straight out of an Amazon S3 bucket, with no ‘server’ for me to manage. This is one less thing I need to monitor and mess with. And just in case things get wonky, I’ve put CloudFlare as a CDN in front of the S3 bucket, so y’all should get lightning-fast performance out of this.

Bear with me as I continue to tweak and improve the site over time. I still have to migrate the few static “pages” I had in Wordpress, but 98% of the stuff has come across, and I decided to launch this revamp now rather than wait any longer. Please drop me a comment here, and let me know what you think!

Syria is kicking its population off the internet as I type this. It’s bizzaro, watching this unfold in near-real-time.

Arstechnica has a good article on this, as does All Things D. But the thing that has the hair on the back of my neck standing up is this video from CloudFlare, showing the internet routes dropping to Syria one at a time…

Creeps me the heck out.

OR:

How I won a Nexus 7 without much teeth gnashing.

OR:

How to make your fellow nerds upset at you.

So, a couple of weeks ago, SCALE 11x happened. As usual, the SCALE team pulled off a GREAT expo - I can’t rave more about the job these guys do. If you’re ever considering attending their show do it. Spend the weekend, soak up the geek vibe. Lots of good knowledge, and a bunch of good people. However, this post isn’t about SCALE per se, it’s more about an attitude and credo I try to live by.

I’ve always told my kids that you can achieve whatever you set your mind to, and I try to embody that example. I’m not perfect, by any means but I try to strive for my own personal, unique, brand of awesome. By and large, I think I succeed. This came into play during SCALE in a very strange way. The folks at Rackspace were holding their annual break/fix contest at SCALE again this year. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a break/fix contest, it’s simple: they break a server in a way known to them, and then they time you while you fix it. Assuming you fix the server correctly, Rackspace will award prizes to the first, second, and third fastest repair times. The prizes this year were:

• First place: 320GB OCZ Solid-State Disk
• Second place: Nexus 7 tablet
• Third place: Arduino Kit

I’ve been seriously thinking of the hackery I could do with a Nexus 7 tablet for some time, but I never could justify the money to buy one. However, when I saw that they had one in the contest, I scopelocked on that bad boy like a rabid ferret going into a tube full of meat. I decided to hold off on tackling the contest until near the end of the conference, where I had a better idea of what times were in what position. My plan was to stack the deck in my favor so I could slide right into second place and get that tablet. By waiting till the end of the conference, I figured I’d have a fighting chance at establishing a position just behind the leader.

So, on Sunday, right before I left the conference, I decided to plant my butt down at the Rackspace booth and give this thing a whirl. I asked the folks running the booth what the fastest time was. 9 minutes, 35 seconds, was the reply. I grinned and nodded, and told them to start the clock as I cracked my knuckles and began shoving manager-Bill to the backseat so that engineer-Bill could drive this racecar to just outside the winner’s circle.

First problem: Get Apache on the virtual server in question running. No problemo, man. A quick sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start to see where the feathers on this Injun were missing, and bam, I had the answer. There was a typo in the httpd config file. Flew into vim, fixed the typo, and had Apache running. NEXT!

Second problem: Get the correct index.html to show up when you hit http://vhost1.local. This hurdle was also cleared in fairly short order, this time by looking at the access logs and config again - this time the guys got sneaky and put an .htaccess file in the directory. Moved that thing out of the way, and onto the next thing

Third problem: The Apache server had to respond properly to a phpinfo.php page. Checked it out, it was the phpinfo() command was administratively disabled in the /etc/php.ini file. Commented that line out, restarted Apache, checked the URL with cURL, and whammo! Looked at the clock, and I still had three minutes to tie the first place guy. Perfecto - I’m right on pace to come in second, as planned.

Fourth problem: The Apache server had to answer to a second virtualhost (http://vhost2.local) and respond with data from a local MySQL database. Ah, LAMP, how I haven’t really missed you. Shouldn’t be too hard so I dug into it. Turned out that the password for the database wasn’t right in the config file, so I edited it and it still didn’t work. Crap, I’d have to change the breakfix user on the MySQL database to get the thing to work right, and I can NEVER remember the syntax on the MySQL commands for that kind of thing. I looked up at the test guy and asked, Hey, is it cool if I google for a couple of things? He replied with You don’t have internet access on that VM, dude. I said, Yeah, but my smartphone DOES have access. He shrugged and said, Sure, it’s not a closed-book test. AWESOME. A spot of AT&T imitation 4G later, and I had the syntax for the command at hand, and changed the breakfix user in the MySQL DB to match what I’d plugged into the PHP configuration file, and did another cURL to verify my work. And then

I looked at the clock. 9 min, 30 seconds. I grinned, and restarted Apache for good measure, then double-checked the other answers. Only then did I say, DONE. Came in at ten minutes flat and won second place. THE TABLET WAS MINE.

Rackspace made good on that contest, and the Nexus 7 arrived in the mail a couple of days ago.

So, kids, once again, listen to Uncle Billy. You CAN achieve anything you put your mind to, even if that’s second place. Second place may be first loser, but if that’s where you want to be, then you’ve won.