Few things in life are more pleasurable than stopping a telemarketer dead in their tracks. Telling a cable or satellite TV telemarketer that you don't own a TV is one way. And during the next few instants in which they scan their script to find a possible response you have the perfect window of time to interject a polite "thanks for calling" and hang up. Technically I DO own a TV, however it is relegated to monitor duties for a DVD player and Sony Playstation in my daughters room. It's not that I am against TV, I enjoy watching sports or sitcoms or whatever with friends. It's just that I don't miss it when It's not around. It's really like a deeply jaded apathy toward the whole media platform. Writer strike? Tell somebody who cares bud. I do however enjoy watching movies and listening to music, and while I am not an audiophile per say, laptop and computer speakers in my budget range are tinny at best.

      If elephants never forget, then I have mouse memory. As the years go by I strain at times to remember early childhood events. I do recall however a certain Christmas gift I received long ago, and when I consider how much fun I had with it I can't help but wax nostalgic. It was a book of ciphers and codes, and had instructions on how to create a multitude of substitution ciphers of varying difficulty. The excitement I felt when I scrawled an encoded message and rolled it up inside a hollowed out pen was not lessened in anyway by the fact that nobody would ever receive said encoded message, nor would anything happen when some time later the hollowed out pen was eventually fished out from the junk drawer to then be thrown away after the quick conclusion that it was broken. But heck, I was like 9 or something. When you are that age the day after tomorrow may as well be 50 years from now, and the reason for doing things need not make a whole lot of sense. At least when I was 9. As I reread this I can't help but think that my recollection of fond memories is coming out more pathetic than heartwarming, so lets jump to the present and get on with the post.

    In a perfect world a laptop with both DVI and VGA outputs can power two separate monitors. There would also be less of what appears to be an internationally organized effort to convince me to "impr0ve my manliness" via a constant stream of email. But back in the real world my Inbox is full of spam and my laptop (DELL Inspiron 9400) is limited to one connected monitor on either the DVI or the VGA output. Having convinced myself that a desktop split between the laptop's 1920x1200 17" LCD and a Samsung 21" 1680x1050 monitor is far to small a workspace to get anything done, I set out to see if it was possible to add another display to my setup. It just so happens I have a 21 " Westinghouse LCD that would be a perfect 3rd monitor, currently part of a dual workstation connected to an aging Gateway PC running Debian unstable. While I can't make this 3rd screen an actual part of my main desktop, I can gain control of the window manager running on it almost as if it was, giving me a 3 screen desktop, sort of. All it takes is some xorg configuration changes, a network connection between the two machines, and a nifty tool called x2x.

    If I was not writing software for a living I am not sure what I would be doing, but it would not be sales. Having spent some time with friends shopping at car dealerships recently I shudder to think that in the process of promoting my own business I might somehow be associated with the underhanded hard-sell stigma often stereotypically associated with car sales. And though stereotypical it may be, the "what can I do to get you to buy a car you neither need nor can afford" pitch is indeed prevalent on a new car lot.  With this hopefully avoidable possiblility in mind I set out to market my buisiness in the same way I set out to tackle a complex programming challenge: break it down to  manageable pieces then address each in turn.

    Since very early on in my professional career I have been afforded the luxury of running Linux exclusively on my own hardware, and most of my administration experience and programming work has been primarily done with Linux or Unix like operating systems. Having dabbled in maybe a dozen or so systems, and supporting several as a part of work duties, I just really like the way Linux runs. My Linux work environment is fine tuned to the Nth degree of precision, though it does take the occasional fiddling to keep all the ants marching in the same direction. These days I have settled into a happy symbiosis with Debian unstable. Possibly because I am a micro-managing control freak, or possibly because I am the kind of person who finds patching, configuration, and compiling a new kernel fun, I keep apt away from the kernel bits and build my own from kernel.org source.

    If the English language is the Amazon, then SQL is a birdhouse. Or at least a well organized small town with streets in a logical grid arrangement. I love it. I don't claim to have traveled each of it's narrow alleys but I have traversed many a side street and it's longevity is not surprising once you let it into your heart.

    Programming is fun, at least to me programming is fun. It's a series of puzzles inside of puzzles, weaved together into a tapestry of function. Or something like that. It's the thrill of each challenge met, each hurdle overcome that keeps me interested in programming. There are however quite a few ubiquitous qualities that web sites and applications with a moderate feature set share. Sessions, db interaction, form processing, you get the picture. I will confess that over the years I am guilty of re-inventing a wheel or two here or there. In retrospect I believe the experience and knowledge gained from doing so was worth the time, or at least the finer tuned re-invented wheel rolled more smoothly or fit more precisely to the circumstances for which it was created. As a software engineer I despise bloat, and detest dependencies, two positions that make designing a usable framework an interesting challenge.

    I have noticed that writing blog articles is sort of like talking aloud in an empty room, but one that might be connected via sound carrying corridors to other rooms teeming with listeners. So on the one hand it's like listening to yourself talk (or drone on endlessly as in my case), and on the other it's possible that somebody is actually hearing whats being said. Regardless we have added a new site feature that is both a demonstration of what we do, and a place for anybody looking for advice or to discuss web programming can drop by and post their thoughts.

    Having run LInux (and X more specifically) on desktops and laptops for a long time, I have tried a lot of different configurations and setups. Recently however I found myself with a need for two workstations and while I had two sets of keyboards, 2 mice, and two monitors, I had only one PC (running Debian unstable). It took some trial and error but running multiple desktops from one not-so-new PC is both relatively easy to configure and surprisingly usable once set up.

    No matter what the purpose of a web site it's extremely useful for site owners to better understand who is coming to the site, where they are coming from, and in many cases the most important information, how often are they coming. Collecting and displaying statistics about site activity is not difficult per say, but building useful activity measurements and a nice interface for the admin presents some interesting challenges that need to be addressed if the system is to be robust. This post is about managing site statistics to help a site better understand it's strengths and weaknesses to eventually become a better site, NOT about invading the privacy of site visitors. Collected data in this case is used purely as a means to provide trend information and current activity numbers.