Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

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Hacker Idol


12 Jan

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Posted in Rants | 2 Comments »

Today was the first night of American Idol, Did you watch?  I watched about half of it.  While I do find the auditions the best part of the show, there is only so much that I can take before I wanted to pull my eyes out.

What would be an interesting idea, is IT Idol, or Hacker Idol. They start out with all the geeks and nerds, and see who really has the true l33t speak talent and can either fend off the hackers, or can beat the IT people.  It might not be the best TV, but it sure would be more funny to me at least.  I can just see the quotes “ Yeah, I dropped in the rootkit with the exploit to phpmyadmin, and then boosted the ect/passwd file and ran jack the ripper, and boom I was in”  Ok, well yeah. I am a geek, what can I say, but truly I’d enjoy a show like this.

Also, the shows on food network like “The Next Iron Chef” and others, are often more fun because they have more…. Flavor than the wanna be singers I guess.

Oh, 24 starts, and is in New York this year… I wonder how the Yankees will deal with that..

</rant>

Rant about Drivers


11 Jan

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Posted in Rants | 2 Comments »

Since, this is after all my Blog, and it’s called Corey Rants, you would have to expect some type of rant or rave pretty quickly.  Here is my first official rant about stupid people.

Today’s topic is Cars.

<Rant>

Cruise Control.

  • Use it, seriously for the love of god.
  • There is nothing worse than having the same car try to pass you, then pass you, then you pass them back and forth for 6 miles because the other person doesn’t go at a constant speed.  It’s dangerous.  Yes you stupid car, sitting in my blind spot, then speeding up and going back and forth.
  • Keeping a constant speed, with cruise control, when you are paying attention is very safe even in the rain and snow.  You are more likely to cause problems by speeding up and slowing down, then just going a constant speed.  If you notice the car start to slip,definitely turn off the cruise control, or if you are coming to a corner that you know if slippery, turn it off. It is common since. But you save so much in gas and time and annoy drivers less if you just go a danged constant speed.  Plus you can pay more attention to the road and what is ahead of you when you aren’t worried about your speed control constantly.

Driving too fast or too slow.

  • More accidents are caused when people are going to SLOW for conditions than going too fast.  When someone is coming too fast you can get out of the way, but when you come across someone that is going say 25 when conditions warrant 50, and are going 50, it creates as much if not a bigger problem then someone going too fast.

</Rant>

Thanks for letting me blow off some steam, sometimes we all need to do that from time to time.  :)

CMS, What is it good for?


06 Jan

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Posted in Rants, Reviews | 2 Comments »

My winter class this year (WDMD 346) is on Content Management Systems (CMS).  What is a CMS you ask?  It is a system for taking the everyday tasks of managing a website and simplifying it into something that is more manageable for more users.   They are able to dynamically (create on the fly) create pages with content that you provide.  The main benefit is that you can have a static template file, and the content changes for every page, but you only have to update the template file once and it is applied globally to all files on the site that use the said template.

A vast range of CMS’s have existed for a long time, but a few have stood the test of time, and have proven to be more useful.   I have used a few CMS’s over time, mostly for blogging.  The CMS’s that I have used are GreyMatter, MovableType, WordPress (This site), Drupal, Joomla and phpnuke.

Because most of the sites that I manage are mostly static content, and a few blogs, the blogging suite of CMS’s have gotten more of my focus.  From my class work, I’ve used Drupal and Joomla.  Both are very powerful, but have more of a learning curve than I have had the time for.  Today in class, we took the time to compare a few CMS systems to another.   The new CMS that my group and I played with was ezPublish, which is known as the “The Content Management Ecosystem”.

Our first thoughts of the sites that were produced with ezPublish were that they looked nice, and had a professional feel to them.  However this is mostly just the templates that were used.  From exploring the administrative options and the backend of the sites, we started to become less and less impressed as time went on.  The Demo sites, including one that we locally installed, were sluggish, and the interface was just clunky.   Our task was to evaluate the CMS on a range of features and compare them to Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.

CMS Matrix

Click for a Larger view

(I’ll try to post an update with all of the CMS’s that the entire class looked it)

While the above picture shows our results, one thing to note, is that ezPublish seems to focus itself on the ecommerce side of things, and not as much of the pure content systems that the others do.  EzPublish works more as a media server, and Enterprise CMS system for intranets.  While the other systems can be used in these environments, this looks to be the area that ezPublish shines.

I still plan on sticking with WordPress for my blogging needs, as its interface and plug-ins associated with it, tend to work the best and the quickest.   For my other sites that aren’t a blog, I think that Drupal or Joomla might end up being a better choice. The scalability of adding more features with Joomla and Drupal seem to really catch my interest, and is something to keep looking into as time goes on.

Web Hosting


05 Jan

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Posted in Rants, Raves, Reviews | 2 Comments »

When It comes to web hosting, you do get what you pay for.  I’ve had an online presence for years, and have worked with a few different companies over the course of that time.

I started my time at a company called Hosting Revolution.  Their service is cheap, but does have a nice control panel. However, the over all performance was less than good.  My sites would be slow in loading and often had bad down time.

The next step that I took, and the present provider that I use, is ServerBolt.  Their service is of very high quality,  offering a vast range of services that can be customized if you talk to the hosting provider.  Their control panel allows you to set up the major aspects of your account, and provides the backend components such as phpMyAdmin for SQL, and easy domain management if needed. They also have backups that are run automatically and are very redundant.  You can run your own backups, but the host also backs up the entire server to prevent any loss of data. The main part of hosting with ServerBolt is that the server and sites that I run are always responsive, and downtime is very low and minimized.

Everyone will have stupid moments, such as deleting the wrong file, or even non-so stupid moments where there is a server problem.  With the right backups and preventative measures, it is a good feeling to know that your data is protected and will be there waiting for you.  My host has saved my butt a few times when I accidentally deleted the wrong SQL database and lost all the content for my other sites.  This is not a good feeling to see everything gone, but thanks to my web host and backups, nothing ended up being lost, besides a few beads of sweat from me.

This concludes my rant on web hosting.

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Corey's Rants

A Web Developer's rants, raves and randomness.