Peplink Multi-WAN Routers

Review

Update Sept 2014: My favorite Peplink is now the Balance One, and my favorite router if you’re super-techy and want to configure networking stuff is the Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite. Read more about Ubiquiti here.

I live and work on the internet, so when I have trouble connecting it really slows me down. About a year or so ago I started looking into multi-WAN routers that would, at least, support two internet connections and failover to the other one, and as a bonus maybe provide some speed benefits as well. Here’s the story of that journey.

Continue reading Peplink Multi-WAN Routers →

Giving Back

Karma

In August of this year I started thinking a lot more about philanthropy and giving back. I was raised with a strong emphasis on civic responsibility and volunteering and though I’ve been very lucky in this world but haven’t found a way to connect back philanthropically beyond sporadic donations to open source, freedom, or music organizations I’m passionate about. There are a million places you can give money to, but it’s tricky to identify where it’ll be best used and have the biggest impact.

Spurred on by a lunch I attended with Peter Diamandis talking about the prize-based philosophy behind the Xprize and goading from Tim Ferriss I’ve stepped things up in the latter part of this year, starting by matching Tim on First Giving (something I hope to continue though he’s ahead right now). If you’re thinking about dipping your toes in giving back, Donors Choose is a great place to start.

Link Thanks

Uncategorized

I just wanted to take a moment to thank those people who give proper attribution (aka a hat tip) when they post about something they found here. More and more lately I’m seeing things that I know started here show up from blogs of people I know and respect with nary a note or link back. Taking the time to properly attribute things can be a drag sometimes, but I think it’s important to maintain the credibility of weblogging as a medium and to reward those who bring new things to light. If you are someone who does properly credit things please know that I appreciate it quite a bit, and I hold you in a higher esteem than more “professional” blogs who are sloppy at best with their attribution.

Zeldman Keynote

Asides

I recorded the Zeldman keynote on my camera and the quality isn’t the best (I haven’t even listened to it yet) but I wanted to put it up for people who couldn’t make it. Listen for the surprise towards the end. Here it is: Jeffrey Zeldman SxSW 2005 Keynote. Sorry, looks like I accidentally put up my Jeffrey Zeldman/John Cage remix edition. The link should work now! Everything was really exciting, I can die happy now. 🙂

WordCamp Developer Day

Asides

I have some cool news: On Sunday the day after WordCamp San Francisco we’re going to host a WordPress developer day at the Automattic office on Pier 38. It will be Barcamp-style with no pre-announced schedule, but expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now, there should be plenty of room for everyone to connect. (Try to keep things local though, we’re not sure how the internet will hold up.)

Christmas Jazz Music

Asides

I love Christmas: the lights, the food, the music. The music part can sometimes be fraught, though. There’s so many cheesy and badly done Christmas albums out there. Fortunately my favorite genre, jazz, has actually a really impressive collection of interesting interpretations of Christmas classics.

Over the years I’ve curated a few of my favorites. Thanks to Spotify, one of my favorite services I discovered in 2013, it’s easy to share them with you. Here’s my Xmas Jazz playlist, including my favorite holiday arrangement of all time, Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite.

Remember: It’s okay to play holiday music until at least mid-January.

If you have any favorites you’d like me to add, send them via Spotify messages or in the comments. Merry Christmas everybody!

Nickel and Diming

Asides, , ,

Seth Godin: Nickel and diming. (As an aside, it drives me crazy that people like Seth Godin and John Moore are pouring countless hours into creating priceless content as sharecroppers on domains they don’t own. To clarify, I have no problem that they’re using Typepad, but for goodness sake put it on your own domain. When someone Google’s you the first hit shouldn’t be .typepad.com. Your name is the most valuable thing you have, and every day you put it off is more links to someplace you can never truly control.)

Random Photo Returns

Meta, Photolog

The random photos are back. I wrote a quick hack to loop over every photo in every album and read its relevant info into a MySQL table. Now instead of taking a few seconds to get a random photo using the Gallery data stores, it uses a single query and takes a millisecond. Long-time visitors to the site remember that the random image in the corner has always been one of my favorite things about this site, but as the photolog grew to a thousand, two thousand, and then nine thousand images it slowed down more and more. I had to start caching it so it would change once every 15 seconds, then every minute, then every 5 minutes, and then I just manually rotated it for a while. Finally I put the random image out of its misery.

Now it’s fully dynamic, every page you view is completely unique, just like you.

(There goes my bandwidth.)

Tom Ford’s 15 Things

Design

For the 15th anniversary of Vogue.com noted fashion designer Tom Ford made a list of 15 things that every man should have, which are as follow:

  1. A sense of humour.
  2. A daily read of a newspaper.
  3. A sport that you love and are good at.
  4. Tweezers.
  5. A good cologne that becomes a signature.
  6. A well cut dark suit.
  7. A pair of classic black lace up shoes.
  8. A smart blazer.
  9. The perfect pair of dark denim jeans.
  10. Lots of crisp white cotton shirts.
  11. Always new socks and underwear, throw away the old ones every 6 months.
  12. A classic tuxedo.
  13. A beautiful day watch with a metal band.
  14. The perfect sunglasses.
  15. Perfect teeth. If you don’t have them, save up and get them fixed.

A pretty good list, though I would replace the newspaper with Circa, and I must confess I’m not sure sure what #4 the tweezers are for.

Om also has Tom Ford’s 5 tips for a modern gentleman.

Standards Police

Uncategorized

The Standards Police, I think Keith is totally off here, as I began to express in Dave’s comments. A laissez-faire approach to compliance isn’t helping anyone. Someone needs to set an example, and if it’s not these guys who will? Jeffrey and Doug, each with no small amount of content on their site, seem to have no problem keeping things compliant. Neither does Eric, Tantek, Joe, Lars, Anne, Mark, just to name a few. Don’t tell me “validation is very hard and takes quite a bit of effort.” That’s a weak cop-out. Accessibility is very hard, design is very hard, music is very hard, driving in between the lines is very hard. If you don’t want to make the effort, then don’t dabble and make flippant comments that hurt the field as a whole and insult the people who work “very hard.”

I’m coming out. This site is to the best of my ability valid XHTML 1.1 sent with the proper MIME to browser that can handle it. Even the photolog, which took me hours and hours of work to get to the point where it is now, and for a long time was far from decent markup. However I am fairly certain that there are some comments (particularly on the mosaic thread, which now has almost a thousand replies) that have broken validation, and though I am very busy I will personally check each of these. WordPress helps a lot. The WordPress site is also XHTML 1.1 with the exception of the forums, which are compliant by default (more hours of work) but which could do a much better job of validation input. These are my weaknesses, out for the world to see. Even though the sites work just fine, and “validation doesn’t pay the bills,” I’m going to devote my time to fixing these problems because how can I presume to be a member of an organization devoted to standards without following them myself?

Update: Pulled and republished.

It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

Uncategorized

At first I was optimistic that the Lockergnome redesign wouldn’t be that terrible, I mean they have smart people there. Then the evidence mounted that there wasn’t going to be any good hybrid approach. Why go backwards? Is it a joke? Is ruining their website some twisted form of RSS evangelism?

Earlier today a comment from Simon said:

Well, the redesign appears to be out now and it�s much worse than I expected – blockquotes for indentation, paragraphs with non-breaking spaces in them for added vertical spacing – tag soup if ever I�ve seen it. Yuck.

He expanded his thoughts illustrated by the code snippet:

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="778"
bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<tr><td align="left">
<div id="footer">
<blockquote>&copy; 1996-2004, Lockergnome LLC. ISSN: 1095-3965. All
Rights Reserved. Please read our <a href="/about/privacy-policy.phtml">
Privacy Policy</a> and <a href="/about/terms-of-service.phtml">
Terms of Service</a>. Web site hosted by
<a href="http://www.webair.com/cgi-bin/in?51">Webair</a>.
Email newsletters powered by <a href="http://www.whatcounts.com/">WhatCounts</a>.
Domain registered at <a href="https://www.gnomedomains.com/">GnomeDOMAINS</a>.
</blockquote>
</div>
</td></tr></table>

One can only assume that the newsletters will be following suit, and no one wants that kind of filth in their inbox.

All joking aside, I am going to be unsubscribing from all Lockergnome newsletters. I am not under the illusion that my action will be anything more than a number blip to the people there, but principle of the matter is I don’t have a lot of respect for them anymore. How can I take web development news seriously from an organization that is in the wrong decade code-wise? Even worse, they had something great and threw it away. If enough people were to do the same and unusbscribe they might take notice, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I might even be forgiving if their markup (which is invisible to the user when it works) devolved but the site was much easier to use or aesthetically pleasing, but the site has degraded in every conceivable way. I decided I could tolerate the design long enough to unsubscribe, but couldn’t even find that on the site. Google brought up a cached page that no longer exists which pointed to the correct URI, which incidentally still has the old design. So if you also disagree with the recent direction things have taken, unsubscribe from Lockergnome.

Looking for something to fill the void? It didn’t come to mind the other day, but I highly recommend the SitePoint newsletters for web development topics. Blogs are also great, but sometimes it’s nice to get something in yoru inbox. I’m open to suggestions for other newsletters.

Update: I’ve written a new entry that explains why I care.

Marketplace Followup

Asides, , ,

Alex Jones has some good thoughts on the marketplace. As some stats, our themes page on .com got 2.4 million pageviews last month and someone previews a theme about once every 1.74 seconds. I can’t say how many people have purchased upgrades on .com, but even with our limited selection of products it’s a meaningful percentage, and that’s one of the reasons we think this idea has legs. It’s still impossible to know for certain, though, and I appreciate that our launch partners are taking a risk that they might create a theme and not sell a single one, and the whole thing might tank. If it goes well, though, I fully expect there to be thousands of themes in the system by this time next year, and the people in early will have a significant advantage, much like app developers did on Facebook.

Wii Tennis

Asides

We’ve been taking breaks at night here in La Paz by playing a bit of Wii Tennis, which is one of the best multiplayer games ever. Barry decided to organize a double-elimination tournament where everyone had to link to the winner. That ended up being me and so they’ve requested this post so they can properly pingback their entries to this one.