official iphone & itouch unthreaded blog icon
April 2, 2008 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Castle, OSX, Puter Stuff, Techy, Web Design & Dev, iPhone
tada!
ok no i didn’t create it the icon. it’s from the tango icon gallery and published under the creative commons attribution-share alike license.
from your apple iphone or itouch, visit my blog and then tap the + (plus icon), then “Add to Home Screen”. You’ll now have a quick link to my very unthreaded ramblings marked with this wonderful castlemonkey icon.
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To create your own simply upload a png image to your root web directory and name it apple-touch-icon.png. If you’d like this image to also be the bookmark (favicon.ico) for your site, you can easily use one of these sites to turn your apple icon into one.
Tags: tango, icons, creative commons, unthreaded, castlemonkey, iphone, apple-touch-icon.png, favicon.ico
So Thankful It Hurts
November 23, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
5comments Categories: Castle, Family, Friends, Insider, Must Listen, Squirrels, TimeKillers, TimeWaster
I’m immobile. Perhaps permanently confined to my lazy-boy and a soon to be 60 Minutes or Oprah special on obesity. A gluttonous mountain of hot Latino, stuffed with such tastiness I fear the police may come knocking to question the legality.
My mom really outdid herself this year, every dish was superb. The turkey wasn’t dry, the mashed potatoes weren’t lumpy and the gravy… oh the gravy! Such delectable roasted flightless fowl juice! It challenges my refreshing Sprite for the tile of ‘Sweet Nectar of the Gods’. I find myself drooling at the memory of it. Too many trips back for more, I lose count and just keep calling them “seconds”, I might have blacked out from the pain and joy. The bottles of wine might have played a part as well.
Slowly I recover from the feeding frenzy as the gravy lust subsides. My body finally forces me to stop, the laws of physics call. The new jeans I wear, which were too big, are now much too tight. I fear the lining of my stomach may tear apart if I move too suddenly. Internal organs bathed in masticated flesh and vegetables…no I must not think that. The horror of all that wasted gravy….
Sitting here, unable to reach the remote - I think of what I’m thankful for. My old co-worker Sue would call them blessings, my dear friend Jason would call it luck - the good fortune I’ve been allotted has taken many forms and shapes, sometimes not so obvious and other times so delightful I feel wrapped in joyx.
The engineers who designed this chair to hold my massive girth come to mind. As do the engineers from Nissan who designed the crumple zone of that Nissan Sentra which kept me alive many years ago. Of the emergency room witchdoctors which may have saved my life when I had chest pains. Pam the nurse who assisted when my daughter was born.
I think of the true friends I have in my life - old and new. David McInnis who’s taught me many things about business, management and generosity. Willybob for always being true and understanding. The Bonz for mentoring and forgiving me. Travis for being the poster child for a life-long boyhood friend and McGerr for not making me listen to his music. Carl I can’t imagine my life without you in it. My dear talented Penguins whom I judge all others against. Cari & Terry who let me vent, make me laugh and think my “quirks” are adorable.
And of course shout outs: Paolo you’ve shown me there’s hope yet for mankind. Jiyan, Robin, and Ryan - for showing me that creative and intelligent people do exist on the East coast. Bob & Mark of Vocus, I learned a few things about surviving in a large, public company. Mike & Joe who claim that not every gay man wants me. Chris for entertaining me by being a closet Mexican and Matt for not being a Latino.
My family, well most of them - you guys aren’t all that bad. I’m thankful for my animals - as Izzy and WeeWee play fight at my feet. The only thing that would make that scene better is if the Star Trek fight music was playing as they circle one another… Izzy becomes distracted and attacks a wall outlet. I love that damn cat.
It’s been a long time since I’ve reflected on what I’m thankful for. I also skimmed over a few people, but my greasy sausage like fingers are tired of typing. The gravy is taking its final hold on me, time to sleep.
SysAdmin of the Year - Ode to Jed
November 5, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Friends, Insider, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Techy
I wrote this last month(?) or whenever System Administrators day was, to enter Jed in for a contest. I’m not sure if this is the final version I sent or not.
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PRWeb was small company two years ago with less than 15 employees running all operations on a single antiquated home built Linux server. In order to keep pace with our explosive growth Jed researched, designed and implemented a robust and scalable network infrastructure that in short order doubled our profits, and enticed many a buyer until we sold to Vocus last year for a tidy sum.
Our entire operation is web based, including the interfaces used by our customers and internal staff. If for whatever reason DDOS, bad cable, dead router, code typo, caused the databases or websites to fail we could not accept payment from customers or provide the services for those payments and our internal staff would be sitting there unable to do their job, which is 24/7 year round. During our explosive growth to clusters of redundant database and web servers there were a few problems, most corrected before any customer or employee realized, others cropped up, especially the DDOS and other attacks from China in the wee hours of the night. In all cases Jed was the point man, first to be called in the wee hours despite having two small children, one new born - ie complete lack of sleep.
His dedication, knowledge and resourcefulness is impressive to say the least. In short our company would not have had the extreme success we’ve achieved without this scruffy individual who has sustained many a war injury on sharp edges from generic PC cases, bruises from contorting during late non-peak times to install 4U terabyte servers single handedly in cramped data center cabinets, and of course the mental trauma all support staff deal with when having to address users and customers directly.
He’s been the administrator of it all single handedly, systems, network, web, database, email, network engineer, hardware monkey, programmer and technical support. Intimate knowledge of every major networking protocol and service. Having written some of the most advanced bash shell scripts for backups, automation and other tasks. A warrior monk - Python, Perl, Java, Bash, Awk, Sed, PHP, Javascript, HTML, XML, CSS are not so much languages as melee weapons he wields. His minions, MySQL cluster trolls, load balancer orcs, powerful Apache elves, and Cyrus wizards and a host of hobbit like user workstations. A vast interconnected machine greater than the sum of its individual electronic components and miles of cabling rumble - he’s in tune with all of it. It’s a bit creepy at first, if you watch him working, he’ll suddenly stiffen as if he’s wondering if anyone heard him fart, over the sound of his speed death metal blaring, but its almost a sixth or seventh sense with him that he knows something is afoot on one of the servers even before one of his monitoring script alerts him.
Its not merely that Jed did all this, perhaps there are a few highly intelligent individuals who could have taught themselves and completed all of this in a few years. Nor is it that he has done so with the good attitude of a crufty old Unix admin that he must channel. (We call him the Mumbler among other things.) It is that we of PRWeb / Vocus have all benefited in ways that most of the staff and executives can not even comprehend except in the loosest of ways when they refer to “The Server”. He is the Morlock Supreme of this company, a thankless and sleepless position he maintains and protects so that everyone else can sleep soundly, IM their friends, watch Youtube videos and of course email and do their jobs without thinking what makes it all work and grow. Day after day he is Sisyphus and Atlas and my friend.
To Jed. Thank you
Rant: Share The Web
June 18, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: OSX, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Read These, Web Design & Dev, gnash-teeth
It seems everywhere I turn someone is writing, talking or funding another “share the web” “social networking” site. Almost all of them have the same recipe.
- Build a site using LAMP or Ruby On Rails
- Provide free registration - possibly an upgrade path.
- Ajax/Flash - Upload photos, videos, music, misc data files and other content.
- Bookmark, rate, tag, comment on third party web pages.
- Offer various feeds of points 3,4
- profit. ok maybe not.
So basically that’s exactly the same thing the web already was/is before the new buzz words, each website is a collection of files and links. Sometimes these websites are a collection of users, for example Slashdot. It existed long before the buzz and granted it’s mostly a troll haven of thrice posted news from the month before it’s still an example of online social behavior on a large scale - pre-blog era (PBE). Of course in the PBE we also had web-rings, the sort of primordial slime of social networking.
So blogging software (ie CMS) made it more accessible for users that found Front Page and MS Word too difficult to create a crappy web site and couldn’t figure out the shareware FTP software to upload to their 3rd rate ISP’s IIS server. Suddenly we have a lot more content online and everyone is happy from the guy with the crappy content and site to the ISP. I’m okay with that, people should feel like they can express themselves. I remember how I felt when I first learned HTML and put up my very own completely pointless website. (Actually several of the commercial ones I’ve done are equally pointless but it was a paycheck.)
I’m also okay with sites like delicious (despite it’s horrible name), same with digg. I don’t regularly use them but they were good ideas initially that seem to have reached their full potential. The number of copycat sites may now cease.
Tagging in general just seems like a general good way at categorization of existing content and many sites that have nothing to do with socializing are making use of it.
Audio and video casting have their places.
What do I have against sharing the web and social networking? I love the idea of sharing, in fact my favorite tool is StumbleUpon. I simply adore it and can’t imagine the Internet without it. It’s simply the gold rush mentality and the ‘drive by media‘ both on and offline which are fueling it. The sheer number of sites trying to combine all of this using my above non-patented recipe is absurd and is beginning to annoy me with all the attention they are getting. Same with the clones of digg, flickr, et al.
What’s worse is the old school businesses that slap a delicious logo on their website and say they are embracing social networking. Having news releases put out and charging customers more for the logo. Let it go, lets continue to innovate and can people stop using 2.0 after every silly thing.
What are you working on Senior Castle you may ask? Well I can’t tell you, binding contracts and all that, but pay you no mind what I’m doing. And as to PRWeb we’re using social networking concepts where they make sense. Most of which are just various ways to interact with our existing data and are not the core of our business model, something we’ve always done and embraced during the PBE.
What’s out there? What’s next? I’m ready to move on. Too many people are on this bus, riding this wave. The more I ponder it the more I see what’s going on the less excited I am. The next thing, in my mind, requires new interfaces, which means new OS’s and protocols. Maybe I’ve watched too many Japanese cyborg-mech cartoons and read all of Gibsons books (even the really bad Idura one) more than once. But for what I want to do it doesn’t exist yet and frankly I’m not smart enough to create these new standards so I have to wait for the rest of you to catch up and build the damn thing for me.
I’m an armchair visionary, my mutant gene gives me the ability complain and whine without shame. Surely somewhere, in some government lab of DARPA, the DOD or the MASAD someone is working on the future. Are you?
