Building a Linux PC (Part 2)

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I ended up buying all of the aforementioned parts from newegg, because I didn't appreciate tigerdirect's hidden tax on top of shipping. I was able to upgrade the harddrive to 750 GB at a lower price thanks to newegg's promotion codes, and I also found a discount for the slim dvd drive. At the recommendation of a friend, I also picked up an extra motherboard "just in case". The grand total with shipping ended up being: $907.64.

Upon assembling the PC, I discovered that the slim dvd drive was mini-SATA and it didn't come with an adapter so I had to boot from USB. I picked up an adaptor locally a few days later for about $6 so not a huge deal. I decided to install Linux Mint since Ubuntu seems to be pushing Unity which I tried to get used to but, meh. Everything was working great; networked the old PC and backed up my files, left the screensaver running and went to sleep, and then I woke up to my first real problem. No picture, just bright distorted flickering colors, not even a boot menu on reset. After tinkering around, I ended up having to remove the video card for it to recognize the onboard video. Bad card? I don't know... I'll have to see about returning or replacing it. Very frustrating.

Anyway I'm back up and running now. Tonight I will leave it on again and hopefully not wake up to anymore problems. I am loving how compact it is, and the silence is almost disturbing.

February 16 2012, 8:34 pm
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New site design

I was never really happy with my original design. It worked, it was okay, but then I've never been super great with graphics. I'm suprisingly pleased with the new look; it's simple, not too busy, but not lacking either. It reminds me of one of my favorite Zen quotes:

Quote:"form is emptiness, and in emptiness is form"

I'm still working out a few problems, still testing compatibility, and I want to add a few things. Bear with me, and shoot me an e-mail if you spot any problems. It would be much appreciated!

February 8 2012, 5:39 pm
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Building a Linux PC

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Back in 2004, I decided to build this beast of a machine solely to handle the newly released Doom 3 although the game never lived up to my expectations. While the box served well for some other games it was only about 4 years later that, due to inevitable circumstances, I decided to give up on Windows forever and made the permanent switch to Linux. The computer is huge, heavy, noisy, runs hot, all the things you would expect of a machine that is 8 years old running an open source operating system on hardware built with a proprietary agenda. I'm actually surprised she is still kicking, and I know it's only a matter of time before she dies but I've just been too broke to do anything about it.

I just completed my tax return and while I still feel like I can't afford it, I think it's finally time. So, I've been shopping around for my first machine built specifically with Linux in mind. I've looked at System76, Eight Virtues, Emporer Linux, Think Penguin, ZaReason, Los Alamos... The best price I've been able to find is the OpenDesk DO model from Ohava:


The cost is $959.98 before shipping, and I managed to find the owner via reddit who was nice enough to offer me an 11.04% discount code. My only problem is, the company doesn't appear to have been around for more than a few years and I can't find a single review from a person that owns one. While I feel a little rotten about it, I went ahead and did a price comparison on building something similar myself:

Better power supply and processor, and a lower price of $737.93 before shipping. It's still another week or so before I've got any money in the bank, so I've got plenty of time to think about it. I would love to support a fellow open source advocate, I just need to save whatever money I can...

January 30 2012, 6:05 pm
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As the new year approaches, I've been reflecting on life.

Every once in a great while I get in this mood where I feel like I've been bottling up creativity and it's ready to explode. The only problem is, I have no idea where or how to direct that energy. As much as I want to be a part of some meaningful project, I feel stuck and often end up juggling several side projects unable to decide which deserves more precedence.

Once upon a time I decided I wanted to learn how to build my own website. I taught myself HTML and thought I was god. After a reality check, I decided to give Perl a try, gave up and started reading about C before a friend, Douglas Tyler, turned me on to PHP and I was hooked. I soon joined the online community codewalkers.com where I was quickly promoted to a moderator. As a thanks for my dedication and involvement, the owner at the time, Matt Wade, decided on a complete whim that he would ask for donations and send me to the first ever PHP Architect conference which took place on a cruise ship in the Bahamas. The cruise was an interesting experience, but not exactly a life-changing one as I thought it might be. Everyone was very warm and welcoming, but I couldn't help but ask myself what I was doing there. I was certainly no seasoned professional like the rest of them, just some punk kid who was lucky to be there. The trip lead to a few small contract jobs with PHP Architect, and another conference in Chicago 3 years later, but nothing more.

While writing book reviews on codewalkers, I was contacted by someone from Sams Publishing (Pearson Education) who asked me if I'd like to be a technical editor for an upcoming release which I of course accepted. That eventually lead to me authoring my first book through Sams. One of the ladies I met through Sams ended up leaving to go work for another publisher who had recently acquired the Wrox series, which lead to yet another book that I co-authored. It would seem I was on the road to success, but I still didn't feel like I was going anywhere.

In 2009, I got married. My wife is a Japan native, so between the cost and time of traveling back and forth to meet her family, I ended up taking a break from web development and settled for full time unrelated work at a local hospital. She is still struggling with English, doesn't drive, and there is zero Japanese community in the area where we live so I am the sole support and we are financially stressed out of our minds. I've been attempting to learn Japanese, but without the possibility of immersion it is extremely slow going. So here we are now, no idea where we will end up or if we'll even stay together, and I'm trying to get my feet wet in web development once again.

Through yet another friend from my codewalker days, Timothy Boronczyk, I've been writing for PHPMaster which is an awesome gig, but it pretty much just helps me get to my next paycheck. I'm not complaining; I enjoy the work, but it's only a part time thing.

I've applied for countless jobs, locally, out of state and even international, but nothing ever seems to pan out. I know I'm not alone as the world economy is in flux, and I suppose it doesn't help that I still don't have a clue what I want to do with my life career wise. I know that I love development, but I don't care at all for the commercialism that seems to dominate the field. I want to work on a project that is doing something educational and not just trying to make a sale. I want to take my time writing code that is new rather than hacking a bunch of libraries together to get it done fast.

I keep jumping all over the place and I feel obligated to give back to the community that has treated me so well. If I could just focus my energy on something specific, but what that something is eludes me. It feels more like I'm waiting than anything else. Waiting for what... Another year? I still feel like I'm that punk kid just lucky to be here.

December 24 2011, 5:40 pm
Misc : Comments (4)

Spam me if you can

Ever since I've had a few of my blogs linked to on other more popular websites, namely phpdeveloper.org, I've been getting a fair share of comment spam. I was just banning IPs which worked okay up until tonight. I haven't been able to sleep because my phone keeps dinging with a new comment notification every 20 minutes or so from a dynamic IP. I'm not losing sleep because of frustration, but rather the fact that I love a good challenge and my brain can't shut down while the wheels are turning.

My comments are setup to be non-intrusive on purpose. I welcome those who wish to remain anonymous; I certainly can't expect anyone to register an account for my personal (who the hell is this guy?) blog. I don't like CAPTCHA images or similar measures of spam prevention because it forces visitors to jump through hoops for what should be my problem. I'm the one being attacked, and there really is no excuse to make my site less user-friendly just because I'm too lazy to sift through a little spam.

After studying my bots behavior I noticed something curious... It always fills out optional fields. That makes a lot of sense, actually. Why would a bot designed to crawl the web and spam different websites bother to check if certain fields are required or not? That would be hit and miss, especially when you consider that a lot of websites don't even make it clear which fields are required until you click the submit button.

In order to confirm my hypothesis, I added a completely arbitrary field to my comment form, set the display to hidden so no human beings see it, and sure enough the bot is still filling it out. Spam avoided. Additionally, I proceed to display a "success" message just so they don't have any reason to probe further.

I'm sure it isn't fool proof, but I could further expand it to generate random arbitrary fields and hide them using different methods. I can't imagine why a spammer would go out of their way to target my website specifically, and modifying their bot to recognize required fields might just be more trouble than it's worth?

We shall see, shan't we. Your move, spammer.

November 12 2011, 4:35 am
Web Dev : Comments (3)

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