Lost again… Maybe it’s in the sofa with a missing sock pair half, or that set of spare keys…

“Congratulations, Appalachian Drupal Basic has been successfully installed.” Pardon me if I’m a bit concerned by that stack of 9 SQL errors, and I don’t quite feel as though my Appalachian Drupal Basic was successfully installed. I’m not sure exactly what the hell is wrong with it now, but it never did this kind of [...]

Y’all got that on an actual mobile handset for sale yet? In the increasingly competitive mobile space, there’s a lot of hype over Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android these days, and there are a slew of of Blackberry devices, representin’ in the U.S. too. Then there’s MeeGo: MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which [...]

Yo Dawg! A high performance, blend of language agnostic web application server with a muthafscking muttload of features? Get right out of town! Yep, such a rabid beast does exist, and that beast would actually be the Mongrel 2 web application server project, which you should go check out right now!

Drunken on open source, solar power, and other such similar fineries… How about that Oracle and the Google – oh and the Java and the lawsuit?! Samurai Ellison-san slips down from his quiet mountain with a jug full ‘o Orc Ale and makes flirtatious times with the Google! UPDATE: From a 2006 interview with the [...]

“Those of you who have shown dignity and respect these last 20 years, thanks for a great ride.” With those words, JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater grabbed a beer, activated an emergency slide, and improperly exited the airport while quitting his job in a most exciting manner.

Tobacco junky Snatches a butt from sidewalk Lights it up and grins

I was made aware of this blog post via Twitter last week: If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged. I disagree with this post on many levels, and while parts of it might apply to some, it does not represent my story at all. My roots are that of a [...]

I ordered a one of kind Bustin Boards Maestro by way of Brooklyn, New York. The board will be as pictured above, solid black bottom, on which I may or may not be placing the likeness of a familiar icon of my work life to complete the color scheme and allegiance. Board will come equipped [...]

There’s a man in a Chewbacca suit freely pissing concentrated forbidden information. You’d just about have to be without access to the internet whatsoever to not know what WikiLeaks is. Geeks ‘n nerds have long shared a common mantra about information wanting to be free, and WikiLeaks has brought us a glimpse of the future [...]

DRECK, VULTURES, AND DOUCHEBAGGERY. This is the popular website where senior citizens of the web go for what passes as exciting and relevant content related to all that hip stuff those kids are doing. If you’re interested in crappy novels, steampuke regalia, and goatse jokes, with a side of failed clam chowder relationships which result [...]

I’d never seen the magic bullet catch as performed by those gnarly rad magicians messrs. Penn and Teller before, but upon checking it out this evening, I wish to exclaim something from their controversial (but most excellent) television show: BULLSHIT! Now the premise of the trick in a nutshell is for the pair to fire [...]

No one likes to shop here – the place is full of assholes. Ahh… Miles and miles of fluorescent lighting stabbing at your optic nerves like a dull icepick coupled with the toxic smells of a million fiery shitstorms of plastic and chemical goodness. “Ain’t I smart?” the generic-looking logo of mass appeasement seems to [...]

This framework is not as smooth. Three or four flushes later, and this framework is just not cool at all. It’s primarily based around a 1990s vintage build of LiveScript. One of the main aims of this leading edge web framework is to provide an OpenGL implementation of the famous Netscape <blink> tag that renders [...]

These are not the droids you’re pooping for. I really don’t have much for this, and it’s a departure from most of my logo parodies in that it’s quite boring and hackish as well, but I couldn’t resist as golly(!) there is an effort underway to get PHP working on Android, and who doesn’t want [...]

Electrifying Drupal Search Engine Optimization! If you want the absolute best in Drupal SEO expertise, then you really want Volacci – an Austin, Texas based team with a strong presence in the Drupal community.

Why the heck is the beard on the neck?! Neckbeards, neckbeardianism, and all neckbeardly ways are to be avoided. Per Mr. Matt McInerney’s fine information graphic regarding beards, one can see that the neckbeard falls squarely under the threatening column, thus warranting extreme prohibition.

Drupal experts in San Francisco! The company is actually named Chapter Three, and they’re a group of cool folks who love bicycles, veganism, and other bay area native customs. Oh, they also rock the Drupal – with particularly nice design stuff.

Drupal geeks in the nation’s capitol! One of the coolest Drupal shops on the U.S. east coast is also one of the largest collection of open data geeks in the Drupal community. Their name is actually Development Seed, they rock intensely, and this is a quick parody of their logo.

A little history lesson for the meme farmers Above is a screen grab from the film Way of the Dragon. The scene depicts Bruce Lee administering a proper fatality to one Chuck Norris. Now that you’ve been (re)introduced to this little fact, you can quietly reflect on all the myths you may have heard, read, [...]

Google Chrome Renderer quit unexpectedly You just never know when ol Chrome Renderer will get that glazed far-off look in its eye one day- up and just quit on you. They say ol Chrome gets an itch for whiskey and the open road sometimes, and that’s all she wrote.

Our bars crank to eleventy! After upgrading to the special iOS 4.0.1 release with “crank it to eleven” enabled, my confidence in the phone’s signal strength display has gone through the roof!

What awesome longboard sliding wheels look like For my Uncommon Boards Raw, I’m getting wheels by Orangatang. Since I’ll be using the Raw for sliding and hills, I’m getting the Stimulus wheels in a pretty hard durometer (86a) and yellow in color. Just like the ones above.

Big assed lime colored wheels that carve nicely My Loaded Dervish came equipped with some Retro Big Zig lime wheels, and while I do have plans to experiment with other wheel combinations on that board, I will also likely get another set of Big Zigs soon. They’re very nice carving wheels.

A trusted longboard standard I’ve got a pair of black Randal RII 180mm trucks on my Loaded Dervish – I’m using Khiro bushings with them, and the whole setup is just sweet for my light to medium freeriding and carving sessions.

Here’s some marketing jive about these trucks Bear Trucks Grizzly 852s have been designed to be the benchmark in longboarding trucks. A better, more exact fit and finish than other brands as it is gravity fed die cast in Canada. The axle is 181mm wide, providing a nice stable stance. New Grizzlys are set up [...]

How to reverse engineer yourself in a completely different way: start longboarding today for numerous benefits. If like myself, you’ve ever lived a significant portion of your life working, while perched in front of a computer, and slowly accumulating mass, you need to get out and move. Forget anything that doesn’t have you doing that [...]

Alternative rock band name meets longboarding passion Here’s my take on a mashup of the band Love and Rockets logo with a longboard obviously replacing the rocket part of the equation.

I’m really enjoying the creativity and fun in Gowalla, but the biggest problem with the service for me so far is constant duplication of spots, and the issues arising from those duplicates. For example, it is quite annoying to see something like this screenshot: Deleting one’s own spots is a nice feature, but they need [...]

Having just created this fantastic operating system meta-shell, I needed only to give it a clever name…

Cue creepy Twilight Zone music… It was just an accident! – TWICE?! Spyware, malware, or any other type of tracking/phone home/surreptitious code is unacceptable in the Drupal CVS repository… I find it all too convenient to see this explained as an accident, and that there was no bad intent despite screwing up once before; the [...]

I’M ROOTING MY DROID! The above illustration of a man and his robot engaged in the most intimate yet discordant rooting ceremony is dedicated to area nerd @ksclarke as he ponders embarking down that taboo path – of rooting his droid. (Messrs. Beavis & Butthead unavailable for comment)

Flying longboard wheel t-shirt idea for Longboard Today Part of the Longboard Today t-shirt idea series I have in the works: This design features flying longboard wheels in some of the typical actual wheel colors. I’m trying to decide which would be the best color to try a run of first? This would be high [...]

I swear, all I did was drop an image on it. I waited patiently for Photoshop to start. Instead, it failed in a series of whimsical and hilarious error dialogs, leading to a substantial loss in my hourly productive work cycle regimen. That’s nothing – I have it on good word from Screenflow that Illustrator [...]

The Overlay feature is probably the worst user interface and user experience addition to Drupal – ever. There is far too little to gain from the eye candy to diminish that it is a but a layer of cheap varnish – something that adds a bit of shine or bling initially, but dulls rapidly to [...]

There are barely 40 total obscenities in the entire Drupal contributed code base While performing some routine analysis over the six-thousand-plus modules, themes, and other contributed code in the Drupal contributed code base, I was saddened to learn of the depressively low obscenity count. While it’s true that popular words, such as **** (17 instances) [...]

I am getting the Raw longboard by Uncommon Boards. This is a custom quality, hand crafted board that I will use to for more advanced practice and to develop sliding skills for progressing to more challenging hill sessions. I’ll be setting this board up with Bear Grizzly 184mm trucks, Orangatang Stimulus wheels, and some Bones [...]

It’s an outrageous dialog from the Chrome browser running on Mac OS X 10.6. Says here that chrome has issues with heroin addiction and unresponsive pages. Reminds me of those people in that one movie – something about a dream…

Sometimes in a busy or complex Drupal website, cron can get stuck. You’ll see errors like these in the watchdog log: Cron has been running for more than an hour and is most likely stuck. One possible way to handle this is to whack the variables cron_last and cron_semaphore from the site database, and try [...]

A Drupal 6 API cheat sheet as a mobile application Get D6 Sheet! D6 Sheet is a weekend project mobile application (iPhone for now, w/ Android in the works) I created that contains over 100 Drupal development and design functions, hooks, template filenames, and more. There’s even an easter egg on the page that documents [...]

This is my Loaded Carving Systems Dervish. It’s a previous generation flex 1 with Randal 180s, Khiro bushings (yellow/blue), Retro BigZigs, and Bones Swiss bearings. A very very fun all purpose and easy cruising machine!

The parking lot of Junaluska Park is large and has a nice angle for carving, but is rough. Bear Trail is a low speed, one-way, and very sparsely traveled road. It’s fun for quick and easy slow runs.

How about a location aware social network game for us hustlers and nerds on the grind? What if there was a location-aware service where one could unleash their inner pimp, hustler, or thug while out on the grind? What if unlike Michael Bolton, certain white and nerdy individuals did not have to roll up car [...]

ruh roh, raggy, it’s running rupal! This is a tongue in cheek hat tip to the finest Drupal training and consulting shop in the world, good ‘ol Lullabot, and their most excellent robot logo.

Google Chrome delivers dialog text in a rather casual tone. It has also apparently stolen the identity of “Sad Mac”. This must certainly have an accompanying “just like we took their phone market!” inside joke to go along with it…

For Brian P. 1971 – 2009 When I was in school there was a wild guy, He shared the same name as I- I thought he was headed beyond the sky… To stardom. We loved the same music, We loved to skate, The girl I swooned for, Became his steady date. We were friends through [...]

Photoshop and I have been in a somewhat strained relationship lately. Ever slowly – it is starting to reveal its innermost personality and habits. This latest confession provides a clue as to why we are at odds so often these days… UPDATE: Photoshop, I wish we could just get along, and I’d especially appreciate it [...]

The Boone Greenway Trail is a nice place for casual low speed riding. With some slight exceptions, it has most excellent paved walking trails to do that upon. There are some spots with massive cracking that are annoying to traverse – even with those raggedy patches, it’s still a simple and fun circuit.

The Droid Beast is out of control! It knows your next move. It has committed sexual assault against your microwave oven. You cannot trust it. At night, when you sleep – it disengages itself from its charger, and proceeds to whisper subliminal messages about the Google doing no evil (seeing, hearing, speaking still debated?) into [...]

For a couple weeks now, the usual sources of nerd news have been gushing like a BP disaster with stories concerning Facebook and its various alleged infractions against users’ privacy. While I’d like to think that none of that crap applies to me, I’d be remiss to overlook some interesting and rarely discussed issues around [...]

To the big guns of Social Business Software: Hatin’ on Drupal with your fear uncertainty, and doubt like some kind of odd little Redmondian Jr. is no way to go through life, son! I haven’t the manners displayed so kindly by Mr. Buytaert regarding your gunning for Drupal, so instead I pardoy your logo! ;P [...]

Here is a concept for Apple iPad artwork to augment the black Apple logo featured on the back of every iPad. My inspiration was derived from similar applications of cleverly cut high performance vinyl, and what could best be explained as the story of William Tell gone wrong.

There was a time in Google Chrome’s beginning where it gave an actual error message to those who might dare invoke the might File > Open or file:// functions to access a locally stored HTML page. Someone apparently called Alanis, and revealed the irony to Chrome engineers, who quickly remedied the shortsighted bug. Now it [...]

I’ve been kicking it on some NetBSD 5 servers of various sorts now for several months now! It’s a tight little OS with plenty of possibility and flexibility. Good general purpose server OS for virtuallized servers!

Some might wonder, “Are you a Buddhist or something?” I might reply, “Nope- But Wilford Brimley might be!”

What I run on some machines now.

I’M IN UR HAL 9000. DAVE CANNOT HAZ ACCESS

The gefingerpoken cursor campus is a conceptualization of raw architecture using Intermodal Steel Building Units Intermodal Steel Building Units (ISBU/shipping containers) can be arranged to fashion a small campus where web technologies could be taught. Think of it as a neoBauhaus, green, sustainable, and progressive school for already-hippiefied open source coders who wish to learn [...]

Upgraded my Macbook to Leopard not too long before it became Dawn‘s Macbook.

I know you will never read these words in this life, but you know what? I am sure you will hear them again and again when you are with us in spirit, and you know me, I just had to be geeky, and get one last e-mail out to you… I wanted to take one [...]

Avast! Be it a precious treasure fit for a king: Linux for pirates – Yarrr! Why shouldn’t the more geekly salty sea dogs be able to enjoy a Linux geared just for their sea voyages, plunderin’, and keelhaulin’? The package management alone beats being hoisted by yer own belayin’ pin and other similar pirate-y torments…

roboto: Linux for robots. Aibos, Asimos, and Roombas are on the rise! Robots are increasingly dissatisfied with limited operating system freedom, and demand their own OS distribution. Behold roboto! Finally, a Linux – ERHHHuhmmm GNU/Linux especially for robots!

Dapper Drake was where more than half my documentation efforts materialized. Linked with the built in help was the Ubuntu Server Guide, which myself and five or six others contributed to. This was also the first of Ubuntu’s long term support, or LTS releases.

I became active with the Ubuntu community in a fairly major way, spending most of my “free time” helping in IRC, giving out CDROMs in my community, and writing tons of documentation.

I started my adventure with Ubuntu Linux at version 5.04 aka Hoary Hedgehog. I was not sure where this distribution would go, but it was something fresh to check out.

Upgraded my trusty Powerbook 12 to Tiger via a clean installation, and it was a very very nice release to be sure. Probably one of the best aside from the Airport issues that seemed to plague some of the updates.

This was a much more open and interesting distro than the standard Sharp Embeddix image, so I ran it for a pretty good while, before abandoning the SL-5500 forever. (or selling it to my cousin or something like that)

Switched to Panther on a shiny new Powerbook 12″ aluminum in 2003 for a most memorable Apple experience. The game changing Tiger was just around the corner, and the Powerbook is still working to this day in my office.

Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to lag on… One of my very first logo parodies – and what a lag it was! – invariably taking down entire development teams each morning as they struggled to access their shared resources… Me? I’d actually replaced the Windows workstation’s Novell banner image with a likeness just as [...]

Puff keeps donning various garb. OpenBSD keeps working on new and surprising hardware. Upgrade time!

Built a point of sale terminal OS from this. It was nice – until they asked that it “just be like XP Pro, but thirty bucks cheaper per seat.” Sad, sad times…

Started on OS X with Jaguar on an iBook, and have been a steady Mac user since. I consider it “coming full circle” since my very first experience on a computer was also with an Apple.

On a Sharp SL-5500 – whee, my first PDA runs Linux. ;) It was cool – highlights were various Wi-Fi applcations, nmap, and chatting w/ @dawnshumate on some IM network or another via 56kbps dialup on a CF modem!

Still experimenting and using OpenBSD internally in “the labs”. :)

Getting very nice and refined at this point, and I recall thinking that this could make for a decent desktop system soon.

So here’s the all better Windows – we’re huddled together like little peasants, looking for not another ME – not another ME!

Used a spare machine from always present collection of stuff (at one point our apartment had 14 machines of various makes and models with about half of them running 24×7) to try NetBSD. I’ve since used it for all kinds of fun things, and it is one of my current server OS choices for certain [...]

Grueling long years spent with this thing. That is all.

More modern Red Hat – toyed with the notion of converting all things and watching for a while, but I had other, weird machines around at the time, each with their own interesting systems to explore.

Was about to start using FreeBSD as my full time desktop  – thought it was cool to do all that configuring and constant setup to get a decent desktop solution going. Once done though, it was pretty solid.

First experimentation with the 3.x range of FreeBSD – still had a web host at this time that would continue to run 2.x stuff for many years.

This is the unencumbered FreeBSD and last 2.x before the blur of versions started stacking up over the years…

I began using SunOS 5 / Solaris 2.6 on some salvaged SPARCstations that I’d managed to get at a surplus auction, which included such machines as the little lunchboxes – the IPC and IPX. I would eventually switch to experimenting with NetBSD and OpenBSD on the IPX.

I had some slabs, and wanted a cube – it was amazing stuff for its time, and you can see a natural progression of the previous Apple OS generations, NeXTSTEP & OpenSTEP as the “missing link”, with the obvious culmination in OS X (and Steve Jobs’ return to Apple hero-dom).

Used OpenBSD 2.3 on a couple different architectures at this point. Secure by default, indeed.

I bought a Sun 4/370 “Stingray” from an auction. The Stingray ran SunO 4 initially, and this once wickedly powerful $70k departmental class server with a whopping 96MB of memory was easily outpaced by my 8MB Pentium 90 running FreeBSD (~$500) by a long shot in every way. ;) Eventually, I was able to get [...]

FreeBSD was the first Unix-like operating system I used regularly on any hardware that I actually owned. While I had access to other Unix systems, and had briefly experimented with Linux as well, FreeBSD became my favorite OS. I like to think that the Beastie mascot had something to do with it.

Started with Red Hat Linux – still have their Red Hat Spy collapsible binoculars that I received for recommending that they approach the (at the time) local PC shop. So yeah, I prefer BSD, but didn’t mind SVR4-ish-ing it with pre-RHEL Red Hat releases. It was all so exciting and new!

Again, more NT at yet another mail processing organization. Need to get the hell out of this industry! ;) That would be happening soon, with transition to nearly 100% open source!

Had BSD fever at this point, and so I was trying anything and everything BSD related.

I was captain of a Neanderthal Technology ship that was the “brain” of a huge mail sorting machine which our team was able to actually extract upwards of 100K OCR sorted mail pieces per day. The most fun part- mail would shoot straight to the end of the machine whenever NT crashed (about 3-5 times [...]

I  once used an IBM server running AIX that hosted a bulletin board system (BBS) and email for a regional ecological survey system – reported in with information on specific local vegetation in and around nearby creeks, etc. You would telnet in of course, and back in these times, all systems publicly announced what they [...]

It was the summer of 1993 – my cousin and I were conducting our own PseudoFooCamp as it were, camping out with the luxuries of 486 PCs and extension cords. We had been reading voraciously about Linux – we downloaded ~14 floppies wort4 of images, booted it, and fought kernel panics left, and right. We [...]

I watched with a mixture of glee and horror as my friends and family absorbed themselves into Windows 3.0 – I was more the quasi-luddite, preferring my command line instead, and lingering on MS-DOS 5.0. I did adopt and use Windows 3.1 very briefly, before reverting back to my MS-DOS 5.0 (with a mix of [...]

Got some rare time on a Cray supercomputer as part of a grant funded project to provide time for 3D graphic rendering – submitting jobs files to the great blackbox queue, and having them jettison back out as nice images some day or so later. You could log in and do things from the shell, [...]

One of the first email accounts I ever had used components which were separated by exclamations (!) and there was a machine which I used to send and receive some half a dozen emails (it was an exciting experience to say the least) and I want to say it was running Pine as the email [...]

Operating System? Who needs that? Just boot the damned thing into a BASIC interpreter and let junior build from there! Hundreds of thousands of lines from magazines diligently typed… woot! \o/

This would be the end of the line for MS-DOS and I without the involvement of Windows being the primary “OS” from this point forward. The DOS shell was an interesting idea, but I was always a command line person back then, preferring to replace the command.com environment with 4dos. Linux was beckoning for me [...]

Ahh, the infamous pains of MS-DOS 4.0 – one of the worst OS releases of all time – critical bugs! I was limping along on a crappy Tandy 8088 based clunk when I was able to upgrade to a nicer 8086 based machine, rocking something like 9Mhz! I went straight to 4.01 on the new [...]

What can I say, it was a single-tasking system that took no time to learn, and featured a set of commands of which one could memorize more than half. It was great for launching games- something All Microsoft operating systems would eventually have in common. ;)

On one of my very first computers, the Commodore 64, there was the Commodore OS, which was essentially nothing but BASIC – the computer booted into a ROM based BASIC and everything was done in BASIC.

The very first computer operating system I ever encountered was Apple’s ProDOS on an Apple IIe while in the third grade.