(the) Inevitable Corp. RSS

Serving your ass like John McEnroe since 2001!

Steve Mallett About Inevitable

Our Joints: OSDir.com
Twollow

Contact: email

twitter: @comforteagle (not strictly biz at all)

kiva

Archive

Jul
14th
Mon
permalink

Google Analytics Reveals Weirdness to Me

Using the Google Analytics “Site Overlay” tool revealed that many many people are clicking on a piece of OSDir’s layout that ISN’T a hyperlink.

So far I can only assume that these “many” consist of non-English reading peeps who assume, thanks to newer CSS conventions, that it is a link without the blue colouring and underline.

I’ve given them something to click on in the mean time while I cook something up…but I’m thinking that Google Search _is_ site navigation.

permalink

Tools Allowing Me to Sleep Better

1) nginx - a load balancer I have running on ec2 between running instances of osdir.com.  If one goes down the others handle it all.

2) persistentFS - persistent storage for EC2 on S3 which operates exactly like a mounted filesystem.  Rawk! for all you/we who don’t have access to AWS’s persistent storage for EC2 yet.  Also soooooo beautiful for backups (which help me sleep better).

3) Large EC2 instances.  They’re expensive, but the power, my god the power!

4) AWS’s firewalls.  Let AWS block all the badboys (except ports you open).

5) XXXX Firewall.  Not saying which, but it hooks up to iptables automagically.

6) Postfix.  I killled sendmail on one of my servers the other day, installed postfix instead and watched the avg cpu load drop considerably.

Jun
27th
Fri
permalink
permalink

Social Media Defined

“Social Media” has become sad shorthand for people who think airlines, hucksters, and Rails programs have the capacity for human friendship.

Merlin

Jun
26th
Thu
permalink

Maybe Wanted: PHP Programmer

We’re also on the look out for a solid PHP person. LAMP stack a must.

Bonus points for having a bit of a head for business like stuff and/or experience with a web shop.

Moncton a must.

email steve@inevitablecorp.com, subject “php person”, short bio, outline experience, URLs.  God help you if you send me a resume in .doc.

permalink

Wanted: Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence

Small, but successful Web1.0 company looking for a new bright spark as Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence. 

What’s that? All the fun of a startup without all the risk.  Salary to work on your cool apps.

We’re looking for a young programmer with tons of crazy new ideas, but no backing.  Apply if you’re into some of the following & have apps to show that you’ve already built: Rails, Django, Python, Ruby, Erlang, AWS, APIs, SaaS, OSX, Getting Real, Rapid Prototyping.

If you think those areas of interest are complete and utter bullshit, we’d like to hear why too as long as you spit out crazy apps.

We don’t care where you live: “in Residence” just means you’re a part of our company charged with inventing cool stuff.

email heir@inevitablecorp.com, make the subject line “HEIR”, give us your blog and/or twitter URL, a short bio (non attachment), and some URLs of apps you’ve conceived, built & finished. Proceed to Rawk!

Jun
23rd
Mon
permalink
Jun
18th
Wed
permalink
Sometimes you can do the impossible.

Sometimes you can do the impossible.

Jun
16th
Mon
permalink
You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.
Jun
13th
Fri
permalink

...Take My Content... Please!

A pet project of mine has been USPTO patents. That information is a biatch to search. It’s classic need-to-know information for so many, yet you’re bent over roughly to find it. We’re working on this, again, at patents.osdir.com.

Right now what’s there is sketchy and totally incomplete at best, but once we get everything formated correctly & searchable we’re also going to do some plainly dressed html versions & GIVE THEM AWAY. Then do some updates & do it all again. Face it, no one does search better than the Goog so you gotta get it into their sights. How? Give them to everyone to have crawled.

Jun
10th
Tue
permalink

Disabling Kontera

Yikes, Firebug shows kontera slowing down page rendering with more than twenty calls. DISABLED!  Twenty-ish?!

permalink

Bit of a hiatus

I’m going on a bit of a blogging hiatus.  T’is crazy, busy here.

permalink

Jon Udell on hyperlinks vs footnotes

” Nick Carr’s essay in the current Atlantic Monthly crystallizes a lot of what I’ve been feeling for a couple of years about how our use of the Net is changing us. Not co-incidentally I read the essay in the printed magazine whose non-hypertextuality I experienced as a feature, not a bug. (Nick writes: “Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.”

…Part of the answer is to develop — and teach — strategies that enable us to graze on the information commons in the most effective ways. I work hard at that.

But we also need strategies that enable us to retreat from that commons, and to experience sustained attention, deep reading, and quiet contemplation.”

Hyper footnotes might be a nice way to format online work requiring actual thought.

Basically instead of putting hyperlinks within content you make footnotes as per paper, but those are hyperlinks instead.

Jun
9th
Mon
permalink

Extreme A/C

We installed A/C at inevitable global corporate headquarters today.  It involved standing on furniture, cardboard, a swiss army knife & what else… duct tape.  Luckily it also involved a 12000 btu portable A/C unit.

It most definitely was an exercise in doing the simpliest thing that could possibly work.  It won’t & needs a lot more duct tape! And a ladder.

Jun
8th
Sun
permalink

Oreilly.com Distancing Self from Oreilly Network?

Perhaps it’s just an oversight, but an old haunt, the oreilly network, no longer has top banner-tab space on the newly launched oreilly.com site.  There appear to be some links to articles though.