I’m Mike

The Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia application created by Macromedia (now a division of Adobe Systems). Flash Player features support for both vector and raster graphics, along with a scripting language and bidirectional streaming of video and audio content. The player is a virtual machine that runs Flash files, which are often embedded in websites to present animations, games, GUIs, or other visual interestingness. If you’re reading this website, you probably know all of this. What you might not know is that Flash sucks. It is the bane of the Internet, and it needs to go away. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve spent some time on a Unix or Unix-like machine (e.g., Linux, OS X, Solaris, etc.) then you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with the concept of a load average. A system’s load average can be easily determined from the Unix shell by running the uptime command:

mmalone@www:~$ uptime
 15:37:38 up 133 days,  3:37,  3 users,
    load average: 0.37, 0.37, 0.41

The load average is also displayed by the w and top commands, and by pretty much every system monitoring package on the planet. But what the heck is a load average, exactly? Read the rest of this entry »

While I’m primarily a developer, I end up spending a lot of time working with CSS and other front end technologies. I’ve learned a lot about CSS, but I don’t use it enough to have really good habits and often end up with superfluous selectors and bloated code. So when Tom Armitage’s CSS Redundancy Checker popped up in my feed reader I was intrigued. Tom’s solution is simple, elegant, and reasonably quick. But it’s a command line app that requires ruby and some additional packages — not exactly newb (or lazy programmer) friendly. Since I was looking for an excuse to play with Rails a bit more, I decided to write a web front end and build an Online CSS Redundancy Checker on top of Tom’s code. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving users mobile access to data is the latest vogue, but unless you’re a mega-corporation, or have a boat load of funding, it can be prohibitively expensive. If you’re looking into getting a short code and building your own SMS gateway, be forewarned: it’s an arduous process that’ll cost you upwards of $15,000. For the rest of us, 4INFO’s Open Platform is a pretty cool (and FREE) alternative that enables developers, content providers, and bloggers to utilize the 4INFO short code to deliver mobile content. Read the rest of this entry »

The upcoming spectrum auction that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to authorize in the next few weeks has pitted several major technology and telecommunications companies against one another. The current draft rules for the auction set aside some new spectrum (22MHz of the 60MHz up for auction) for an “open” network — unlicensed radio frequency spectrum that can be used by anyone, with a limited set of rules to prevent abuse of this “wireless commons.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re anything like me, you spend far too much time checking your web server stats, and not enough time actually creating content and coding. Thankfully, my logs are always close at hand since I work almost exclusively on the command line. With the help of a few common unix filters, you can quickly gauge how things are going on your site. These commands work with Apache, or Apache compatible log files, and can probably be tweaked to work with other log file formats pretty easily. Read the rest of this entry »

IBM Developer Works just posted a new article discussing a variety of “lightweight” Web Servers. They analyze a number of servers across a variety of dimensions including performance, scalability, security, flexibility, and manageability. The article explains that “while it’s reasonable to assume the market leaders have been carefully optimized to be effectively unbeatable in performance (for example), many tiny competitors are faster for simple service of static Web pages.” This is in line with the results I found when I ran a comparison between longtime stalwart Apache and lightweight newcomer lighttpd. Read the rest of this entry »

John Resig, a programmer working for the Mozilla Corporation and creator of the wonderful jQuery JavaScript library spent last weekend putting together a server-side browser/DOM environment that he’s released on his blog. The application, written entirely in JavaScript, runs on top of Mozilla’s open source JavaScript implementation called Rhino. Read the rest of this entry »

Pownce is “a way to send stuff to your friends.” It’s a one-to-many “social messaging” application like Twitter, but it packs a bunch of additional features (full review). Backed by Digg.com founder and web wunderkind Kevin Rose, Pownce is a high visibility project with a good chance of success. The site held up fairly well to a barrage of traffic after its launch, which made me wonder what makes it tick. Lead developer Leah Culver was kind enough to answer some questions via email. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rather ironic that, while search is nearly ubiquitous on the web, there is no perfect solution for adding search functionality to a web application. Many developers simply use the basic search functionality built into whatever database server they’re using. Until recently, systems that required a more feature-rich, efficient, or flexible search solution had to turn to proprietary commercial software. But this is no longer the case. Apache’s Lucene project has brought the open source community a sophisticated and flexible search solution that rivals most commercial packages. Read the rest of this entry »