Communiqué

Hi, I'm Fred L., and I... am a backspace-aholic.
(All: Hi Fred.)

For someone in this line of work, I have a somewhat odd affliction: I can't stand the sound of people typing. It drives me up the wall.

I've tried my best to try and live life under the protective cover of headphones, but socially that really isn't healthy. When my headphones aren't hiding me, I can hear the typing; the clickity-clackity sounds rattling all around me. Every key produces a different noise, like a tiny piano of crackling cacophony.

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Memorial Day honors U.S. men and women who died in military service. Robert Wilde, my great-uncle, did not die in military service but his story deserves a little honor and recognition on this fine day.

Robert Wilde, or Uncle Bob, grew up in Boston, served in WWII, and managed teams of computer programmers before most of the world knew what a computer was.

Born as Robert Wild in the mid-1920's, by 1943 he was ready to join the U.S. Army. However, he was only 17 years old, which was one year too young to sign up for the military. Being the resourceful, determined youth that he was, he got a fake identification card, and a couple months later, he was stationed on an island in the English Channel, a proud member of the U.S. Army Rangers. Read More

Hello folks!
Time again to talk about aliens! No, not the illegal kind. The green kind! What better way to kickoff the summer spirit than with explosions, death rays, and a little stormy weather - thanks to our friend, Photoshop.

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It's May in New England, and that means three things:

1. flowers are blooming
2. lawns are turning green
3. the Red Sox have a decent lead over the Yankees

As with every spring, the Sox appear to be unstoppable. By the end of July, however, all will change in quaint New England. It will be wicked hot. Everybody's lawns, gardens, and flower beds will start dying or turning yellow. And the Sox will see their springtime lead disappear as the Yankees burn it up, like a newborn left out on a sunny Cape Cod beach.

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One of my least favorite challenges is getting the servicemark to display on a web site. The servicemark is "A word, phrase, logo, symbol, color, sound or smell used by a business to identify a service and distinguish it from those of its competitors." (www.leanlegal.com) So pretty much if you name a service you provide, you'll want to throw a servicemark after the name to prevent other people from using the same name.

With a little Googling, you are sure to find that the servicemark is the unicode character U+2120. So logically you would think, "Hey, there must be an html entity for that!" Right you are! Read More

Just yesterday Blue Security closed up shop, ending one of the most successful campaigns against spammers ever. While Blue Security did prove that spammers can be effectively stopped, they failed to follow through. As a result it is likely the 450,000 users of the service will now be bombarded with even more spam. So, while I am disappointed with the recent turn of events, I think Blue Security really should be commended for their contributions. In addition their model should be adopted and improved upon to help eliminate the scourge spam. Read More

That's it.

I think the time has come for us to officially blow the whistle, for the general threat of the embedded MIDI file has been eradicated. Read More

Part 3 of 3 / Configuration

I know it's been a while since Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Sorry for the long delay. I imagine thousands, if not millions, of inquisitive geeks out there with their FreeBSD servers ready to go. Apache, PHP, and MySQL are installed, and they're just waiting, reloading the iMarc blog every couple hour, wondering..."Now What?"

Well the wait is over, my furry little geek friends. Cancel your World of Warcraft membership and do what real men do - run a UNIX web server.

In this lesson, we configure Apache and serve up a PHP page.

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Everyone loves a quickie!
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