NerdHappens.com

Today I woke up and SciTE wasn't cutting it for me anymore. I write PHP at work, and Python at home, and I need an IDE that will work for both since I hate switching editors. First, I ruled out emacs and xemacs because they lack any visual appeal whatsoever. JD is probably rolling his eyes at me right now. Zend Studio, which my employer licenses, is only good for PHP and smells like Elf Puke (™ Alex Balashov) thanks to the Java. Eclipse is kind of clunky and slow. I used Komodo for awhile, and it was my favorite of the heavyweight editors, but it still wasn't quite perfect, and for $300 out of my pocket it had ...

My friend and comrade Alex Balashov along with Kelly Storm have launched their venture Evariste Systems online. A link to the company's blog is also on my navigation menu. Please stop by their site and take a look at their innovative products in telecom and analytics.

Without much fanfare, AT&T (formerly BellSouth) began offering naked DSL in the Southeast region last week. This is DSL service unbundled from local phone service. It is currently only available by calling customer service at 1-888-757-6500 and asking for "bundle 97". Pricing is:

1.5Mb - $37.95
3.0Mb - $42.95
6.0Mb - $47.95

I ordered the 6Mb last week and received my modem yesterday. I paid no deposit or modem fee(modem is $7.50 a month) since I am an existing AT&T (Cingular) customer. So far I have not yet hit 6Mb down or 512Kb up, but I am pretty close (I ran these tests during internet "rush hour" last night). Very happy with the ...

After stumbling around the Ubuntu repository a bit more this weekend, I found Mirage. F-Spot and gThumb are both cool in terms of features, but they choke very badly when loading a directory with 11,000 images into their side browser. Without that browser, it is not possible to use back/forward functionality. Mirage is blazing fast, light in terms of features, and simple. Although it is only rated at 3 stars in terms of popularity, I give it a 5.

As a recent Windows convert to Linux (Ubuntu specifically), one of the biggest obstacles was getting used to gFTP. It is clunky, ugly, and tough to navigate IMO. However, I accepted that it was the status quo and I should just deal with it. Being curious the other night, I googled a bit. It turns out that FileZilla is in the beta stage of being ported to Linux. Even better, it is available in the Ubuntu Feisty repository.

sudo apt-get install filezilla

That's it! Even though it is beta, I have had no issues yet and I am very pleased to have my old friend back.

After a lengthy period of absence, my site is now back online. Quite a few things aren't working just yet since the site isn't finished. I got tired of looking at the coming soon page so I thought I'd just put what I had done up here. More to come soon. Back to work.