Zac Garrett

It’s hard to remember the number of times I’ve went to update this site and just drawn a blank. Writers block is a horrible state that happens to just about everyone. Skribit is a way to get around that. It allows your readers to suggest ideas and then vote on them. It is about the best idea for a widget I’ve seen in a long while. However it is still in public beta and has its flaws. Continue Reading »

In my attempt to keep up on podcasts I finally gave up with Miro and found a great shell script called BashPodder. This is a very simple script that keeps all of your podcasts up to date with very little effort. It was missing a few features that I wanted, so I updated the script and am now releasing it to the general public under the GPL. Continue Reading »

Leopard seems to have a problem when you have more than two DNS servers set. As soon as I added a third DNS server to the list all connections nearly dropped out. It would take over five seconds to load any page.

The fix to this problem is to use only two DNS servers. I choose OpenDNS as their servers are reliable. I don’t like the ads they put on the pages when you type a domain wrong, but the benefits are good enough to look over this issue.

When dealing with clean URLs it usually means some complex regex for each and every single type of content. When using lighttpd and wordpress there is a much simplifier solution, 404 rewrites. All you need to do is add an error handler to your lighttpd.conf and a single line of php  to your theme.

The first step is to add the following to lighttpd.conf for the domain:

server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php?error=404″

The next step is to make sure your actual 404 page gives the 404 error. In your templates 404.php you need to add the following to the top of the file:

 <?php header(”HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found”); ?>

Once you get these two settings in place you will be able to set the custom permalinks to whatever you would like.

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr is a new book about how the IT department does not matter. What the book really represents is hunk of wasted paper chalked full of inaccuracies without any real backing. To be honest I’ve only read the first chapter and cannot read any further.

The book starts out with a story in the prologue about how the author met with some people in Boston who showed him that IT could be a utility. It asserted that this was his idea from some previous book he wrote. The story itself was boring and meaningless. It didn’t grab my attention nor was there any good information to keep me reading. Continue Reading »

Does anyone still fall for the Network Solutions scam anymore? I mean, $34.99 for a single domain registration for one year? The most you will ever spend at godaddy is $9.99 and that’s without any discounts.

This is the first time a renewal has came up on a domain in my current job. I can say for a fact that we will be moving to another registrar before paying another penny to Network Solutions.

Does anyone still use Yahoo as a search engine? Whenever I get the urge to use yahoo for some reason I stop after only a few searches. The reason for this is their horrible results. When I use a search engine today I am looking for an answer to a question and I want it now. With yahoo the result I actually want sometimes is a few pages deep. This is unacceptable today. Continue Reading »

Someone talking about copyright sounds boring right? Well, this is the first talk I have seen on the subject that is quite interesting. Larry Lessig explains whats wrong with copyright at TED.

Update: It should be noted that this site is now running on Wordpress. The very latest version of WP fixes most of my problems and with the plugins available it suits my needs better.

I’ve been running this site for nearly a year now and I have learned a ton. I started out by using Wordpress as I had no idea what else to use. I quickly learned that the software left me with a lot to be desired and I was on the search for something better. After hearing a tip by the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, I found Serendipity (S9Y). This script was exactly what I was looking for, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Continue Reading »

The more I use google’s services the more I find that they do not use SSL by default. As someone who knows how easy it is to eavesdrop on clear text I would love to see google encrypt everything with SSL by default. Most of their services will work with SSL, but you have to manually go to the right URL for it to work. Continue Reading »