Candidate for Best Web Host
Today I discovered WebFaction by way of the CodeIgniter IRC chat. They came highly recommended, and their main selling point is that they offer 1-click installs of Rails, Django, Trac, SVN, and PHP, among many others.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: they are about the same price as DreamHost. I’m thinking about moving my personal domain over there.
Why Dro Doesn’t Post Much
Ok, so it’s time to explain why I’m so bad at posting. No, it’s not sex, drugs, or rock’n'roll. It’s Kohana, the PHP5 framework that I ended up being the lead developer of.
Around May of 2007, some of the active members of the CodeIgniter community decided to fork CI. There were several reasons for this fork. The main issues were speed of development and how the community was being treated ignored.
We forked, and after a month or so of work, had fixed all of outstanding bugs that CI had, and asked EllisLabs (the creators of CI) to think about making our changes official. They promptly attacked us for trying to help, and more or less told us to GTFO.
Now, many months later, our fork has grown and matured. Kohana is now a very fast PHP5 MVC framework that has a lot of promise. Our first official release is out, and we are had at work on the next release. And it takes a lot of my time.
Cars, Gas, Money, and Maintenance
Today’s topic is a bit more serious than yesterday. Here’s a bit of back story:
My girlfriend’s car (a 1996 Chevy Lumina) recently died. Long story short, it overheated while she was driving it, we got it checked out, and it has a blown head gasket. Price to fix: at least $1600, just to take apart the engine and find out if the cylinders are warped beyond repair. Not worth it, for a $800 car. So begins car shopping, and why I am writing this post.
There are some rules for car maintenance that I think will help everyone: Read more
Ubuntu + Parallels = Pain
It seems that Parallels has some major issues with Ubuntu Server. The kind that make me feel like this guy:
Linux.com: Is my hardware Linux compatible?
Linux.com has a very nice feature about Linux hardware compatibility:
Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available.
I’ve been around the Linux community for the last 3 years, and this article proves something that I always tell people about Linux: You can find anything, you just have to know how and where to look.
Hex Color Picker: God Loves Me Today
I just found Hex Color Picker for OSX. One of the worst things about OSX is that it gives you a severely limited color picking utility, with no way to enter or get a hex code of the color you pick. As a web designer, this makes the OSX color picking utility 100% useless. Today a light shined down and a voice said “search Google for ‘osx color’!” so I did. And now I am happy. Thx voice in teh sky!!1
Mootools: Okay, I’m Impressed
I just came across the Mootools’ demo of Fx.Morph. Impressive.
This effect somehow manages to animate the change between two completely different CSS styles, including halting the effect. Sorry jQuery, you lose this round.
RentACoder: Damn site, you look ugly!
After using RentACoder.com for a week, I really have to ask:
Hey you guys! You should use that awesome website you built to hire someone to make it look nice. Read more
jQuery Plugin: .selection()
Wrote a new plugin today. This one will get the current selection of any input, and also (optionally) change the input. Read more
Isolator.app: Thanks for being perfect
Today I stumbled on Isolator for OSX. I just wanted to say: Thanks, Ben Willmore, Isolator is perfect.
Screenshot shows Isolator in action. It does what it says, exactly. Clutter, kthxbye. Focus, ‘lo.
jQuery showeach() plugin
I needed a recursive way to show each item in set, after the previous item had been shown. I came up with this: Read more
Opacity Plugin for jQuery
About 5 minutes ago, I was in need of a .opacity function for jQuery, so I whipped this up:
Read more
Tez’n'Dro Give You: DreamHost Referrals!
We are offering $20 off the price of opening a DreamHost account. Just enter the promo code TEZNDRO when you checkout and a $20 credit will be applied to your account.
I’ve been a happy customer of DreamHost’s for over a year, and have been very impressed. These guys have amazing customer service for a such cheap hosting, I have no idea how they pull it off.