Computer

After reading Tips for how to decouple your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I was struck by how stupid I’ve been marking up my HTML for CSS and JS events. I started rewriting my latest project using these principles and they’ve really helped create a separation of concerns. To illustrate how this has helped, I was coding up a quick administrative interface to CRUD some service model classes in my project and I started to really hate the UI/UX I chose. I decided to switch to a table since the data is more tabular in nature and I was quite please to see that none of the JavaScript functionality broke. ...

In yesterday’s post I explained some weird activity in my RAID backup server. Well, it turns out that it was just calm before the storm. Thankfully, that storm was nothing more than a little rain. The backup server started working again, without issue, after I pushed the drives back into place. When I awoke today I noticed that the disk status light beside drive 1 was off. I tried reseating it but the light would not go back on. I figured that maybe something happened to the circuitry in the unit and the LED is no longer receiving power. ...

It turns out that the heating and cooling of the unit over the past 5 years caused the HDDs to slip out of their connectors. All I needed to do was nudge 3 out of 4 of them back into place (I didn’t need to reseat them, just push them back in) and the unit started working again. Crazy. This incident now has me thinking about backups for my backups. ...

For this website I decided to use a VPS instead of using a shared host or a PaaS like Heroku. I figured that I need to keep my system administrator skills up to date, and there is no better way to do this (as someone who works from home) than to run everything myself. Running a VPS is also much more affordable than using Heroku, so that’s another win. As for shunning shared hosts, the reason I didn’t go down that route is simply because I’m tired of using cPanel or any UI, because I am much more comfortable on a command-line interface. Oddly enough, I find that cPanel (and its ilk) make things more difficult for me to understand, possibly because I overthink how to perform a simple task. ...

In order to fully attain my merit badge for renaissance man, I am going to state a few goals of mine that will be started this year and may take until the end of next year to complete (mainly because I have to care for my daughter, which is a full-time job). These goals are in varying disciplines, but fulfill things that I have always wanted to learn as well as something that will help me in life (sooner or later). I don’t mind learning information that I may never use in life* but if I am going to spend money on learning I am going to ensure I get a positive ROI from it. These goals also dovetail into the new business opportunies that my company, JustPlainSimple Technologies Inc. would like to explore. In no particular order, here they are: ...