Things That Work

Here’s a nifty little prank you can pull on a friend (or coworker) with a Mac (works in both Tiger and Leopard). You should be fairly comfortable with working on the command line before you play with this. Also, follow these instructions at your own risk. While this procedure is pretty safe, we are going to be messing with the internal defaults of OS X. I am not responsible if you break your Mac.

Imagine this: You accidentally left your computer unlocked when you left for the evening. When you came back the next day, your wallpaper has been changed to something …humorous. So you sigh, and change your wallpaper back. Except, a few minutes later, the wallpaper is back. No matter how many times you change your wallpaper, the other image just keeps coming back a few minutes later. Restarting does not help. You also notice other little inconsistencies, like, whenever you go to reset your wallpaper, System Preferences still says it’s set to your original wallpaper, even though that’s obviously not what’s being displayed. And every couple of minutes, the Dock flickers. What’s going on?

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If you’d like to see where I work, look no further! Office Snapshots, a very cool blog that showcases the offices of various tech and web 2.0 companies from around the world, has posted some pictures of Grooveshark’s offices.

Tech startups tend to be full of really creative people, and it’s awesome to see what various places have done with their space. It gives you a little insight into the sort of people that work there, and the culture they’ve created. Some of the featured offices are truly inspiring.

PS: My desk is visible in the 3rd and 4th pictures. It’s the one with the plant, but not the plant with the lamp.

So, I’ve decided that Tumblr’s really not my thing, and have finally gotten my Slice up and running, so Things that Work is now officially resurrected.

Theme is forthcoming – I’ve actually been working on it all afternoon. I’ll probably have it applied in the next few days, and will continue to tweak it from there. Here’s a little preview of what I’ve got so far:

I tried to get sIRF working for a nice handwritten font on the headers, but it doesn’t seem to want to play nice, so I think I’ll stick with plain old boring browser fonts for now. Hmm, I really don’t want sIFR to be my first “Things that Don’t Work” post. I’ll mess it around with it more some other time.

So welcome to Things that Work!

I just wanted to give a little shoutout to my VPS provider: Slicehost.

I used to have a couple of shared hosting accounts with Hurricane Electric. Now, if you just need a basic shared hosting account, I highly recommend them. In all the years they hosted my sites, I never had any problems, and I really appreciated their no fuss, no muss approach. Yeah, no cpanel or plesk or whatever, but I didn’t need those things, and in my experience, those all-in-one control panels are usually more trouble then they’re worth, and in the end you wind up with fewer options and less control over your site than if you had it hosted somewhere without them.

So I was very happy with HE.net, except that if I wanted to set up any more domains, I’d have to sign up more accounts, and honestly, none of the sites I wanted to build were really worth paying more money per month just to play with. Plus, I wanted an opportunity to learn more about how to set up a web server in the first place. So I started looking into VPS and dedicated server solutions. None of them particularly grabbed my attention until a friend found a link to Slicehost.

Both their philosophy and their prices caught my eye. They say that they’re a VPS provider for developers, by developers, and so far I’ve seen nothing to the contrary. They offer a variety of Linux flavors that you can install on your slice, and experimenting is encouraged – worst case scenario, you log into the admin panel and click the button to rebuild your slice from scratch. Five minutes later, you have a brand new shiny root password and a fresh start. Their wiki and forums are full of advice, guides, and tutorials from fellow slicehosters, so even if you’re new to linux server administration, you’ll be able to figure out how to set up the environment of your choice, regardless of whether you prefer PHP, Ruby on Rails, or even Django. They’ll even take care of your DNS for you, with a handy-dandy web form that makes adding records a snap, even if you’ve never done it before.

So I can’t recommend Slicehost enough. I’m saving money, getting to host whatever sites I want, AND learning all at the same time. Win-win.

Slicehost Works.