Joe’s Blog!

I have confirmed there is indeed wifi available downtown St Louis. My brother confirmed it when he walked past a technician installing an antenna, asked if this were indeed free wifi for the downtown area. The tech also stated that it is difficult trying to get decent range with all the building and etc. Very true indeed, wifi is all about line of sight, buildings get in the way.

Ok … so with all the hoopla (good or bad) regarding Zed in the RoR community it seems like a few folks will be creating an alternative to Mongrel. This seems like mostly personal issue and not an issue with mongrel/mongrel_cluster itself. However, what I have been thinking someone (possibly myself) should fork mongrel and make mongrel connect via AJP rather than proxy. This should improve performance and bring mongrel one step closer to a looking like a servlet container like Tomcat, Jetty or Resin. To that end, Resin can run PHP code, so maybe the way to go would be to take an already existing container and make it RoR compatible. Down the road maybe Rails will include its own container build in, Rails being both the framework and container. With yml configs and an all-in-one type of installation setting up deployments should be a breeze. At any rate there is certainly some work to be done to bring Rails to the same level that Java webapps now have. Anyone got any ideas?

Ok, as you already know I have been rolling a MacBook with Ubuntu. Things at the beginning were fine but eventually things just got plain annoying. The keyboard changes were dumb and I am tired of other MacCrap that I have dealt with. I am sure it’s fine while using OSX but I am hooked on linux. Last week I ordered it’s replacement, a Lenovo T61. Needless to say, I am pretty stoked. This sort of thing (and other situations) has taught me to get what you want (within your means obviously) rather than whats easy or {insert reason}. Having exactly what you want is worth a bit more money, time or {insert valuable resource}. I will post info about the new machine when it arrives, hopefully before the weekend.

If you are wanting to purchase a clean, use ready MacBook (Leopard installed) let me know I will be selling mine in the very near future.

It’s been a long, long time since I changed up the theme here on the blog. This blog has been around since 2004 and the theme hasn’t changed but a couple times. So here it is, with cool rotating photos!

I have a report that there does indeed seem to be free WiFi downtown now. There is a SSID of “ATTMETROWIFI” now available near the antenna locations. Cool beans!

Edit: there also seems to be a SSID of ATTMETROFREE, so perhaps one pay for service and one free service?