I was 16 years old in 1983 when my high school physics teacher, Rocky Trembly, carried a little white box into the classroom. He fired it up and the dark screen lit up and said, “Hello.” I didn’t know it at the time but that moment turned out to be the cornerstone to a lifetime of exploration and discovery. Throughout my life I’ve earned a living as a art director, writer, technology manager, web master and systems engineer and none of it would have been possible or probable without that single moment. Now as the screen goes dark I’d like to say thank you to Steve (and Rocky) for making my world and the whole world a better more different place. “Goodbye”

Nǐ hǎo 你好! Permanently on my desk, and everywhere I go is an iPad/iPhone app called Pleco, which has my custom flash cards that I use to quiz myself about 300 Chinese (Mandarin) characters. I’m getting pretty good with the help of a weekly instructor found via Craigslist, daily walks through Chinatown in NYC, and a website called Memrise. In less than a month I’ve been able to specifically translate (a lot of) the data sheets for products I’m sampling/purchasing for my job at Adafruit Industries, and for fun/downtime I’m translating some of the Chinese graffiti in Blade Runner (I always wanted to know what they said).

At this point, you might be asking, “Why are you wasting your time learning such a hard language? Computers can do it — why don’t you hire a translator?” Or “the USA will make electronic components again, really!” Well, I’m going to tell you why and how I’ve decided to devote the next 2+ years or so of my free time to learning (Mandarin) Chinese with my own deadline to be fluent by 2016.

In this week’s article I’ll talk about why I think it’s a good idea for any maker to consider picking up some new language skills and specifically what I’m doing. A lot of my articles tend to be about the future (I can’t wait to look back on these 5 years from now). So, yes, I think a lot of us are going to find speaking, reading, and writing the language of the soon-to-be biggest economy in the world and, who makes almost everything, is a good idea. It’s something to consider learning, starting now, particularly for makers, especially the ones who run maker businesses.

continue reading at Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese.

via Picking the Right Web Server for the Right Job.

http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2011/05/17/architectural-digest/#

Take aways:

• Shards – protection in silos
• Single-tier architecture; No remote storage
•  Evernote’s business model and cost structure. Evernote is notable for their pioneering of the freemium model, based on the idea from their CEO: The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using. Evernote is designed to become profitable at a 1% conversion rate.

via PHP on AWS Elastic Beanstalk | Cameron Stokes’s Blog.

While Amazon claims they’re working on other platforms, initially Beanstalk only supports Java applications deployed in the Apache Tomcat 6 container. However…using Quercus, a “100% Java implementation of PHP 5″ from Caucho, we can run PHP using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. All it takes is setting up a simple Maven project.

> sudo easy_install pip    # PIP is recommended for installation
> sudo -s   # Creates a new sudo shell 
> export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64"   # Need to set some GCC flags
> pip install fabric   # Get the install on

Props go to these guys and stackoverflow for helping out.

Side note: If you run into this error in the console or log when running your script there is a simple fix. Wrap your env.password with str() (ie str(env.password)) and voila. A better solution may be to create a log handler and ignore and I’ll post that solution if I have tome to figure it out.

> No handlers could be found for logger "paramiko.transport"

Where has the space gone?

Although time consuming, the following procedure can be used to track down where your space has been used.

cd /

du -s *

(Some folks like to use “du -cks *”, which is easy to remember as “ducks”.)

This command will print the number of blocks used by each directory and file in the root. Most likely, the largest number printed is where you should be looking. You can then cd to that directory, and examine it. If it has sub-directories, you might use:

find . -type d -exec du -s {} \;

You can search for “large” files by cd’ing to a suspect directory ( or even starting at /, if you must), and typing

find . -size +5000 -print

will print the names of all files over 5,000 blocks (2,560,000) bytes. This may find many, many files, so you might want to refine it with larger numbers. You might also want to sort it:

find / -size +2000 -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -nr | more

To limit find to the filesystem you are on, add “-mount”:

find . -mount -size +5000 -print

via Out of DiskSpace?.

Read on for the list.

via Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools | Linux Magazine.

via NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome.

Once all of the virtual wires are connected, these services are extremely user-friendly, allowing anyone with a bit of web savvy to become the “system administrator” for their office.

Follow the steps below, and you’ll be on your way to a customizable and scalable business infrastructure that lives where your employees do: in the cloud.

via HOW TO: Run Your Business Online with $10 and a Google Account.