I was in Moab this weekend with my family and our motel had free wireless Internet. I used SSH and a SOCKS proxy to create a secure tunnel to my iMac at work. This allowed me to browse Gmail and Facebook securely. Here’s a screencast on how to create an SSH tunnel and browse securely […]
Category Archives: Tech
Learn more about WordPress at WordCamp Utah
WordCamp Utah is a 1-day conference all about WordPress, to be held in Provo, Utah, on September 27, 2008. Speakers will include WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, WordPress guru Alex King, both visiting from out of town, and several local personalities including Cameron Moll, Thom Allen, Ash Buckles, and yours truly. I’ll speak on using WordPress […]
What goes around, comes around
I’m not a big believer in karma, but this week I experienced some karma-like effects. Two years ago for work, I developed code to protect wiki websites. Then I published it on my blog. This weekend a software upgrade caused this protection code to stop working on our websites. I couldn’t find an answer. Then […]
Is the Internet broken?
As amazing as the Internet is for commerce, communication, and education, it might have been better. Imagine opening your email and not finding any spam. Imagine your children or your little brother not happening into any pornography. Pete Ashdown spoke at the Utah Open Source Conference earlier this year. He touted the virtues of the […]
The Patriot Act and Customer Service
I. Mac and Linux computers come with a command called “rsync” that makes backup and synchronization easy. Every morning before work I synchronize my 4 year old dying Powerbook to my iMac at work. When I get home, I synchronize back. This way, I get my same mail, documents, and music wherever I am, and […]
Amtrak series: Ruby on Rails on Rails
This will be the most technical of my posts in the Amtrak series, but it’s not just for computer geeks so stay with me. Here we go. Ruby on Rails is a “web application framework”, a way for programmers to make web applications more easily and more quickly (and more enjoyably, as its creators would […]
Skype + Applescript = poor man’s voice web services
Skype is one of my favorite applications. I recently used Skype to call someone in Russia and it only cost a few cents. I’ve also been studying the Skype API, which opens some interesting possibilities. On a Mac, you can combine simple Applescript commands with simple Skype commands to open a lot of possibilities. For […]
Mining iTunes for podcast listenership data
For podcasters and their advertisers, tracking the size of a podcast’s audience is sticky. You can track how many people download a podcast, but who knows if they actually listened to it? iTunes is the #1 podcasting client (57% market share last year), and additional podcatchers push podcasts into iTunes, so much of the data […]
Seven ways the Internet is changing politics
1. Last week I attended the opening event of Phil Burns’s new company Politic2.0, a platform for communication between politicians and citizens. When I first heard about the event, I was skeptical that it would be anything more than the buzz-word-ification of another niche, but by the end of the event I was really impressed […]
Big milestone for CP80 but still many detractors
It was a big week for CP80, the anti-pornography group led by Ralph Yarro. The Utah legislature unanimously passed, and Governor Huntsman signed, a non-binding resolution calling on the U.S. government to do something about Internet pornography. The resolution calls on the federal government to “take action to help stop children and employees from accessing […]