5tags

The following is a mirror from osocio.org

This banner from SOS Mata Atlântica seems to be a view from Google Earth unless you start zooming out.“We are sorry, but only 7% of the Atlantic Forest is left in Brazil.”SOS Mata Atlântica is the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest conservation foundation, Mata Atlântica is the name of the eastcoast of Brazil and is one of the world’s most critical regions as we speak about deforesting.The destroying of Atlantic Mata is responsible for the disappearing of almost all the fauna and the flora, contributes for the heating of the atmosphere, the lack of water in the cities and with the increase of the levels pollution.The banner was on the shortlist at the Cannes Lions 2007.

I am really loving my iPhone thus far and am also very happy to see the iPhone on some of the latest TV shows. Although they are on the right track in using the hottest consumer electronics as props, sometimes the actors may not know exactly how to use them.

As nearly all of you know the iPhone’s back has a black “band” at the bottom of the phone, near the microphone and external speaker. So obviously you would talk into this, thus having the black edge near you mouth apposed to your ear. There have been two recent mishaps in Hollywood.Bionic Women (video clip): Two and a Half Men: Come on Charlie Sheen, you should know better.  

I have been on the hunt for an iPhone for the past 3 weeks. Last week I decided to ask a friend that lives in the United States to buy and ship a brand new iPhone up here. The price would be $399 + 6% tax + shipping + gift for their service. A few hours after asking this I found a 4GB one on eBay that hadn’t been activated or used at all. I decided to buy it. The auction closed at $395 and shipping was $10. Excellent. I will be unlocking it the second I get it. Now I just need phone service. Rogers is the only GSM provider in my area. I just want unlimited texting and a few minutes of voice. This could get expensive!

A 13 year old girl from Beverly Hills, CA think that taking the hike to Malibu is like going to the wild. You must listen to this segment from Ryan Seacrest’s Morning Show regarding Kid Nation. “Omg, a blackberry, I have an iPhone.”

Click here to listen

Remember in 1997 when Microsoft poured $150 Million into Apple for $5.43 per share?Well just 10 short years later Apple’s share price is $122.06 which would makes Microsoft’s shares worth $18 billion. 

Apple shares were then selling at $5.43 a share. They closed Friday at $122.06. The potential gain on the shares: $18.1 billion.By comparison, if Microsoft spent the same money on its owns shares, then selling at $17.67 and closing at $28.25 Friday, the gain would have been (only) $89.8 million.-barnako.com

Everybody thinks differently in terms of tips. Tips were originally just little extras for superb service and now they are a must. Since I have never worked in a business were I was tipped, I think tipping is ridiculous. The employees get paid a per hour rate and that should be good enough. If they do something special then a tip could be given. I know some restaurants split the tip throughout the employee crew and if no tip is given, it comes out of the server’s salary. Now that is stupid! Here is a list of what is acceptable to tip, but by no means should you totally follow this.

RESTAURANTS/BARS

Waiter/waitress:	15% of bill (excl. tax) for adequate service; 20% for very good service; no less than 10% for poor service
Headwaiter/captain:	often gets a cut of table server’s tip; so tip your server extra to reward captain, or tip captain separately
Sommelier, or wine steward:	15% of cost of the bottle
Bartender:	15% to 20% of the tab, with a minimum of 50 cents per soft drink, $1 per alcoholic drink
Coatroom attendant:	$1 per coat
Parking valet or garage attendant:	$2 to bring your car to you
Washroom attendant:	50 cents to $1

DAILY LIFE

Taxi driver:	Varies depending on locality. Assume 15% will be enough; an extra $1 to $2 for help with bags.
Food delivery person:	10% of the bill (excl. tax), at least $1 for bills up to $10. Should tip 15%-20% for a difficult delivery.
Grocery loader:	Check with store policy if tips are accepted. If so, $1 for bringing bags to car; $1.50 to $3 if you have more than 3 bags.
Barber:	15% to 20%, minimum $1, for a haircut. For other services (shampoo, shave or manicure) tip $1 to $2 to service provider.
Hairdresser:	15% to 20%. (It is now acceptable to tip owner, unless he or she says otherwise.)
Shampoo person:	$2
Spa service (e.g., massage):	15% to 20%. If service is provided by owner, no tip.
Staff at coffee/food retailers with tip jars:	No tip required. It’s completely optional.
Handyman:	No tip
Gas attendant:	No tip

TRAVEL

Skycap at airport:	$1 per bag if you check-in curbside; $2 per bag if skycap takes bags to check-in counter.
Hotel doorman:	$1 per bag for help with luggage; $1 per person for hailing a cab
Hotel bellhop:	$1 per bag for bringing luggage to your room (but a $2 minimum if you have just one bag)
Hotel housekeeper:	$2 to $5* per night
Hotel concierge:	$5 for getting you tickets or reservations ($10-plus if they’re hard to get). No tip required when you ask for directions.
Cruise:	Varies. Ask cruise line about customary gratuities.

Don’t you hate when you need a tiny 1.5V button-cell battery for some small device but hate paying around $5 for the stupid thing? Well did you know that a 12 volt battery contains 8 of these 1.5V button-cell batteries? It’s true and here is a video to illustrate the hack. 

12 Volt Battery Hack! You’ll Be Surprised… - video powered by Metacafe

I bought the new Apple keyboard the day it came out to the online Apple Store which was August 7, 2007. I just got a knock on my door today from the Purolator man with a package for me! It was huge, but it was indeed my keyboard. The packaging was ridiculous, the keyboard box was in a box, which was in a box that was about 1500x larger than the keyboard box its self. Talk about a waste. Here are some photos of the stupid box along with the keyboard on my desk with my MacBook Pro. 
 

One month ago I said that I have moved back to Media Temple’s grid server. My previous experience with Media Temple as a company was great, but my experience with the grid server was horrible. The MySQL server was down during peak times, and the service as a whole just felt “new”. I moved back to Dreamhost for about 5 months watching (gs) grow month after month. Suddenly last month I realized that some of the projects were growing quite fast and that a move back to the grid server would be great. The grid seemed to be very stable and some of the new features like the MySQL container made it very compelling. So I picked up a coupon and paid $17 for one month of service.

The Movement of Data

Moving everything back to Media Temple was so easy. Last time I moved data to Media Temple was during the shared server (ss) days when they were using an extremely old version of MySQL, thus forcing me to convert all of my databases and downgrade to the older version. It just didn’t feel right. This move was super easy. For the data I simply compressed all of my domain directories on Dreamhost, threw it into a web accessable directory, downloaded it via SSH on Media Temple (using real 12MB/s download speeds!), and then distributed the data amongst the domains. As for databases I simply exported the databases as .sql and then imported it via SSH on (mt).

GPUs (Grid Performance Units)

Since right now my sites aren’t terribly large I knew that I would now go over the 1000 GPU limit. I was very curious as to how many GPUs my site would use. As I mentioned a few weeks ago I have optimized my site greatly. Some of these optimizations included removing plugins from Mint and Wordpress, making sure that lost files and pages were not being redirected to the 404 page, thus burning useless GPUs.

I usually get about 4000 to 8500 hits on Thursdays, which is by far my busiest day. Other than Thursday my traffic is generally a lot lower than that. These Thursdays use about 7 GPUs which is almost nothing. 1000/31 = ~32 allocated for a day. I still have a lot of room to spare. I began to do some tests so I added polls and a photo gallery. Surprisingly these did not add much to the GPU total. It really does take a lot to burn thru 1000 GPUs. Today, being Thursday I really wanted to use as many GPUs as possible to just see what would happen. In order to test I added an include to 10 javascript files that do not exist. Since I have wordpress, these would spawn the generation of a 404 page, which involved database queries. In the first full hour 20 GPUs were burned. In the main and busiest hour of the week, the GPUs still have not been calculated. My best guess would be that I used ~30 - 40 GPUs in that hour! We will have to see. So in all I probably used ~120 GPUs in the month. 12% of my GPUs is not a lot considering my major tests that made up about half of the usage.

So if you are wanting to start or move your blog to Media Temple’s grid server you should be fine. They offer a ton of resources for the low cost of $20 per month. There are tons of hosts that are cheaper except you just can’t beat the reliability of Media Temple along with their amazing customer support. What a great company.

Containers

Right now there are two grid containers available the Ruby on Rails container and the MySQL container. You get a free 64MB of RAM RoR container with every grid server account. If that isn’t enough then you can upgrade for a small monthly charge. If you outgrow the default MySQL SmartPool then you can purchase a container starting at $20 per month for $128 MB of RAM, but there are options up to 512MB of RAM. These are very powerful and not many blogs would ever need more than this.

Media Temple is also beta testing a Django container. Since I am getting into Django I am really hoping that I can get in on the beta testing. It would be very cool to get a Django site out the door and it would be even better to have it on the grid.

Bandwidth

I am really happy that they give you 1TB of bandwidth. It really goes a long way. For large images and standard assets on my sites I usually use Amazon’s S3. Aside from the fact that there is only one data center, the “bandwidth” is great. I didn’t even use 10GB this month.

When downloading files via SSH you are able to use the super fast connection available to the grid servers. I have only downloaded one file from SSH and it was downloading at 12 MB/s, thats 12 real MB per second. Thats a 100MB file in 8.33 seconds! My home connection is only a tiny fraction of that to say the least. I still want to test using the grid as a video server where there are tons of concurrent connections downloading large video files just to see how (gs) can handle it.

Disk Space

They give you 100GB of disk space on (gs). This isn’t your run of the mill, crappy disk space either. They use lightning fast SAS disks. With day to day usage you may not see a major difference but if you ever get Dugg then you will deeply appreciate it. I only used about 4GB since I host large files on Amazon S3.

Overall

I really love Media Temple now. Not only do they offer very high quality service but they are so reasonably priced. They have such innovative products and also seem to be updating the grid service product all of the time, thus taking advantage of the newest technologies.

If you have a large or small website or blog then I really suggest you look at Media Temple. They not only cater to the small guys but can also handle huge sites like Techcrunch. Why not try them out?

The one application that most Mac owners have been waiting for has been delayed. Originally Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac was rumored to be launching in August of 2007. Microsoft has just announced that Office 2008 has been delayed and should be available by January 2008.

It really is just a quality issue across the board,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh business unit, said in an interview Wednesday. 

The last version of Mac Office was in 2004, which not only is a long time in terms of software but also all of the new Macs include an Intel chip, and thus the Intel Mac owners have been eagerly waiting for a Universal Binary version of Office.

My Take

Since I am starting college in the fall I was fairly angry because I really need this application. I suppose I can live with Office 2004 for the first term, maybe I can even get into one of the open source versions like Neo-Office.

What I Suggest

If you are waiting for Mac Office 2008 and need an office suite in the meantime then I have two suggestions:

• Use Office 2004 or
• Get the free Neo-Office

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.