We live on Planet Earth, every now and then you take in a sight so beautiful and breathtaking, you're forced to stop and take stock of what you're doing, believing, or simply why you're not seeking out those sights more often. This documentary is five discs of that moment happening continuously. Plants, animals, and even minerals in ways you've never imagined.
Each disc is separated into separate episodes (the documentary was filmed for the BBC), with each episode concentrating on a theme such as deep oceans, fresh water, caves, or mountains. The hour long episode examines and explores the various wildlife present in each of these locales with breathtaking footage, and beautiful narration. each second of video is the kind of "perfect shot" that you would set up as your desktop wallpaper and leave for months. The narration is from BBC's resident expert David Attenborough, there's a version released for the US where it's been re-dubbed, I'd recommend the original brit though.
Small anecdote, after going out with a few friends we came back to my place for some hot chocolate (with baileys), I offered to throw something onto the TV, and got some strange looks when I suggested a documentary over the wide variety of other options. There won't be any disbelievers next time.
Overall, my highest possible recommendation for pretty much anyone with a television.
(Links for HD DVD, Regular DVD, and Blu-Ray respectively. )
Each disc is separated into separate episodes (the documentary was filmed for the BBC), with each episode concentrating on a theme such as deep oceans, fresh water, caves, or mountains. The hour long episode examines and explores the various wildlife present in each of these locales with breathtaking footage, and beautiful narration. each second of video is the kind of "perfect shot" that you would set up as your desktop wallpaper and leave for months. The narration is from BBC's resident expert David Attenborough, there's a version released for the US where it's been re-dubbed, I'd recommend the original brit though.
Small anecdote, after going out with a few friends we came back to my place for some hot chocolate (with baileys), I offered to throw something onto the TV, and got some strange looks when I suggested a documentary over the wide variety of other options. There won't be any disbelievers next time.
Overall, my highest possible recommendation for pretty much anyone with a television.
(Links for HD DVD, Regular DVD, and Blu-Ray respectively. )
About one week in, and I've made a bit less progress than I had hoped. I sought out a server to use for hosting, and selected a host. The disappointment started with the sign up process, continued with the confirmation emails (requiring me to use their DNS servers rather than simply giving me IP of my box), peaked with being required to use FTP to connect to my server for file transfers (as opposed to SFTP, or FTP(S), FTP sends the credentials in the clear), then with an excellent close of a weak support system that double escapes so you're comments come through as "I\'m seeing lag...". Expect a post rating several different hosts in the next week or so.
Things are moving along on the local development, I've got the local server set up, with Windows Server 2008 on one partition, and Ubuntu Server Edition on the other, setting up the Windows partition however was not without it's failures.
I've started generating some performance metrics about the two different systems (static files, phpinfo(), phpsecinfo, etc. If you've got a particular application that I can have running with real-world data rather easily let me know) and should be able to start generating some nice graphs in the near future. Note that I don't expect IIS to be wining these fights, I just want to see what sort of metrics I should be expecting out of a server running IIS.
I will point out that to be fair, I used the apt-get install for php, and apache. This pained me greatly, I've been compiling apache and PHP from scractch, to have to use some sort of a pre-compiled distribution... it was like tiny daggers stabbing me from the keyboard with each key-press. I've got Windows Server set up with IIS7 & FastCGI support for PHP.
Things are moving along on the local development, I've got the local server set up, with Windows Server 2008 on one partition, and Ubuntu Server Edition on the other, setting up the Windows partition however was not without it's failures.
I've started generating some performance metrics about the two different systems (static files, phpinfo(), phpsecinfo, etc. If you've got a particular application that I can have running with real-world data rather easily let me know) and should be able to start generating some nice graphs in the near future. Note that I don't expect IIS to be wining these fights, I just want to see what sort of metrics I should be expecting out of a server running IIS.
I will point out that to be fair, I used the apt-get install for php, and apache. This pained me greatly, I've been compiling apache and PHP from scractch, to have to use some sort of a pre-compiled distribution... it was like tiny daggers stabbing me from the keyboard with each key-press. I've got Windows Server set up with IIS7 & FastCGI support for PHP.
I'm working on a side project (no, not that one) with a friend, and I just caught myself following some really bad practices (and I fixed an SQL Injection vulnerability, oh my!). I was doing something that appears pretty benign: I'm letting users rate content by clicking on an image, or a link for "No Rating" or Spam. They're all regular anchor links that link back to the page itself, with information embedded into GET on which item was being rated, and a nonce for csrf protection (else you could (if you were sneaky enough) make everyone rate your content well with a CSRF attack embedded into your own page).
Did you catch the problem? (after the jump)
The problem here is how I'm letting "people" rate the content, an anchor link. Sure it's quick, easy and it works, but it's bad. The HTTP spec calls for GET to be "Safe", which is somewhat loosely defined, but this most definetly doesn't fit. Rating an item has a lasting effect, the site remembers your rating, spam ratings are measured against the content to remove items etc. Fixing this took a bit of work on my side, switching the simple anchor tags to be form buttons, with data embedded into the name, but it's a really good idea. Search engines, and other spiders are smart enough not to POST data, but following regular anchor links is their job. If I had left it as is the next (first?) time the site got spidered the bot would have gone through and rated every single post with every single possible rating.
Did you catch the problem? (after the jump)
The problem here is how I'm letting "people" rate the content, an anchor link. Sure it's quick, easy and it works, but it's bad. The HTTP spec calls for GET to be "Safe", which is somewhat loosely defined, but this most definetly doesn't fit. Rating an item has a lasting effect, the site remembers your rating, spam ratings are measured against the content to remove items etc. Fixing this took a bit of work on my side, switching the simple anchor tags to be form buttons, with data embedded into the name, but it's a really good idea. Search engines, and other spiders are smart enough not to POST data, but following regular anchor links is their job. If I had left it as is the next (first?) time the site got spidered the bot would have gone through and rated every single post with every single possible rating.
In an effort to learn more about IIS (which a number of my students and contracting contacts seem to use), I have decided to challenge myself: To design, build, and launch a PHP based site, and receive at least 1,000 unique visitors a day by Feb 28, 2008, served from an IIS7 server.
Details after the jump
What's the goal?
To learn about IIS7, it's all well and good to shout "apache is better, faster, more secure and free" then stick your head in the sand, but I'd like to know what's happening on the other side of the fence. This way I will be in a better position to help students, and contracts with IIS issues.
What will you be coding in? Expression Web? Visual Studio?
Likely neither, I lack a development machine running windows. I do most of my fun coding on the couch on a mac laptop. I could use the testing server I mentioned, but I don't want to sit in the office at a desk during my free time. So likely Komodo & Zend Studio. I could buy a crappy laptop rather than a crappy desktop but: I want to do performance testing which needs a real hard drive, and they're more expensive. I'm not spending hours coding in parallels unless my MBP gets an upgrade.
Did Microsoft make you drink the kool-aid while you were down there?
Not unless it tastes remarkably like vodka
What happens if you don't make it?
I'm open to suggestions.
What happens if you do?
Also open to suggestions, I'm leaning towards drinking.
Why FFAQ? Fake?
In order for questions to be asked frequently, the topic must first be presented. Any time you see a FAQ on a just launched page, the questions were made up, not asked frequently.
Details after the jump
Assets:
- One smart-ass programmer with enough idiocy to throw down the gauntlet, pick it up, then slap himself across the face with it.
- One kick ass designer
- One license for IIS7 + OS that I can use locally for development
- An Idea!
- One sneaky ninja cat
Required:
- One local testing server (I'll buy one on sale from some crappy online retailer)
- Hosting (apparently I can get free IIS7 hosting for a while)
- Time
- Using PHP as the scripting language to power the site (Not phalanger or some other fakery)
- Blogging about the issues I encounter
Idiocy
- Timeframe
- Hit count
- Having never used IIS
FFAQ (Fake Frequently Asked Questions)
To learn about IIS7, it's all well and good to shout "apache is better, faster, more secure and free" then stick your head in the sand, but I'd like to know what's happening on the other side of the fence. This way I will be in a better position to help students, and contracts with IIS issues.
Likely neither, I lack a development machine running windows. I do most of my fun coding on the couch on a mac laptop. I could use the testing server I mentioned, but I don't want to sit in the office at a desk during my free time. So likely Komodo & Zend Studio. I could buy a crappy laptop rather than a crappy desktop but: I want to do performance testing which needs a real hard drive, and they're more expensive. I'm not spending hours coding in parallels unless my MBP gets an upgrade.
Not unless it tastes remarkably like vodka
I'm open to suggestions.
Also open to suggestions, I'm leaning towards drinking.
In order for questions to be asked frequently, the topic must first be presented. Any time you see a FAQ on a just launched page, the questions were made up, not asked frequently.
