So, I've been looking for a job recently. After the SuperBowl ads, I thought I'd post a resume on CareerBuilder.com. Yeah.

Once you've signed up, they try to sell you up to $500 in additional services, ranging from visibility packages to proactive distribution to resume consultations. And then they let spammers for similar services search their job seeker database to find people to spam.

I blogged in more detail about the experience.

While looking for the video of the distraught bride cutting off her hair, which was recently revealed to be a hoax, I noticed YouTube had multiple copies of it, a couple with a URL overlaid that went to a site chock full of porn clips. Looking into this practice a little more, I wrote "Spam, Spim, Splogs... Spube?" exploring this particular method of spamming YouTube and some possible names for the practice.

Coherence is a feature in the recent release candidates for Parallels Desktop For Mac that allows you to run Windows applications directly on the Mac desktop, treating them much like they were Mac applications.

I recently tested Coherence and wrote a blog entry at BrainHandles.com about the process and results, plus a couple of tips on getting everything configured.

Recently, I switched from Windows to OSX. When thinking why I wouldn't recommend switching to my parents, I came to an understanding of why people stick with Windows. I reasoned that it's not so much whether alternate software can do the same things, but the fact that users often have to learn new ways to do the same things.

A quote from my blog post...

If you want an example, find someone who has never used a trackball mouse and isn't familiar with the concept, then swap the trackball for their regular mouse...

It will take hours, if not days, before they stop grabbing the trackball mouse like a regular mouse. They have spent years grabbing a mouse and moving it, and it has become almost reflexive. They have learned through extensive repetition that the desire to move the pointer on the screen is satisfied by grabbing and moving the brick of plastic beside the keyboard. And every time they do the wrong thing, it wastes time and makes them feel frustrated or stupid for getting it wrong. The first few times it may be a laugh. The 28th time, it's an irritant.

Following a "dream", I tried to get a very cool Flash-based drawing application built. After coders on Rent-A-Coder and E-Lance wasted weeks of my time before saying the app was impossible or would take a team of programmers months, I finally decided to do it myself even though I'd never even touched Flash before.

I recently blogged about the experience of building a complex application while learning the necessary programming skills as I went. Quite a journey and one that hit home the value of RTFM.

Just got the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive and put it through its paces on my MacBook Pro. I actually got speeds a bit faster than reported by cNet's review.

Hooked up via the FireWire 800 port, this bus-powered baby is plenty speedy for everyday use (not just backups), and at 120 gigabytes (111.78 available), it basically doubles the disk space on an off-the-shelf Mac Book Pro.

I've noticed both on my own pages and on the pages of others (like Yahoo) that sometimes a page will hang mid-render while waiting for a script-sourced ad to fill in a table cell or a div.

I thought this was only a problem on older browsers where the size of the ad/div wasn't specified, but I'm finding that this still happens on the newest browsers with divs and table cells.

As a site-builder and as a user, I'm interested in how to avoid this from both sides: making pages less prone to this when coding them, and finding ways to push the render through as a user when I find myself viewing someone else's page that is stalled halfway and waiting for a response from Google AdSense or another remotely-sourced ad.

Any advice that isn't "don't put ads on your pages", "use an ad blocker", or "only visit sites that don't carry ads"?

SEE UPDATE BELOW ORIGINAL POST:

Apparently Firefox 2.0 hangs for no apparent reason on OSX. You have to force a "quit", lose all your tabs, and then try to find the pages you were on.

Annoying as all get out. And people have been complaining about it.

Also, I wanted to get the new system set up with Apache, PHP, etc.

Of course, because Mac is the bastard stepchild of the world, Apache and PHP don't have binary installers. And though MySQL does, you still have to recompile portions of it from source, because it uses static libraries instead of shared libraries which means you can't compile PHP with MySQL support unless you compile MySQL from source, making the binary installer sort of useless.

So, while I'd have had this set up within 3-4 hours were it a Windows machine, I've been chasing down error messages, step-by-step instructions on how to install this stuff from source, and waiting for various things to compile (or barf up error messages so I can try to figure out why they won't compile).

So I think the Apple slogan needs to be changed from "Mac: It just works" to "Mac: It just works so long as you have really low expectations and don't mind pulling your hair out when you try to run any of the cool free Open Source stuff it's so easy to run on Windows."

AND NOW THE UPDATE:

Mac does come with Apache 1.33 and a 4.4.x version of PHP. Of course, the version of Apache isn't configured to actually work with PHP. You have to hack the httpd.conf file, and that's hidden from the average file search to prevent users from doing harm to themselves.

I figured it was a non-standard install and looked to install Apache 2.0 with PHP 5. That was where I ran into trouble. That was my downfall. That was the unmerry path that wasted half of my day.

Finally, after sharing this complaint with a friend, he pointed me at a step-by-step for getting WordPress working on OSX (which included the hidden location of the httpd.conf file). I followed the instructions and had everything working in a matter of minutes.

I'd actually seen a link for the WordPress instructions come up as I googled for an answer, but since I didn't want to run WordPress locally and I knew how to install WordPress on a machine where Apache/PHP/MySQL were already running, I ignored it.

Ticks me off that this would be the 10-minute answer to my question, while the other results were all WAY too complicated.

So, earlier in the Summer I got two "Ask Slashdot" submissions accepted.

The first was regarding PHP and Perl in one script. I asked because I wanted to use ImageMagick and because it would be processing user-generated text, there was no way I wanted to generate commandline code. Because the developer of MagickWand for PHP abandoned the project around the start of the year and it was still basically an alpha release, I wanted to use PerlMagick, but I wanted to program all the hard stuff (a lot of XML and math) in PHP, which I already knew.

Long story short... I'm using PHP to write the Perl scripts. The small amount of Perl that's needed is sort of "fill-in-the-blank", so I have PHP doing that, putting it all in a string, then PHP writes it to disk and then executes the perl script.

As for a good multi-format SVG converter. As long as you don't want to convert to a vector format, ImageMagick does a good job with that, rendering SVGs to a wide range of raster formats. Of course, I actually wanted to convert to both vector and raster formats, so I'm basically using 2-3 different programs, batch converting a collection of SVGs with each, then comparing the outputs and picking the best.

That is all.

Stopping by Apple's online store to check out the specs on the new Core2Duo MacBook Pros, I decided to price out my dream MacPro system and found they'd lowered prices... by a whole dollar.

Seems Apple got religion on pricing everything with 99s, not just the base systems. Upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM... was $300, now $299. Upgrade to 500 gig hard drive... was $200, now $199. My dream system came down in price a whole six dollars! Sigh.

One of my revenue streams looks poised to jump 500% this month from last month.

That's not amazing, since it was just slightly more than beer money last month. But, for the fun of it, I decided to do some factoring to see where it could go if every month it multiplied by 5.

So next month it would be 5x more than this month. The month after that 25x (5x * 5x). The month after that 125x (5x * 5x * 5x).

I figure that somewhere around my 39th birthday I'd have all the money that exists in the world, have every man woman and child on Earth indebted to me for 20 million dollars each, and officially own everything.

At that point, I believe 500% month-over-month growth would become unsustainable. :-)

- Greg

I turn 37 this week. Not sure how I feel about that. If the average life span for an American man is now 74, I just hit "middle age".

I am WAY too young to be middle-aged. Middle-aged people have always been older than me, and all things being relative, they should always be older than me.

Therefore, since I am not middle-aged.... By my declaration, the new average life expectancy for an American man is now 76. Next year it will increase to 78 and continue to increase by two years for every year I am alive so that I am always a year away from being middle-aged, but will never hit it.

And when I die at the age of 237 years old, people will say: "Oh, he died so young. He was barely middle-aged."

- Greg

The baby is doing great and he sleeps through the night. Wife is doing well and she sleeps through the night too. I'm still working on my start-up(s). I don't sleep.

Photos of the baby here.

Baby came home before the wife did. Wasn't fun. But a couple of days later, Grandma came up from L.A., wife came home, and I got a little sleep.

The baby's 29 days old and weighed in at 11 lbs. 2 oz. today. He's healthy, mostly happy, and a little champ.

If I don't send out photos at least every 4 days, my parents call and complain.

Took 2 weeks off for daddy leave, went back to work and quit. Starting up a couple of businesses.

The general plan is I go to bed between 9-10 p.m. Wife wakes me up at 3'ish, I take care of him until 9'ish, then bring him to her for feeding and a nap in the bed with her while I grab a shower and get down to work on my variety of start-up businesses in the home office.

I'm still tired.

- G

Been a hell of a week...

Saturday, the 19th, wife is 4 days overdue and her water finally breaks. But labor doesn't start. After 6 hours, they induce.

Sunday, the 20th, after 28 hours (22 in labor) she's got an infection, spiking a 103+ fever, not fully dilated yet, can't stay in labor without Pitocin, and the baby is distressed. C-section time. Baby comes out at 9 pounds, 1 ounce.

Monday, the 21st, the baby is in the NICU because it picked up some of the infection and will have to stay for a week while they give it IV antibiotics. Wife is recovering.

Thursday, the 24th, wife comes home, but baby doesn't. Do what I can to make her comfortable.

Saturday, the 26th, did you know that you can get pre-eclampsia after you've had the baby? Wife was short of breath, we called the hospital, they said to come in. Diagnosed as post-partum pre-eclampsia. They'll have to keep her a couple of days... at least one to get her stabilized and one for observation.

Monday, the 28th, son is supposed to be released from the NICU today. He's already closing in on 10 lbs. Got a hell of an appetite. Don't know if the wife is coming home, though. Maybe he'll go stay in her room at the hospital since she's in the labor recovery ward, but maybe I get to play single dad. Maybe I get them both home and we finally get to start that lovely family life we've been dreaming about.

I'm tired.