My name is Ken Collins and I am a geek. I've spent the majority of my career in the wonderful world of advertising and online marketing. It guess it all started in ninth grade when I submitted a report in history class that got an A+ simple for the fact that it was presented well. I did have an advantage beyond my personal World Book Encyclopedias as I was probably the first kid in 1986 to wield a $5,000 laser printer and personal publishing system from home. I also worked at a local print shop and my Mac Plus consistently outperformed the Xerox 6085 Workstations I worked on. That's right, at the age of 14 I was being paid as a Desktop Publishing computer operator. Back then, a 10 megabyte hard drive was elite and the fastest way to rotate text was to stand on your head. My have the times changed. To learn more about my job history, go check out my resume. Sorry, you will not find the print shop nor my paper route on there :)
What Are Meta Skills ?
The concept for my blog reflects a big theme in my work ethic, working smarter not harder. As I started to learn more about programming I came across a concept called meta programming whose simple premise is to code at a high level rather than at a low level machine language. The concept is quite broad but it really can be applied to everything we do on a computer and in our daily lives. For instance, you don't need to know how your car works to go somewhere in it. This is a convention and metaskills.net is all about learning what conventions computers offer us in IT and Online Marketing and what is going on behind the scenes, if you are so inclined to learn...
How Has This Happened ?
That's a great question and I'm glad your reading on. I did say that I was a Mac addict did I not? Maybe you picked up on that. Well I am and here on this website I am taken Macs out of their normal piegonholed category as being used for the creative industry and graphic artists and into the world of serious IT using the power locked behind the Mac OS X operating system. By example even this website, including its databases, DNS, and mail services are all hosted on an average Mac that anyone can buy at the local computer store. I am specifically speaking about the Mac Mini.
So now I also find myself being an IT and UNIX junky too and not just a creative driven marketer and guess what – it's a good time to be such, especially for the Mac aficionado. There is so much that Apple has made easy to do using their Mac and OS X Server operating system. Even more if you decide to get under the hood and tinker around past the graphical user interface (GUI), where the real power lies. On my blog I want to cover as much about these conventions and to advocate that learning both the GUI and the command line tools behind them are the way to go. Here is a list of the posts I have done on the topic:
- Mini Network with a Big XServe Style
- How To Control Browser Caching with Apache 2
- Getting On Good Terms With The OS X Shell
- My Own Soup to Nuts Recipe for Ruby on RAILS on OS X
- Flying Light - Configuring Drupal and LightTPD
For those that can not afford a full license for the server edition, there is still a lot you can do with Mac OS X client version. And if this is your first dive into the IT side of the Mac, go check out Ward Mundy's Nerd Vittles (HOW-TO Bonanza: 50 Great Summertime Project for You & Your Mac Mini ). For now, take a look at the current network setup for ActionMoniker.com, my parent domain.
