Well, I just got back this past weekend from the Pragmatic Studio in Boston and it was well worth the time and effort. If you have not yet used the RoR framework for web applications, stay tuned to my next post. By next week I will lay out an extensive tutorial on how to install the framework with all the proper goodies on your Mac. So do not wimp out and go for that easy package install and dare to impress your friends as we build our own software installs with Darwin Ports.

I will be the first to admit that I am really just learning how to tap into the power of my shell environment and to be honest, I've spent way to many hours reading man pages and figuring out how to do some really neat things that help my automate my workflow and system administration. Mostly these are just basic tasks like my Simple MySQL Backup and Deleting Invisible Resource Files scripts. But in all seriousness, when you get right down to using a UNIX-based operating system, you cannot escape using the shell environment. This is a good thing, its your friend, and getting your feet wet sooner than later is a good idea.

I've been learning to or "trying to learn" Ruby on Rails for a few months now and things have always kept me from finishing the book that I purchased from those great publishers at the pragmatic bookshelf. My problem has been that sometimes other work has gotten in the way, but mostly it was because I did not have the core understanding of the basics for building web applications. Especially in the areas of object oriented programming and database languages. For me this was a big problem, I'm typically a fundamentalist when it comes to learning and applying knowledge. Knowing the details helps me understand the big picture and more importantly the confidence to know what I am doing is correct. So rather than learning super high level code, I decided to revisit the 3-foot section of the pool again by reading these two books.

iPods are part of our digital lifestyles and I have owned one ever since they first came out! Actually, I had mine one day before they came out since I was able to convince my local Apple store to release my prepaid item before the market date. Since then, I never looked back to the CD as a precious piece of material associated with music. Right after getting home with my new iPod, I promptly encoded all 300+ of my CDs onto my Quicksilver G4, looted Amazon for images, and tagged every album with image art. After that, all my CDs turned into gifts for my friends and as I have upgraded from computer to computer, that 20 gigabytes of music just follows me around every where I go.

If you have ever accessed your website using a network protocol such as the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Samba (SMB), Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), or Network File System (NFS) using your Mac – I am sure you have run into this problem before – dreaded invisible resource fork files. These are the files that begin with a ._ and they are normally not seen from within the finder. My understanding is that these files are not even created on your local Mac hard drive since the HFS+ file system is smart enough to keep your data and resource forks together in one single file. But even if you are accessing your website from one Mac HFS+ volume to another Mac HFS+ volume, these files will still be created by programs like DreamWeaver and TextMate because the various protocols to access that remote share and/or the file systems themselves will need to split them to cope. So ultimately when ever you use these other types of file systems or network protocols, you will eventually be creating lost of invisible resource fork files.

If you are like me, an up and coming network geek, you probably thought that browsers automatically cached a site's assets and media as you went through it and looked at each page. I was very surprised to find out that this was not the case. In fact, every time I went from page to page on my newly created MetaSkills.net blog all of the CSS, PNG, JavaScript and other media files that were common to those pages were being downloaded at each and every request. WOW! This was bad news for me and, if left untouched, it would have easily caused all of my bandwidth to be taken up when 50+ users came and started clicking around.

Thanks to all those that read my recent post about networking 3 Mac Mini's Hopefully it can help you create a network that is as close as possible to the administrator's second home, the NOC. As an aside form the posts I had planned, I did want to share some of the statistics that the digg.com exposure generated and some "simple" helpful tips to those interested in surviving high traffic/bandwidth peaks. I'll cover more "technical" ways of setting up your server(s) to handle this too, but that is for my next post.