Alright, so no network would be complete if someone didn't use pine or otherwise configure SSH in a way that did some type of port forwarding. As it turns out, I have been using SSH for quite some time for a number of reasons including website management, email, and system administration. Although it's a convenient way to tasks remotely, it's certainly not intuitive nor does it provide the level of simplicity and convenience I wanted. I literally wanted to point and click my way to having secure remote access to my home network from anywhere in the world.

Courtesy of a massive hardware failure, I embarked on a journey about 6 months ago to move from a Windows infrastructure to a LAMP infrastructure for the ePartment54 website. The language of choice on Linux was obvious at the beginning, PHP of course. PHP wasn't that much different than anything else I had programmed in, but I quickly learned it got ugly real fast.

Sorting through the gobs of code which was my initial stab at a PHP version of the site, I decided to adopt something that was being hyped in the programming community...Ruby on Rails. To my surprise, it was a kind language that preferred a framework that forced you to do the right kind of things instead of allowing you to make a mess of it. It uses an MVC architecture which stands for Model, View, Controller.

Valentines Day was an interesting one this year. I managed to catch a hearty case of food poisoning from my local Wendys restaurant. I had plans to head up to my family's restaurant with my girlfriend to partake in a Valentines Day dinner. My sister, her fiance, and my parents were all going to be there. Prior to my departure up home, I had some preparation to take care of in lieu of this romantic day.

First, I had to pickup the flowers that I ordered for my girlfriend. I decided to do this over my lunch break. After doing so around noon that day, I decided to stop by my local Wendys to grab a bite to eat via drive thru. Quoting my order...

Me: I'd like a Spicy Chicken combo with a side salad and a Coke.

Them: Would you like to biggie size that?

Me: No thank you.

Them: That will be $5.13, pull around to the first window.

Back by popular demand, Damon's Christmas Wishlist for 2006. Well, to be honest, there's nothing 'popular' about this list. It's more of a means to provide my family and relatives convenient access to gift ideas for me during the shopping season. Being a technology-focused geek with a grin, sometimes asking for a 'LG DVD Player with at least one HDMI interface, DTS digital audio, and DVD upconversion' can get lost in translation. I originally thought an Amazon wish list was the best approach to all this, but then there were a few products that I couldn't find on there so I decided to capitalize on actually having a website this year. To keep it simple, how about links to products that can be clicked on and printed out. Ahhhh, much better, right!

For the past few years, I've had SDSL 768/768 from my ISP. I could run services (e.g., mail server, jabber server, web server, etc) and have a static IP address. It had worked flawlessly. A few weeks ago, my provider mentioned that they now had an ADSL package (3mb/768k) for less money and with all the same advantages (e.g., static IP address and services allowed).

On the surface, the upload speed didn't change, but the download speed was significantly faster. What could it hurt, let's give it a shot, right? Ehhhh!!! For those of you not familiar with PPPoE, it stands for Point-to-Point Over Ethernet. Previously, my connection was direct in that it didn't require PPPoE nor a username/password to connect. Things changed quickly though.

A long time ago in a distant galaxy I wrote a few firewall rules for iptables. At the time, they were more than sufficient to protect my lonely router from the filthy internet. My network gradually grew over the course of many years and since that time these firewall rules have been mangled, munged, and otherwise become unparseable to all but the most adept Linux operating system. Over the past two weeks, I set forth on a journey to take what was a lagoon full of random packet filtering rules and organize them in such a way that they actually made sense to a human.

Tis the season for gift giving and despite being nearly 30 years old, I still have a Christmas wishlist. For those of you that believe I have earned more than a lump of coal for Christmas, here's a wishlist composed of gadgets, entertainment, personal decor, and other raw materials necessary to keep myself and the apartment operational for the next 365 days. Hopefully this will make your shopping adventures less painful and whenever possible, available from the convienence of your computer and no more than a few mouse clicks away. Keep in mind, this is a work in progress so I'll be updating it over the next few weeks.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but Leopard has finally hit the streets, or at least made it's way via FedEx priority overnight to my apartment. Of course I tracked it the whole way from Illinois to Pittsburgh, but that's just part of the job when it comes to new products from Apple. I'm in the process now of getting things up and running again, but I plan to update this blog as tinker with Leopard. I'll try to primarily focus on things I like, things I dislike, some of those surprises that I didn't expect.

Talk about sending so humor my way just at the right time. My friend Allen and I are heavy users of del.icio.us. He happened to use the 'from' feature to send me an image that not only made me start laughing out loud, but depicts exactly my struggle with web design. I'll share that in a moment, but let's focus for a second on the pains of being a web designer.

It just so happens that at least once, usually more frequently, per day I'm complaining about designing my website so that it's compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. I guess it's more than a complaint, it's a 10-minute violent rant on why I wish I could put a hole through my computer. Basically, I only design for these three browsers because that's about all I have time for.

Floyd Mayweather may be the pound-for-pound best fighter in boxing, but my apartment is likely the bit-for-byte champ when it comes to having the most electronically decorated dwelling space within my complex. With a staggering amount of electricity flowing through the veins that power this little corner of my world, it's no surprise that I have to occasionally make some sacrifices to keep things working. Sometimes it's trying out new things, other times I roll the dice and break something, and more frequently than not, I find myself just purchasing new toys. When it comes to these activities, it's always a game of chance and sometimes like a boxing match between me and my digital opponents in the other room. Sometimes I'm the recipient of that right hook, other times I'm the deliverer.