michael favia

Network neutrality is a term that describes the way that Internet traffic should be treated equally as it makes its way around the world to your computer screen. Internet content providers (e.g. Google, Hulu, YouTube, Apple) use popular buzzwords like competition and discrimination to describe why it should be a national priority. Internet service providers (ATT, TimeWarner, Comcast) on the other hand oppose it en masse using phrases like "quality of service" and "peak demand" to convince you that they are acting in your best interest.

I've recently begun a project to create a drupal install capable of handling multiple domain names with independent front ends and themes for each site and a shared code and database. This project will be tailored to the online marketing needs of the modern service professional and will allow each to post company information, profiles, portfolios, service lists, products for sale, as well as integrate into their twitter, facebook and craigslist accounts for social media appeal.

I joined twitter (on pain of death) a couple 2-3 years ago when it made its real first local debut at SXSW here in Austin. It caught on hard and fast and became the defacto schedule of "events worth attending" for attendees of the conference. My early experiences with the service were valuable and informative but as the service and my social network grew the signal to noise ratio inverted and it lost my attention because there were simply easier ways to follow pertinent topics and people.

I worked with some kind folks in the UX team to promote the delete button on the node edit form to a local menu task (aka tab) like edit, view, track and revisions are. The general consensus is that this is a good thing but Dries would like to unify the interaction model across core if we push it through. I couldnt agree more.

I have had a seemingly constant battle with webdav for some reason over the years. We use it to hold Kate's graduate work and temporary work storage so it is constantly needed. TO its credit the problems ive had have never been its own making but rather a conflation of issues from installing so many services on top of eachother (Subversion, Drupal, Webdav). My most recent battle involved not being able to write to the webdav folder that existed as a subdirectory of a drupal site.

Want to have the handy custom keys om your XO actually control something in XFCE but think the HOWTO looks discouraging or less than entertaining. I've created an RPM that includes some simple scripts to let you control the screen brightness, screen orientation and volume of your XO with the buttons you expect should work. Please install the "noarch" rpm below to add the functionality listed above. Also provided the "src" rpm if youd lie to edit the spec file and change/improve the rpm.

The basic premise of twitter is simple. You update what you are doing and others "follow" you and decide how they want your stream of updates delivered. You may want to have close friends updates sent to your phone via text messages, and have other peoples updates only display on your twitter web page so you can check in ocassionally but not be bothered all the time. The point is, its up to you and can be changed anytime you like from your phone or on the web.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a new desk and chair for my "office". Milla sleeps under my desk while i work and she finally broke the support off of hre glass and steel desk i bought many years ago in St Louis. It served me well but i wanted something "warmer" for my next desk and my Office Depot Special chair has seen better days. I spend alot of time at this desk and i figured it was time to get something decent.

While linux is getting generally easier for anyone to use as a desktop replacement this operation required a little more fiddling than i would like. I'll record it here in case anyone has similar desires to use their cingular phone as a modem/personal area network device. This method lets you connect to the internet over thwe bluetooth link while charging the phone over the USB connection (if you care to connect it at all).