http://www.caxy.com/blog A blog about technology, culture, open-source, PHP, Linux, MySQL with tips, tricks and extra bits. Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:02:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Caxy founder Michael LaVista will be speaking at the PMG Innovation Summit on April 21st, 2009.  Wondering what interactivism is? Are you an interactivist? There's a site about it just for you. What will Michael be talking about, anyway? Gald you asked: This is Michael LaVista, your Technology Squad Leader, and ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2009/03/caxy-founder-michael-lavista-to-speak-at-pmg-innovation-summit/ The 1800 block of West Grand in Chicago suffered a blackout today. However, aided by his trusty Flashlight iPhone app, Senior Developer Jason Bautista got a few more devices into our battery backup and kept us online. It took the power company a few hours longer than we thought to get power ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2009/02/iphones-saved-our-office/ Here's a look at the traffic outside our office via Google maps. This is why I take the train. If you live in Chicago, your car never gets above 30 miles per hour in the winter. [inline] [/script] [script type="text/javascript"] function load() { ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2009/01/caxy-maps/ As times get tough, perhaps the biggest issue facing businesses is cost management—small businesses in particular can only afford actions that cut costs immediately. So will businesses take this opportunity to ignore environmental consciousness to save cash? I’m hoping that the tide has turned enough that businesses will use a desire ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2009/01/cutting-costs-staying-green/ Subtitle: Working with /etc/hosts and lookupd for Mac OS X If you are a developer looking to test web sites on your Mac or maybe you have different DNS for different locations (office, home, client, airport, etc...), you may need to temporarily override the authoratative DNS for a host. Checklist: Do you have ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2009/01/managing-dns-the-hosts-file-on-your-mac-os-x-system/ I have no idea why this is so hard to find, but if you're looking for the JavaScript code for your Google Analytics account, here's how you find it. (This is direct from Google's site, just not in an easy-to-find spot) To find your personalized tracking code and account number, please ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2009/01/where-is-my-google-analytics-tracking-code/ A recession is no time to pay through the nose for software. So in these tough economic times, with proprietary software vendors increasing the licensing fees and locking in their customers, open source is king. The idea behind open source is simple: find a relevant solution that already exists, use that ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/12/open-season-for-open-source/ Well, as everyone around the office knows, I don't get on the upgrade wagon that often.  I see software upgrades as being a never-ending cycle meant to pull customers in and take their money, when oftentimes, an upgrade isn't necessary because the software already works. From a hardware standpoint, this ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/11/building-a-quiet-silent-pc/ A couple of weeks ago, while working on an elastic CSS layout using floated divs, I noticed an annoying problem: when using a fixed width left floated div as well as a 100% width “elastic” div, if the browser is resized and the content is scrolled horizontally, the elastic div’s ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/10/a-common-oversight-in-css-fluid-layouts/ I think every coder and every company that's been around long enough arrives at a situation where for whatever reason, old code needs to be re-used. But not in a 'Hey, I'll grab this function from the site' way but in a 'Hey, we need to redo the frontend for ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/05/managing-legacy-code-while-remaining-somewhat-sane/ Installing pear lets you take advantages of some really interesting way to extend PHP. This should be a fairly simple install, so we hope this helps. First shell into your machine. This is a personal preference, but if you don't have an "installs" directory, your home directory can get messy. Let's ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/04/setting-up-pear-on-a-linux-web-server-centos/ So many of the posts out there about this seem to leave us hanging. This post outlines how to log in to Linux without a password and addresses some of the gotchas that seem to creep up along the way. We manage enough servers that it's nice to be able ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/04/getting-authorized_keys-to-work-logging-in-without-a-password-in-linux/ Hopefully by now you know what Subversion, aka SVN, is. It's a version control system that keeps track of changes made to files like source code and documentation. It's similar to CVS, but with some major advantages. We've been using it at work for awhile, and I really like it. ... http://www.caxy.com/blog/2008/04/using-subversion-for-web-development/