It’s a good thing I’m not trying to make a living off blog-writing, or else I’d be living in a cardboard box by now.

Life is busy, work is extra busy, things are moving at a fast pace…so ABetterGeek has gone by the wayside a bit. Don’t worry; I’ll post soon.

Before the end of 2009, at least.

I spent the better part of today redesigning the site. The new WP 2.7 interface kind of motivated me to revamp things.

Let me know what you think, if you find something broken, etc.

It’s been more than a month since I last posted.

Sorry about that.

I’m going to be working on a new project that involves Twitter (likely in PHP, so that I can run it from ABetterGeek.com), so I may post some insights into that in the near future.

I don’t intend for this to be a dead site; it’s just hard to keep up with regular writing. I need more to talk about. Politics, maybe. And religion. And some lawyer jokes for good measure.

I’m a bit of a packrat. When something electronic finally craps out, I tend to keep it around, just in case. Dead hard drives fall into this category, at least for me.

If you’ve never taken apart a hard drive, you should. The platters are unbelievably reflective, since they’ve never been touched by anything before being installed in the drive’s casing. I have a large collection of hard drive platters at the moment, some of which have interesting radial patterns due to being scratched into oblivion by a misaligned head. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Another handy component in a dead hard drive is its magnets. Hard drives have two extremely powerful magnets in them. You want to be careful when playing with these - you could injure yourself if you got some skin or a finger caught between two magnets as you snapped them together.

I use some magnets on my fridge - the ones that have prongs on one end work well for this, since it keeps the magnet itself from touching a surface. Hard drive magnets are strong enough that they’re pretty difficult to pull off a magnetic surface.

So, in addition to my wide collection of hard drive platters, I also have around twenty hard drive magnets of varying sizes and styles. Today, I found a good use for one of them.

I live in an old historic house in downtown Lafayette, IN. All my walls are plaster. Today, I bought a cheap Black and Decker laser level at Menards. It comes with a magnetic wall mount, but the mount requires using a small pin to attach it to the wall. This pin only really works with drywall - if you’ve ever tried to push a pin or nail into plaster by hand, you know how difficult it is. So, I needed to find an alternative. Because of the design of the wall mount, I couldn’t just stick it to the wall with a piece of double-sided heavy-duty tape. The solution? A hard drive magnet!

It worked perfectly. I used my favorite 3M indoor/outdoor double-sided tape to mount it to the wall. You need to be careful when using this tape - if you remove it too quickly, it will rip off a layer of paint. I would imagine that other types of adhesive mounts would work equally well - 3M’s Command Adhesive tape would probably work, since the level isn’t very heavy (at least, my $15 one isn’t).

At any rate, think twice before dumping your trashed hard drives - they may still be useful for other geeky (and non-geeky) sorts of projects.

I, like pretty much everyone in the known Internet-accessible world, use Google. A lot. I’ve used Google Docs in the past, I have friends and family who only use Google Talk for chatting, Google is obviously the biggest and best search engine available, and now they have a browser.

A browser which, unfortunately, I will not be using.

There’s an interesting article that lays out the details of Google’s EULA (end-user license agreement). It’s not pretty.

This has all come to light with the release of Chrome, but Google’s user-hostile EULA has been around for much longer. The basic gist of it is that Google claims to have royalty-free license to use, manipulate, and/or modify any content (text, images, etc) that you send through their services.

What does this mean for you? Google’s EULA stipulates that you confirm your legal right to any content you send - that it’s your own intellectual property (IP). This just isn’t possible, as the above article discusses. If you use your corporate webmail through Chrome, you have no right to give Google license to use any content sent through email. Your company holds all rights to that content - not you, not Google.

Is it possible to live without Google? Probably, but I’m not interested in giving it up as my search engine. I won’t, however, be using Google’s browser (although for other reasons as well, which I’ll discuss in another article). I’ll also be pretty cautious about using Google Docs to store any important content - I’d much rather put some kind of document management system on my own server, free of anyone’s service or license agreements.

Google’s started to get a little powerful for its own good. I applied for a job there in 2006 (when I was finishing my undergraduate studies at IUPUI), and they were pretty underhanded and unethical in how they handled the interview process. I was never explicitly informed that I was applying for a contract position with no guarantee of full-time salaried employment. I had to ask them directly about that - it’s just not an honest way to do things. Aside from that personal experience, though, just look at how widespread Google has become. They’ve infiltrated many industries. They’re talking about releasing a smartphone with an alternative to Windows Mobile and PalmOS. They’re buying up other services to expand their reach. It’s how capitalism works, but it this case, I think it’s becoming a little dangerous.

Like Apple, people just trust Google to treat them well as customers and users. They trust Google to not abuse its power, and they believe that it has their individual best interests in mind. Unfortunately, that’s just not how corporations work. Google is like any other corporation in that they are driven by what funds them - their stockholders. Google continues to provide good products, because it means people will be interested in their offerings and will consider buying their stock. But at the end of the day, it’s not about your interests at all - it’s about money and profit. Google is no better a corporation than Microsoft; it’s just that the owners of Google aren’t as upfront about their evil as Steve Ballmer is.

I started looking around for alternatives to some of Google’s offerings. There’s an interesting service provider called Zoho that seems to provide a lot of the same services without the hostile user agreement. In fact, Zoho is the complete opposite:

We respect your right to ownership of content created or stored by you. Unless specifically permitted by you, your use of the Services does not grant AdventNet the license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish or distribute the content created by you or stored in your Account for AdventNet’s commercial, marketing or any similar purpose.

It used be that nobody read EULAs on software or services, because they all said the same thing - a disclaimer, limitation of liability, and rules about what’s considered illegal and grounds for revocation of the license in question. Now, however, with Google’s EULA coming under public scrutiny, it might be worth your time to make sure you haven’t agreed to any license terms that no sane person should ever voluntarily agree to.

In the unlikely event that anyone is reading this blog, things are going to go offline sometime in the near future, once GoDaddy finishes transferring my domain to my new registrar (aplus.net).

Lesson learned from this experience: GoDaddy sucks. A lot. Their interface is terrible, they only have long-distance phone support, the level of communication involving even doing this transfer was unbelievably bad, and I am never going to use them for anything again.

I’ve been hosting A Better Geek on someone’s DreamHost space since I started the site. I’ve since discovered that, while free hosting is nice, having control over everything is worth a little cash every month.

Server virtualization has started to really revolutionize the web hosting industry. Now, instead of sharing resources with thousands of others on a single box, you get a little mini-server all to yourself, complete with godlike control (aka root access).

What’s most amazing is how cheap this stuff has become. I ended up going with Linode VPS (virtual private server) hosting. For $20 a month, I get 12GB storage, 360MB RAM, and 200GB bandwidth (which, apparently is a soft cap - not sure what’ll happen if I go over!). But, best of all, it’s all mine. I went with Ubuntu 8.10 LTS, running the ever-present Apache/PHP/MySQL configuration. I have things that your typical shared hosting providers don’t provide without extra fees, like SSH and SFTP. I could run a WoW or IRC server if I wanted.

Needless to say, I’m quite happy with my move. I’ll have to figure out what kind of fun things I want to do with it!

I decided to add a message forum, using punBB.

Feel free to join and post what’s on your mind.

Here it is. I finally got around to installing Wordpress.

Now, before you judge me for not using a more advanced CMS/blogging engine, or writing my own template for this thing, allow me to speak on my own behalf.

I work full time, and at the moment I’m trying to finish a web application by 9:00 AM tomorrow. I don’t really have the time to do much advanced stuff with this right now.

I’ll get around to writing a proper introduction at some point, but in the meantime, there’s this:

My name is Claire. I’m a girl, I’m 23, and I work at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN as a web developer. We mostly work in Adobe ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server, although some stuff is done in PHP or ASP.NET (ew), and minimal stuff is done with MySQL instead of MSSQL.

I already have a personal journal (no, you can’t have the link). I’m hoping that I can use this for something a little more about the real world. We’ll see how it works - historically, trying to manage two blogs doesn’t work, at least for me.

Welcome!