Things I Use Images

Please just ignore this post, apparently it's the only easy way to get images onto Blogger.

However, if you're a blogger or just interested, read on...

Why am I bothering? That part is simple:

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

As it turns out, this phrase applies to much more than design work. I first learned it from design types, but as a result of me bothering to do this it has a number of interesting impacts.

1) Having all of my images on the same website physically as the page content makes pages load faster.
2) If there are problems with, say, Creative Common's Content Distribution Network(I'll pick on them, as it is a bit slow) all of the content on this page will be completely unaffected.
3) Blogger and squid get along famously. For those out there who are running a caching proxy in addition to their browser's cache this page loads like lightning.

And so, without further ado...are the Things I Use images:

Things I Dig Images

Please just ignore this post, apparently it's the only easy way to get images onto Blogger.

However, if you're a blogger or just interested, read on...

Why am I bothering? That part is simple:

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

As it turns out, this phrase applies to much more than design work. I first learned it from design types, but as a result of me bothering to do this it has a number of interesting impacts.

1) Having all of my images on the same website physically as the page content makes pages load faster.
2) If there are problems with, say, Creative Common's Content Distribution Network(I'll pick on them, as it is a bit slow) all of the content on this page will be completely unaffected.
3) Blogger and squid get along famously. For those out there who are running a caching proxy in addition to their browser's cache this page loads like lightning.

And so, without further ado...are the Things I Dig images:

HOWTO: Simply Disable Snap Shots From Snap.com

Well, I got to thinking the other day...and this one isn't just for me. It's really for anyone, old friends / acquaintances from Facebook, random wanders from the Internet sky, whomever.

Thanks to the joy and wonder of OpenDNS, I finally disabled Snap.com. Frankly, I hate the thing.

Some may like it, some may not, but for me trying to disable it via their interface simply didn't function. Needless to say, I think they're spammers now. Such a sad thing to say for what looked at first like a promising Internet startup. C'est la vie. So...they get banned from my world, at the DNS level.

Step 1 - Go to OpenDNS and chose "Create account" in the upper-right corner of the page.

Step 2 - Do the usual register-for-a-website dance.

Step 3 - Follow their instructions for using OpenDNS. This is quite technical, see their website for details.

Step 4 - Go back to OpenDNS and click on "Settings". Scroll down to "Manage individual domains". Leave the "Always block" setting as-is, and enter the following two domains: shots.snap.com and spa.snap.com, one at a time. Confirm that you wish these to be blocked under any and all circumstances.

Step 5 - Go back to whatever website you really want to see(for me it was a Second Life Gaming blog) and reload it. Voila! No more Snap.com! *cheers*

Hope this helps someone out there...feel free to leave a comment if this didn't make sense or you'd just like to say thanks.

Internet Optimization 101

This is mostly for myself, but I wanted to document somewhere the various things I've learned from setting up my laptop in the hopes of making the Internet as fast as possible while supporting Internet radio, podcasting, Second Life, etc.

Required Items:

Fast DNS Infrastructure(i.e. OpenDNS) - This company has an entire soon-to-be world-wide infrastructure dedicated to serving DNS as quickly as possible. This is the part of the Internet that turns www.facebook.com into a number for your PC to contact. Huge speed bost.

Fast Local Search - So I discovered the hard way, that if I leave Spotlight enabled(I'm on a Mac, I bet Windows is similar) that it tries in vain to index every cache on my machine...essentially turning into slag. Once Firefox started freaking I decided to fix it. Voila, SO much better. Just a tip. :-)

Optional Items:

Fast Caching Infrastructure(i.e. squid) - It's total overkill, but I love it. I currently devote 512MB of RAM and 8GB of HD to what is essentially a massive personal web cache, via a piece of software called squid. It did need some tweaking...following are my customized settings:

-----
./configure --disable-internal-dns --with-large-files --without-pthreads
cache_mem 512 MB
maximum_object_size_in_memory 65536 KB
cache_dir ufs /usr/local/squid/var/cache 8192 16 256 
store_dir_select_algorithm round-robin
maximum_object_size 262144 KB
cache_store_log none
ftp_user adam@turing.com
shutdown_lifetime 1 seconds
cache_mgr adam@turing.com
cache_effective_user nobody
cache_effective_group wheel
dns_children 16
ipcache_size 4096
fqdncache_size 4096
----

That's pretty much it. The rest is "standard" squid setup, but dang do these settings make my web surfing just toast. Love it...and hope this helps others.