WillErwin.com

Contrary to the popular belief that I’ve been sitting around Houston doing nothing, that hasn’t been the case. I’m always learning or doing something new - whether it be getting my real estate license or getting Cisco certified. To further development of my skills, and to give me a project to do, I’m going to fully re-design this website. Here is a list of features that I’m going to base the upcoming design off of.

Code:
- Standards based upon XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1
- Consider additional “light” design based on XHTML Mobile 1.1 and CSS Mobile Profile 2.0
- Framework based on PHP 5.2, MySQL 5.0, and Prototype Javascript 1.6
- Dynamically generated and updated sitemap based upon 0.9 schema.

Design:
- Web 2.0 Design
- Use of AJAX with “Unique URLs” Nixed idea due to SEO
- Tags along with dynamic Tag Cloud
- Feeds published using both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0
- Favicon

Posts:
- Online bookmarks submission (eg: Digg, del.icio.us, etc.)
- Individual (separate) META tags for each post - to be defined dynamically. Include post tags into META data.

*More coming when I get one of my brilliant ideas. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comment section of this post. It doesn’t even have to be something you’ve seen before.

After hosting this website off of a server running at my house on a cable modem for good while, it’s time that this site gets some stability, uptime and real bandwidth.

I’ve chosen to use DreamHost as my hosting provider (5 TB+ per month, 500GB+ of space). Their setup is excellent, servers and connections are always fast and support response times are amazing. I’ve used many dedicated server providers and web hosts from all across the country, and these guys are up near the top of my list — so far, for the price. If you need webhosting or feel that yours is slow/inadequate then I recommend you give them a try.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to switch to using Subversion (SVN) to update Wordpress, and have updated this site to the latest release. (A crontab running the SVN update command should take care of any future Wordpress updates automatically.)

It appears that Google is working on integrating IMAP into Gmail. Although Google has not released the official word confirming the update via The Official Gmail Blog, the help documents have been posted onto the Gmail site.

This is exciting seeing that Google is indeed starting to rollout updates to Gmail, as a major upgrade has been confirmed for a few months, but the general public (if you’re not a Google Trusted Tester [cached]) have yet to see these upgrades. I reckon that the IMAP upgrade is only the tip of the iceberg of what we’ll see before year’s end.

update: Google did release the official word on IMAP the next day.

Just a small update. For those (intelligent) individuals who run Firefox, an update is available. The release notes show that this release just contains security fixes, two of which are critical. Anything in the Firefox 2.x series should contain just small fixes. The next version will be Firefox 3.

The auto updater in Firefox should be firing soon. If you are like me and don’t want to wait, you can download the release directly.

I’d like to introduce you to a project called Folding@Home. It is a distributed computing project that uses your spare computer processing speed to help calculate/compute research for protein folding. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

This is a great project and is run by Stanford University. We call want to do as much as we can to eliminate devastating diseases such as cancer, and you can do a part. Just by running a small piece of software on your computer, and even keeping your computer on when you’re not using it, you’ll be helping fold proteins, which has already lead to much advanced research and greater understanding on certain diseases. I strongly encourage everyone to take part - it costs you nothing, but could mean everything.

I’ve been running the Folding@Home client on several of my computers for a few years - you can see my stats. So check out their homepage for more information about protein folding and the research they’ve already accomplished, and even download the client to help out.

I usually don’t run beta versions of applications that I run continuously on my computer, hours on end. One program that I run like this is Winamp, which I use for listening to my MP3’s. If you haven’t heard or used Winamp, then I suggest you check it out, especially since their latest preview version of 5.5 is simply put, amazing.

New features that I’m impressed with include very accurate metadata lookup and cover art lookup. The new skin of Winamp 5.5 has also been changed to Bento, which features multiple UI windows under one skin. From the few hours I’ve been playing around with it, I’m very impressed.

I’ve only been able to crash the application once, which was when I was loading 2500+ MP3’s into Winamp’s library. Hopefully that, along with the Vista preview/Flip 3D image support will be fixed in the final build of 5.5. For one, I can tell you that this version is something worth talking about. Winamp has not only skipped their version numbering system from 5.35 to 5.5, but has also included a publicized beta link on their homepage - something that has not happened in a long time.

Update 10/10/07: Winamp 5.5 Final has been released. Updated post to reflect change.

I’ve managed to push my Internet download speed to a new capacity - 738 kBps or roughly 0.7 MBps or ~ 5.8 Mbits. Thats about 4x T1 lines at my disposal. Not bad for a single cable connection. My upload seems to still be at around 92 Kbps*. Both these limits are of course capped by the local cable company, Comcast, so people like me don’t use up all the bandwidth. I say use it all up though - I’m paying for it and I might as well put it to use. All of this increase of speed has actually been due to me upgrading to Windows Vista. I believe it’s because Microsoft completely rewrote the TCP/IP code in Vista from XP, and also maybe because I’m now supporting IPv6.

I’ve also managed to reach a new peak within my home gigabit network while streaming multiple videos from separate computers to TV’s located across the house. while having the home audio system (which is also connected via CAT 5E) stream music throughout the house. I even have some nice WAN and LAN bandwidth graphs to look at.

*Seems Comcast is able to burst my upload bandwidth for a certain size amount, because I just uploaded a 3MB file at 294 kB/s.

**10/11: Hit 1.05 MB/s (yes, that’s bytes). Actually I just realized that the bandwidth I’m actually getting could be much greater and that the limit I’m hitting is due to the fact that I’m not hardwired and using wireless instead. I’ll be moving into my garage apartment in a few weeks, which was wired with CAT 6 to router when we had the house networked, so I’ll update this again when I get to test out that speed. This is a good article talking about the different cable types (CAT5, 5e, 6, 7).

After reinstalling the OS because I thought one of the drivers may be causing the reboot problem and taking apart the computer, I individually tested each stick of RAM (4 x 1GB) which took a few hours. It turns out the last stick of RAM was bad, so I’ve removed it and all it working. I guess I don’t really need 4GB of RAM anyways.

I’m in the process of installing Windows Vista Ultimate (hope I like it and don’t revert back to XP).

Well, it seems like this site is going to get a new design after all, especially after a year of procrastination.

First though, I have to fix my main computer, which started going haywire today and reboots randomly every 2 minutes. I believe it’s a motherboard problem. Thankfully I policies in place for situations like this with another hard drive with all my important (and up-to-date) data stored.
So, I may be busy ordering parts and building a new computer this week. This is such an inopportune time for something like this to happen, since the release of Intel’s new processor, Peryn, is just a month away. I might just throw in a cheap motherboard and make due until then — we’ll see.

I’ll also be switching over to be running Windows Vista Ultimate, as SP1 is due out relatively soon and beta copies can be obtained online. Time for me to migrate from XP.

Lots to do and I want it all done now!