TheWayOfCoding.com

I’ve used linux/unix quite a bit over the years. Probably my first experience with Linux was when I bought a magazine in the 90’s that had Mandrake linux on CD. Since then I’ve used distributions from Slackware to Ubuntu, but never really had a desire to do much with the OS once I had it running, so it just usually sat on my harddrive. I have recently been reminded why I was never interested in using *nix exclusively. Don’t get me wrong here, I think the concept of free open-source software operating systems is great. (Edit 09/2010: I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and have had generally a good experience with it for a few months as my primary desktop. I’m going to keep using it…) Let me go over a scenario to explain my thoughts: Goal: Setup Debian Linux so that I can test my software. I specifically want to use a VMWARE appliance so that I don’t have to mess around with my current OS. (Edit: I’ve since switched over to Sun’s VirtualBox software, which is much better than t...

I was due for a site software update, so I decided to modify the site as a whole. My main goal was simplification and to improve on usability.  As I went through the visual-template code, I also attempted to improve execution speed by minimizing include files and removing unnecessary features. Minimize the website banner to remove wasted space (logo redesign as well). Remove unpopular items from the site such as the forums. Reorder the site tags, recent postings, and other navigation links to improve on ease of use. Lessen the use of colors on the site. Clean up the footer area. I’ve noticed that the site seems to load faster in general. I suspect something like that XML parser for the forum was decreasing overall speed quite a bit.