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In case you were wondering, yes these pages are hand coded. I figure that after $12,000 in computer classes, $140,000 to get a bachelors degree, and being certified in A+, Network+, MCP, and MCSE, I should be able to create a webpage in clean HTML. Notice if you click on the bottom link, that my HTML validates. That may not seem like a big deal, but try entering any other URL you know in there. Not even my boss writes such clean code.

Why does it matter, you ask? Well, basically it means no more of this "this page optimized for Netscape 6.0" or whatever. Why? Well, here's the quick jist of things. HTML was originally controlled by a standards group called W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). And in the beginning it was standard across all browsers. Well, to meet designers demands, both Netscape and IE started adding in their own proprietary additions to the code, trying to attract designers into using their product (and thus eliminate the competition). Finally the W3C said, "Hold on, we're in charge here" and is now working to standardize webpage coding again. What this means is that by keeping my pages HTML 4.01 compliant, they should be viewable on just about ANY browser including computers, web TV, palms, cell phones, etc. No more maintaining separate versions of a website for every browser out there. (Which some designers, including myself, were being pushed into doing.)

I passed my nasty 4 hour MCSE upgrade test. That's really cool, because I've only heard of one other person passing it. Even my instructors all opted for taking the individual tests. Basically it's like taking 4 tests all at once, but it's nice because it's free, and only NT 4.0 MCSE's can take it. So now I have to pass one more design test and I'll have a second MCSE cert.

OK, here's my geeky find of the day. On a UNIX server, this command will recurse the current working directory and all sub directories for the top 10 largest files and deliver them to you in sorted order along with complete file paths. Oh, and it runs as a background process. (This thing could take a while...maybe a minute to complete.)

ls -alR | sort -g +4 | tail

Aaah, the beauty that is Linux.

-Rick

And here are some notes for my own sanity, on how to manage programs on a Redhat server. The following commands are useful beyond belief:

  up2date --showall

lists all packages available. The switch -l lists any applicable updates for your system, and -u actually updates them.

  rpm -ql {package}

Lists all the files for a certain package, like 'php', 'apache', etc. -qi gives extra info on the package. and -qa lists all the packages installed on the system.

  chkconfig --list

shows all services and their status.

find . -name "*.log" -exec webalizer {} \;

Recursively finds all files *.log and then executes them each with webalizer.

Here are my current certifications:

!write me!