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Wordle Word Clouds

steven — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 08:49:58 -0600

Wordle “word cloud” for evatt.com.

Scavenger Hunt

steven — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 08:19:47 -0600

Adine, Hala (@TheHza), Katie (@nadnuk) and myself formed Team Fashionably Late in yesterday's Scavenger Hunt. The scavenger hunt started at Onion Creek and finished at Big Top Lounge. We had 6 hours to take photos of as many items on their list as possible. Most items could be found inside the loop. We wound up in 6th place out of 16 teams. I would definitely love to do it again.

We all had a blast!

Escape Pod: Resistance

steven — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:37:02 -0500

On my way to Albany, I listened to Resistance, an fun sci-fi short story on Escape Pod by Tobias Buckell. Resistance is about a society that is a "techno-democracy", that is every person in the society votes on every issue. After some time, they realize this is impractical. Their solution is to create computer models, "avatars", for each person to vote the way they would have voted. Eventually, each of these "avatars" does the same thing and creates a master avatar to rule as a "benevolent dictator".

I really enjoyed the story, especially the timing of it being around the election. I only wish the story had ended about two minutes earlier.

Standard Podcast [47:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Houston Zoo

steven — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:23:27 -0500

Adine and I took my nephews Andrew and Sammy to the Houston Zoo for the day. Afterward we celebrated Sammy's birthday at Red Robbin with his Grandparents. Today was tiring but fun. Photos of the day at the zoo are on flickr.

Linux Journal Live

steven — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:06:14 -0500

Last night I was the guest of honor on the Linux Journal Live show. It was my first time on a live video program. I had a great time and think everything went well. Maybe they will invite me back sometime.

The Linux Journal had some very kind words about me in their promo for the show.

Tonight's show is about disaster. Steven Evatt knows a lot about the subject as he and his team were responsible for keeping Houston's newspaper on-line during Hurricane Ike --using Linux of course. Not only did he have to keep chron.com up and running during a natural disaster but he did so while their traffic increased nearly six-fold. We'll talk to Steven about his awesome ninja skills, the Chronicle's infrastructure, CMS, etc., and how Linux saved the day.

Online video chat by Ustream

Hurricane Ike Photos

steven — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:37:56 -0500

My Hurricane Ike photos can now be found on flickr. The storm hit Houston far harder than expected. It was unbelievable how most of Houston lost power for so long. I was without power for over 10 days.

The photo to the right shows how broken glass is still all over down town. The glass I have in my hand came from the Chase Tower which lost most of it's windows for the first 50 floors on one side.

iPhone 3G

steven — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:51:29 -0500

After much hassle, I finally have an iPhone 3G. It's my first "smart phone" and I love it.

My biggest complaint with the iPhone is it's battery life. After setting up the iPhone to sync both my gmail and exchange mail, I was lucky if the battery would last until I got home from work.

Turning off the Wi-Fi helped a lot. Over the weekend I turned off the auto syncing of mail and all of a sudden, the battery seemed to last forever.

Thus far, I have found two "killer apps" that are really making me love the iPhone.

The first is Shazam. Ever heard a song in the background and wonder, what song that is? Well, you don't have to wonder any more. Shazam has the ability to pick out songs in loud places and determine what is playing. It then provides links to iTunes and YouTube for the song.

The second apps is Pandora Radio. You tell Pandora a song you like, then it starts streaming songs similar to it over the iPhone. A few votes up or down on what it selects, then you have a stream full of songs you like. Now I have the ability to stream internet music in my car. Sweet! Best part, it doesn't seem to kill the battery (that fast).

Barcamp Houston 3

steven — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:46:17 -0500

I spent today at BarcampHouston3. I had a fantastic time. It was the best Barcamp yet.

I enjoyed the panels on Mobile technologies (David Herrold), Public Relations (Ed Schipul), Creative Thinking (Kelsey Ruger), and Using Flickr Professionally (TheFuzzball). Houston is full of talented, intelligent, and motivated people.

I can't wait until the next barcamp.

My photos of Barcamp Houston 3 are on flickr.

SEO Talk - Chron.com

steven — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:22:39 -0500

I have given my SEO talk twice in as many weeks to groups at chron.com focusing on basic SEO principles. Both talks were fun and I believe helped the users to understand how they can think in more of a SEO frame of mind while they produce content for the web.

Apache2::Reload

steven — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:33:14 -0500

Debian has moved Apache2::Reload to libapache2-reload-perl due to recent upstream changes to the release candidate of libapache2-mod-perl2 (2.0.4 rc1, "Works with Perl 5.10").

I discovered this as evatt.com went down for about ten minutes after a system upgrade because of the missing module.

Apache2::Reload reloads Perl modules that have been modified since the last time they have been used. It is invaluable when writing mod_perl code. For performance reasons, it is best practice to only use this module on development servers. I had forgotten I had configured this module into my Apache2 configuration. I should disable it on this server.