Info

This is just my (=anti's) homepage. Nothing fancy here.
I just use it to test new stuff;
And keep myself up-to-date of what I'm up to.

2020 Vision
Posted on 06 February 2010 at 23:03

Just recently my sight went below 20/20.
I used to have 20/8 sight when I was younger
and it slowely went down to 20/20 over the last few years.

During the last checkup it was only 20/22.
Which is still good, but not 20/20.

Time for me to replace my 20/20 vision with my 2020 vision.

It's early in 2010 and most people have analyzed the predictions for 2009
or mad new predictions for 2010.

Why not make some for 2020?

My 2020 Vision

(The geek edition)

In the year 2020, when I ask a friend:
"Do you still remember? Only 10 years ago you had regular firefox crashes when you hit some bad flash?"
My little boy will interrupt: "Dad. What is flash? What is firefox? And how did you crash it?"

He never saw a flash based website.
He never used firefox or another webbrowser.
And the word crash is only used for the stock markets.

When systems - which we haven't called PCs for a long time - "crash",
they actually have a "black screen". The things themselves don't "crash",
they just temporarily lose connection to cloud, which has evolved from the internet.
Thus systems "blacken" or they "drop".

Even cars don't "crash" anymore.
Most cars have been gone for a while.
Cars are for rich people and for entertainment.
Mankind has evolved past that toy.

There are no browsers anymore.
Since there is no web.
At least not as we know it today.
There is a big cloud of information, that you can access.

The geeks are a dying race.
After all, we were just the scouts and pioneers.
Even the first settlers are barely remembered.
Computers have long become a commodity.
There are still some systems that remind us of things like the iPad,
which paved the way for the mass access to technology,
but the interfaces are not important anymore.
You simply can and do access the cloud content.
You don't care - or even fight - about the how of the access anymore.

On the energy side people in 2020 will have realized that electricity isn't such a bad medium for energy transfer after all.

The last oil has been gone.
Gas will be next;
And burning wood is a crime.

Electricity is used to heat your home and your water.
It's used to power transportation.
It's used for all kinds of energy needs.
After all, electricity * never runs out. It can be easily created. * it can be transported around the globe in an instant. * the transport is nearly costless.

Efficiency of electricity production has increased a lot.
Solar energy converters will reach over 80%.
Wind energy - pioneered and perfected by China - will reach over 90%.

95% of all energy needs will be supplied by clean sources (Sun, Wind & Water).
There will still be some nuclear fission reactors, but they are becoming legacy.
Nuclear fusion reactors are still a dream, which almost nobody believes in anymore.

The social system will be radically different.

There were some major revolutions,
after riots that broke out
when people finally realized that the social system had failed.
That social security was a lie to lull the masses.

The social net ensured only one thing:
Those at the bottom would stay at the bottom.
A system supporting lazyness and punishing effort had to fail.

After the riots the system were flushed of the crud that had clogged the system.
People were once more reliant on themselves again.

The whole advertising business broke down.
People realized they had everything and didn't need anymore.
They stopped buying stuff they didn't want with money they didn't have.
The average working hours per week came down to 6-8 again,
that's all that is needed to live and enjoy living.

Note: This is not my 2020 prediction.
This is somewhere between my 2020 dream and my 2020 nightmare.
Only time will tell, if this will be my 2020 prophecy.

Note 2: This started to drift slightly into the more distant future,
especially at the end,
but I still wanted to leave it here...

Note 3: This vision is mixing a lot of different topics,
which flow into each other.
This flow mirrors how the real world is interwoven,
but it also makes this post nearly unreadable.
I promise: I will write seperate posts for each of the topics,
but for now I just want you to get the baseline feeling for the future.

Switching To Jekyll
Posted on 05 February 2010 at 18:30

Last week I wrote that I'm switching to jekyll and now the time for the switchover has come.

The pages still don't like I want them to look, but I feel that they look good enough to replace the old site.

This will also mean I'm moving to a new server. (The old one has been running since 2004 and is getting a bit dated.)

This will also mean a switch from Apache to NGINX.

Cut me some slack and give me some time to really clean things up. As long as the text is readable you will find what you need.

Wordpress On Nginx
Posted on 03 February 2010 at 14:33

Yesterday evening I setup a new server for the website of a friend.
He doesn't know a lot about the technical site of the internet,
so I had planned to give him the usual
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) + Wordpress setup.

Having played with Nginx with Phusion Passenger support last week,
I decided to have a little experiment with this clean new box,
that nobody would need before next week.

So instead of installing Apache I went with Nginx.

The setup was ultra easy:

gem install passenger
passenger-install-nginx-module
install spawn-fcgi
configure nginx

After this I only had to do the Famous 5-Minute Install and I was done.

Result?

The system does everything it is suppossed to.
The responses "feel" a lot faster than from my other servers.
The system load is a lot lower.
Memory consumption went down to nearly zero.

I think I'll just leave this system as is to get some long term experience.

Next stop?

Remove the toy MySQL from the equation and replace with a real database system (e.g. PostgreSQL).

Jekyll
Posted on 02 February 2010 at 13:39

Tweaking my templates to do what they are supposed to do.

I'm trying to stay away from reading the (Jekyll-)code to understand how to do things. The documentation should really be enough.

So far I have some workaround tweaks, but nothing satisfying.

Including snippets via liquid is still a little confusing.

Lunchbreak is over, so I have to get back to some real world.
(This site isn't live anyway...)

Switching To Jekyll
Posted on 29 January 2010

This site hasn't seen an update for a long time.

I'm switching it to jekyll right now.
And putting the source on github.
And switching the server to one of my test boxes.
Which will mean the site gets served by nginx instead of apache.

Status
Posted on 09 March 2007

Status