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Stefan Didak

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You are here: Home / Lengthy

Berkeley City Council – Too afraid to have their lies corrected on the record!

September 12, 2014 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
berkeley-city-hell

We went to the Berkeley City Council meeting on September 9th (the day after we got home from Ontario, CA. where we were to attend some meetings and ECC) to set the record straight after the city council and our opponents (the body parts people such as the American Lung Association, American Heart Association, Tobacco Free Kids, etc. and the various other tobacco control groups) had done a hostile and violent bashing job on electronic cigarettes and vapor products at their previous meeting on the same topic on July the 8th. At the time only two people were present to oppose the ordinance. We had no reasonable expectation to “win” (in short; “because it’s Berkeley”) but needed to address it regardless. For about a month I put out the word and request to join us at the next council meeting, in various places including several specific to vapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had not expected a huge turn out but what we got was beyond disappointing. But let me get into that a little later in this report and start off with out strategy and what transpired.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Personal, Rant, Very Lengthy Tagged With: Ban, Berkeley, California, City Council, Electronic Cigarettes, Gordon Wozniak, Ignorance, Maxwell Anderson, Ordinance, Politics, Prohibition, Vapers, Vaping

Making WordPress Fly with APC, Varnish, Memcached and more!

October 20, 2013 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
wordpress-logo

It appears that after my previous presentation on developer tools at the East Bay WordPress Meetup I’ve found myself doing another presentation, this time about how to make WordPress fly. Like a bat out of hell. That, of course is both a BatCache and a MeatLoaf reference. Pick whichever suits you based on your age category. 🙂 This presentation does NOT cover the regular caching plugins but rather on how you can optimize your server (and your code) to make use of a much higher performant level of caching. I will be very quickly covering the levels of caching supported by WordPress itself (the run-time cache, transient cache, object cache, page cache and fragment cache).

Filed Under: Lengthy, Software, The Web Tagged With: Apache, APC, Caching, Digital Ocean, Droplet, Fast, Linode, Meetup, Memcached, Nginx, Opcode Caching, Performance, Speed, Varnish, WordPress, XCache

Resigned from the Oakley Chamber of Commerce

October 3, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
chamber_logo_1-198x150

On October 1st, 2013 I resigned, effective immediately, as a board member/director at the Oakley Chamber of Commerce.The date is actually irrelevant though. The question I will be repeatedly asked now, is “why”. So here’s why. I expect the board of directors at a Chamber of Commerce, most of which are business owners, to act and make decisions in a business-like and professional manner for the organization as a whole, its members, its board, and of course for themselves. When important decisions need to be made you need to rely on everyone doing the right thing and bundle all that business experience into something that forms a solid and cohesive decision. At this, however, the board has unfortunately failed and in a way that is incomprehensible to me.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Personal Tagged With: Chamber of Commerce, Oakley

WordPress, Ignytion DDT and the Home Office (aka the Ignyter Network)

July 12, 2013 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments
Ignyter Network

I use WordPress. I use it a lot. I use it for most of my personal sites, business sites, I hack around with it and contort things to do what I need them to do. I’m not, however, one of those WordPress fanatics. In fact, you will hear me say a lot of nice things about Drupal, for example, even in public and even when talking to WordPress fans. I believe in using the right tool for the right job and in this case you can consider platforms of choice to be no different from any tool. One way I use WordPress is for something that nobody ever gets to really see (unless you visit my office and I happen to show you how I manage and control things): managing my vast number of systems, laptops, devices, and most of all the growing deployment of virtual machines. I used to keep track of network port diagrams via Microsoft Visio but since I am not using Windows as much these days and also don’t want to go back to keeping ASCII notes or document files I decided to put together a more proprietary and automated way to keep track of IP addresses, services provided systems and VM’s, passwords, installation and deployment notes, hardware notes, driver information, etc. And for that I decided to go with WordPress.

Filed Under: Home Office, Lengthy, Software, Software Development, The Web Tagged With: APC, Automation, Home Office, Ignyter, jQuery, Nagios, Nginx, PHP, Plugin, Puppet, Skematic, Theme, Twitter Bootstrap, Varnish, WordPress, XDebug

The DEATH of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry

March 2, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
The Death of the VFX industry

Over the past many years, going back at least as far as the past decade, I have been hearing and seeing the hurt and imminent death throes of the VFX (visual effects) industry and its many great artists that made it the industry that it has become over the past several decades. Even thought I have not been an actual “artist” (if I ever was one, since I considered myself always more of a “crazy scientist developer annex artist”, which most of us were back in the founding days before there even WAS a VFX “industry” to speak of) in this field since the very late 80’s, or early 90’s at best, I have most certainly not failed to noticed the direction things have been heading in for a very long time. And I am sad to say that many of the things I saw coming have been coming to a pass in a very rapid pace the past 2 to 3 years. It does appear, however, things are in an even more hyper-accelerated way the past year.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Rant Tagged With: 3D Animation, Computer Graphics, Hollywood, Visual Effects

Home Office Security and Update

February 19, 2013 by Stefan Didak 34 Comments
Tactical Assault Rifle

I know, I know, you had hoped for a major update with pictures of the new final completed Home Office 7.0 and instead you’re getting something completely different! In the meantime, people often ask me what I do about security and protection at home, especially with the office being a possible target of ill-willed criminals and other likeminded varmint. I normally don’t go into details about that and answer in rather broad terms that we have an excellent alarm system that is being monitored 24-7 by a professional security company. However, recently we extended the “home office defense system” (ha ha) with a new firewall and a thing that can fire very nicely at any kind of wall. And not just walls. Meet the home office protection device! You might wonder what on earth I’d need a tactical assault rifle for, amongst other things. The answer to that might be a long story.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office, Lengthy Tagged With: Assault Rifle, Gun, Red Dot, Tactical

Andre Alves of Aware Bear perjured himself AGAIN!

March 30, 2012 by Stefan Didak 2 Comments
Aware Bear Computers Rochester Pittsford New York, unreliable fraudulent scammer

Our favorite habitual liar and serial copyright infringer, Andre Leite Alves, of Aware Bear Computers in Rochester, is at it again and proving himself to now also be a habitual perjurer. And no, I am not talking about his Rochester Perennial Exchange “website”, which is nothing more than his attempt to link-build to gain a tiny bit of SEO juice in the hopes that all the negative exposure of his business activities and habitual lies would no longer score as high as they have done. This week, Andre Leite Alves, Mr. AwareBear, has once again perjured himself, in an attempt to file a DMCA against this site and three of the images used (in good faith used under 17 USC Section 107 which allows for such considering the context of this site). This is not the first time Andre Alves has attempted to do so. Remember many years ago when he filed a false DMCA (against my domain registrar) claiming the images of my office were actually his and that I was the one infringing on them? Perjury might be something Andre Alves was born with but since I am not a doctor I don’t know that for sure. Lying and displaying deceit, however, that I think has long since been proven.

Filed Under: Home Office, Infringer, Lengthy Tagged With: Andre Alves, Andre Leite Alves, Aware Bear Computers, Computer Repair, Copyright, DMCA, Failure, Home Office, Infringement, Misuse, Monroe County, New York, Perjury, Pittsford, Rochester, Theft, Thief, Thieves

Broadcast Graphics company Astucemedia caught stealing content!

December 10, 2010 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
Copyright Infringement: Astucemedia (a company by Alexandre Leclerc) using stolen content.

A mutual client (which remains nameless) of Astucemedia and more recently of yours truly asked me what my involvement with them was. None, of course. After a few seconds of confusion and further communication it was pointed out to me that my office was prominently displayed on their website. What a great move, using my office on your site, this client now has doubts about the professionalism of Atucemedia and I most certainly agree with the client on that. How’s that for being stupid… unless it wasn’t mere stupidity?

Filed Under: Infringer, Lengthy Tagged With: Astucemedia, Broadcast, Canada, Commercial, Company, Copyright, Graphics, Home Office, Infringement, Legal, Marketing, Montreal, Office Thief, Photoshop, Virtual Set, Website

Mac OSX Experiences – The Pictures

October 1, 2010 by Stefan Didak 8 Comments
Stefan Didak Home Office Version 6

When using the Mac along with the other systems I just pull it forward a little so it’s in easier reach. The little rolling desk was a recent addition because there just wasn’t any way I could fit a big 27″ screen into the current setup and doing an overhaul was not part of the plans I had, certainly not in the current space and certainly not in its current location. The next overhaul will be huge and will be “elsewhere”. Insiders will know what I’m talking about. Anyone else, you can just keep guessing what I mean by that.

Filed Under: Hardware, Home Office, Lengthy Tagged With: Apple, Archos, Experience, Home Office, iMac, Images, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, OSX, Pictures, Software Development, Tablet, Wacom

Windows 7, booting from VHD, converting between VHD and VMDK

September 9, 2009 by Stefan Didak 3 Comments
Harddisk

Virtual Machines are great. I rely on them for my work every day and most of my home office network depends on several Virtual Machines (VM’s) for the core infrastructure (SMTP, DNS, AD, backup management, centralized automation, build farms, continuous integration, etc.) but sometimes you just want the abstraction and ease of use of a Virtual Machine while having full support of the host’s hardware (graphics cards, drivers, etc.) and often you don’t want to mess around with the, often complex or entangled, multi-boot scenarios. If you’re in need of that, Windows 7 (and 2008 Server R2) and their native support for Virtual Harddisks (VHD’s) will come in extremely handy. Especially now that you can install and boot your system from a VHD, directly. The following is a bit of a quick start to using VHD’s, some additional details on how I’ve been using them, and a quick look at Starwind’s free V2V conversion application.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Software, Windows Software Tagged With: Booting, OS, StarWind, Storage, VHD, Virtualization, VMDK, Windows
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