First off this is a (late) response to Christer Edwards way of simplifying his public Dropbox URL's with .htaccess and mod_rewrite, it can be found here. While his solution works, it leaves the URL ugly e.g. a Picture of my son and his toy duck at would redirect to http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/461492/eric-n-duck.jpg . Below is my solution to the "problem". Simply setup apache2 as a reverse proxy for your public folder on Dropbox. Here is the sample config I use on http://storage.imbrandon.com/ , its just a couple of added lines to your vhost/httpd.conf ( change the number after the /u/ to your Dropbox user ID number ).

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /dropbox http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/461492/
ProxyPassReverse /dropbox http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/461492/
So now when you visit http://storage.imbrandon.com/dropbox/eric-n-duck.jpg the URL never changes.

Riddle: Totus illae has venio pro , quod is mos totus venio iterum Answer: All they /h s/ I come for , because he custom all I come again

Tonight begins the end of a great ( IMHO ) Sci-Fi story. I just hope that someday it may be continued in written/novel form. Ahh the things dreams are made of. I'll leave it to the reader to translate the title ...

According to Netcraft 20 Million Chinese websites running on "QZHTTP" ( apparently serving mostly the qq.com domain ) just came out of no where, or are at least crawl-able now. What does this mean? To Me it just means more Questions, I cant seem to find any information on QZHTTP. Is it Open Source ? GPL ? Based on Apache ? Totally from scratch ? etc. etc. etc. So "Dear Lazyweb" what does it mean? Will QZHTTP overrun IIS in web server market share for 2nd place, what about even Apache in 1st ? A quick Google ( don't you like how google is a verb now ) didnt turn up much other than another blog post with just as many questions and not any answers or comments.

Congratulations Debian on the Release of Debian 5.0 "Lenny" , I know everyone on the team put in many many hours of hard work into the release and its good to see everything went smoothly. Cheers !

So in 2009 I've started using Social Media Accounts alot more like Facebook, Twitter,Wordpress ( self hosted ), and plan to use more as time goes on and I discover new services and new services are introduced. <rant> One of the issues I've noticed is most "tweet flows" want you to update your status across multiple services, like your IM status would be the same as your Twitter status and again the same as your Facebook status and so on. See the problem with this is not all "status" messages on Social Media sites are used for the same purpose , e.g. the Facebook status allows comments and the Tweet allows replies and RT's ( Re-Tweets ) and IM status doesn't allow any feedback at all, at least not publicly. An posting to both identi.ca and twitter causes replies and such to be checked on both. Where is our "Digital Convergence" / Digital Universe for Social Media ? How do any of you keep all the different forms of social media updated ( an relevant ) to the media its self, e.g. not posting the wrong status to the wrong service and not using 100000(.5) web interfaces constantly. </rant>

WordPress 2.7.1 was released and I upgraded this blog right away ( along with some other client installs that were already running 2.7 ) Let me know if you notice anything funky about the upgrade, from a cursory look everything seems to be working as it should. On that note, I've also added a place in the comment section where you can input your Twitter ID and eventually I will publish this information along with the users gravatar and name.

You know, the more I ve been using Twitter the last week or so ( @imbrandon ) I have noticed many things that I ll be blogging about. But one of those such things is the language used on Twitter by large is not the same Language that is used in SMS messages even though the two technologies while very different have quite a bit that would effect the language used in common such as the 140 character limit on tweets and that largely the people that use twitter also make use of SMS messages too. SMS messages always seem to be much more abbreviated than Tweets , here is an example ( fictional to explain the point better ) : Twitter to Mark : @MarkRosky Me and Sarah are having coffee at Starbucks on 4th and Grand, come join us if you have time.
SMS to Mark : grabbin cup o java at da spot. get down here Now I m curious if this is because most people started ( and continue ) to use SMS via limited phone keyboards instead of fuller featured ones on Blackberries, iPhones, and other smart phones ? Is it a mindset when using a device other than a full computer , e.g. when you send a tweet via SMS does it follow the SMS language or Twitter s ? Or am I mistaken and its a whole different demographic ? I d love to hear your thoughts in the comments

Its getting close to valentines day again so I thought some of you geeks out there would appreciate a post I made last november about a hack that was inspired by an XKCD comic. Anyhow here is a link to the original post titled Roses are #ff0000 , hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Its getting close to valentines day again so I thought some of you geeks out there would appreciate a post I made last november about a hack that was inspired by an XKCD comic. Anyhow here is a link to the original post titled Roses are #ff0000 , hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

It's a new year, so why not a new hackergotchi I say? Brandon and Robin came around on Thursday night, and where there's Brandon, there's his camera, so he got a decent enough mugshot to convert into a less crap hackergotchi (after I spent a few hours fighting with the GIMP today)

1. Make a list of the top 10 ways to amuse a geek.
10. Use binary.

Change is upon us, lets unite and embrace it. Maybe we can make this country a better place and once again be a Role Model to the world of a young ( yes, 221 years young ) Democracy taking its place in the international community for the betterment of all as an Example Nation, not a unnecessarily forceful and arrogant one. Change is here, and tonight I will sleep well for the first time in ages dreaming of this change. 13 comments so far.

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© Brandon Holtsclaw for http://www.imbrandon.com/, 2008. This Post and Originating RSS feed is released under CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Seven Years Ago, America was a much different place. I don’t condone any of our actions ( as a country ) in the middle east since that fateful day in New York, but instead mourn the people and freedoms we lost that day. Never Forget : 2001-09-11 21 comments so far.

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© Brandon Holtsclaw for http://www.imbrandon.com/, 2008. This Post and Originating RSS feed is released under CC-BY-NC-SA license.

KDE 4.0 Heres looking to a great 2008!
( Find it in Debian Experimental, Kubuntu Gutsy Backports, and Kubuntu Hardy )

Well its been a while since my last post and since I’ve celebrated my 29th Birthday on December 19th, Spent a wonderfull Christmas with my family ( pictures for both here ), and getting ready to ring 2008 ! Sitting here thinking about what I want to accomplish in 2008 I only have a few easy to reach goals IMHO :

• Make it to 4 Linux confrences this year ( Penguicon, Ubuntu Developers Summit [ 1 of 2 ], SCALE, and Ubuntu Live )
• Give atleaste 1 talk at a OpenSource Confrence, and run 1 Local “Package Jam” here in Kansas City
• Quit Smoking Cigarettes
• Decide between a eeepc or Mac Book for my next “mobile” machine
• Upgrade all my systems to use FL/OSS friendly vendors like Dell,Intel,Apple etc. ( I’m not talking 100% ideal companies, but ones that atleaste show some effort )
• Keep and install of Ubuntu GNOME arround alongside my Main Kubuntu KDE ( I’m still a kde guy through and through, but its good to see the “other side” from time to time )
• Blog and Post Photos ( to flickr ) more Regularly

Also on a side note this year I’ve introduced all my imediate family members to Ubuntu and they all continue to use it ( Wife, Stepfather, Brother, and Mother ) instead of XP or Vista, My “support” phone calls have basicly dissapeared. And with that, I wish every one a safe and Happy 2008… May this be the year of the Linux Des… ahh nevermind, yall enjoy the holiday.

Brandon, back in my day, I compiled python-imaging on an Amiga 1200 with a 25 MHz 68040 and then uploaded through a 14.400 baud modem. You youngsters have it easy these days.

First of all a GIANT thank you to all who made this possible. It was hugely a success. Today the parts arrived to piece my system back together , I’m typing this post on it as we speak. This means I’ll be able to get alot more done in a sane amount of time, in fact kdebindings-kde4 is calling my name tonight ( was far too large to compile before ). For those of you interested in the new system specs here they are:

• AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual-Core 4600+ Processor
• 4GB ( 2x 2GB ) DDR2 667 RAM
• 80GB SATA2 3G/s HDD
• MSI K9N6GM Motherboard with nForce Chipset and onboard Nvidia 6100 GPU
• Lots of USB 2.0 ports and all the other standard ports

Time to get all my disk configurations and such upto-date :)
Everyone have a Happy and Safe Holiday Season !

Well the last few days I have updated many things in a lot of different areas, the most noticeable right away is I have updated my website theme, I’m still not 100% happy with it, link colors are a bit off and such but its “good enough” to go live, if your reading this via an RSS feed go check out my main page and drop me some feedback. ( if your really interested in the theme and want it for your own website you can grab it at http://www.imbrandon.com/misc/human_0.5.tar.gz
I’ve released it under GPLv2 , its not perfect but its exactly what I’m running as of this writing. ) The next thing is I changed ISP from Comcast Cable ( ugh ) to Yahoo! Branded AT&T 6M/768k DSL, not only is this faster and cheaper than my old connection, it has the nice side effect of giving me a flickr Pro account free* ( *included in the connection price somehow I’m sure ), that brings us to the next change … I’ve started using my flickr pro account and am loving it, with things like the fuse filesystem FlickrFS and kFlickr makes using flickr easy and painless. Along with that there is this awesome GPL wordpress plugin FAlbum that lets me integrate my Flickr sets into a photoalbum on wordpress very simply and looks great too. Visit my new web album here http://www.imbrandon.com/images/ ( I’ve uploaded just over 100 photos to get it started, I still need to tag and sort most of them ) And last but not least on top of my Ubuntu Core Developer Status, I’ve finally got in contact with a “full-time” sponsor for my contributions in Debian, this will make my application for NM alot smoother with an Advocate ( when I get around to filling out the NM form, LOL ), wish me luck.

Looks like Microsoft Researches new website InkblotPasswords[.com] , aimed at helping users come up with hard to crack passwords ( while at the same time saving them in a database ) is powered by Debian and Python :) From Netcraft :
Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_python/2.7.11 Python/2.4.4c0 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.8c