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Gordon Crovitz wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal titled Who Really Invented the Internet? Fortunately, it’s only an opinion piece, because there was little more than opinion, littered with plenty of misinformation, in the writing. You can read the article here. Now, it’s not like I look to the WSJ for the latest technology information (or, in this case, technology history). Far from it. And generally when a here’s-the-truth-you-never-knew article starts with political propaganda, it’s pretty safe to assume that whatever comes next is going to be absurd. The article’s introduction could essentially be summarized as, “Obama said something that was true, but I’ll be damned if I can’t find a way to make it sound false!” ...

I’ve recently been reading through Steve Jobs’ biography, a phenomenal work by Walter Isaacson. A point that Isaacson keeps coming back to throughout the book is that Steve Jobs revolutionized six different industries: animated movies (through Pixar), personal computing, tablet computing, phones, digital publishing, and music. I don’t disagree with Isaacson. Jobs did revolutionize the way that digital media (including music, movies, books, and more) is marketed and sold today. But before you can have the corner on the market, there needs to be demand. And the revolution that realized the screaming demand for easily accessible digital media around the globe started in a college dorm room during the summer of 1999. ...

I heard a commercial with the booming and illustrious voice of Rush Limbaugh. After I recovered from banging my head against my desk, I reflected on what was said in the commercial. Rush pointed to the popular free email providers (Yahoo, Google, and others) to remind you that they scan your email. To remind you that they sell your email address, and other information about you, to the highest bidder. To remind you that the use of these free email addresses may increase your risk of spam mail. In contrast, purchasing an email address from Reagan.com provides you with private and secure email, and your information will never be sold. ...

Oracle’s VM VirtualBox is a virtualization program that allows you to run another operating system from within your native operating system. Though it is most commonly used to run fully functional operating systems such as Linux or OS X from within Windows 7 (or vice versa), it can also be used to host a Virtual Private Server (VPS). This post does nothing to compare benchmarks between more efficient (and recommended) VPS environments such as VMware or Linux-VServer, and I would not recommend using VirtualBox as a VPS in a production environment. However, it is useful in many situations, and I’ll let you be the judge of when this should or should not be done. It is certainly acceptable for personal and developmental purposes. And hosting a VPS through something like VirtualBox that is extremely simply to setup and use allows you to easily experiment with configurations and operating systems, or even jump between multiple VPSs on the same computer. ...

When perusing the internet for discussions on PHP sessions and cookies in regards to credential validation and user logins, I’ve never been satisfied with the approaches I find. Many of the tutorials are just plain lousy or incomplete. And the others seem to imply that you should only use sessions or cookies and never mix-and-match, a confusion that would probably trip up many PHP novices. So I’ve decided to post a tutorial explaining the complete PHP login format I use for my sites and web applications. Before we start, I should let you know that you can grab all the source in this tutorial from GitHub. ...

A few weeks back, I was contemplating various ways Jess and I could possibly payoff school debt sooner rather than later. I had a spreadsheet detailing my current Loan Payment Plan, but I was more than willing to knock months off the bottom of that plan, if at all possible. So I mulled over several schemes for paying them off sooner: embezzlement, bank robbery, pirated movie sales. The usual. But none of these options gave me complete confidence that they were bullet proof. ...

Author’s Note To prevent uneasiness, I should disclose that the attached sample spreadsheet (link provided at the bottom of the post) contains fictional data as an example/starting point for you to understand how the spreadsheet works so you can more easily use it yourself. These are not my (nor anyone elses) loans or account numbers. Do not worry :)! Everybody has debt. And, I assume, we all want to pay it off. But how quickly should we pay it off? Did you know that on a $100,000 home mortgage at 12.0% interest, increasing your monthly payment by only $100 (from $1,100 to $1,200) will save you nearly $50,000 of interest paid over the course of the loan? Now do I have your attention? ...

What … Is This? If you’re like my brother and me, you love old-timey computer games almost more than the latest and greatest shoot-em-up. For as long as I can remember, my brother and I have loved playing classic puzzle games like King’s Quest, Commander Keen (yah, I realize that’s not really a puzzle game), and, later, games like the Myst games. As such, after years of my brother and I writing our own useful programs, Andrew had a brilliant idea. “Hey, why don’t we write an old-school adventure game with lousy DOS graphics? You know, in the fashion of King’s Quest and the like?” ...

STS-135: The Final (Shuttle) Launch This morning marked the beginning of the end of an era. I say the beginning of the end because the era does not conclusively close until next week, when the Space Shuttle Atlantis returns safely the Earth. The beginning of the end happened at 11:29 A.M. EST as Atlantis’ rocket engines propelled the 4.5 million pound vehicle off the pad and, in eight and a half minutes, out of the Earth’s atmosphere, into space, and up to a speed of 17,320 mph. (For the astute reader, you’ll note that this means it must be traveling at over 4.81 miles per second as it left the Earth’s atmosphere.) ...

One-hundred-seventeen days. Almost four months. What could you build in one-hundred-seventeen days? Perhaps I should rephrase that: what could you build in one-hundred-seventeen days on a government contract? Certainly not an entire aircraft, from the ground up, from scratch-paper to rolling it out of the hanger? But it has been done. The North American P-51 Mustang was ordered just one-hundred-seventeen days before the first prototype was rolled out. That’s an incredible achievement right there. Before the aircraft even got off the ground, putting all of its air superiority aside, the entire plane was designed and put together in less than four months. It was flying less than two months after that. ...