Looking for a place to live in Utah county sucks because no good search tools exist. The closest thing I had to a good search tool was KSL Classifieds. Unfortunately, they’ve replaced their homes section of the site with some service called Rentler. It’s pretty clear that Rentler has put quite a bit of money into their site design, but unfortunately it’s clear that Rentler lacks a good UX developer. There are a number of glaring issues that make searching a bane:

1. There are no text summaries on the main search results page.
   This by far is the biggest problem I have with Rentler. Really, the first two sentences of the description are all I need to make a quick yes/no decision on a property. Normally because these first two sentences include important key phrases like, “women only” (obviously that’s a no, because I have a penis), “BYU Approved” (no), and “shared room” (no). Instead of being able to blaze through hundreds of ads in a few minutes, I have to click on each one, load a whole new page and then click another link to get a full summary. That’s just shit UX design.
2. No result sorting in any way.
   Seriously? What in the hell were they thinking? The default (and only available) search sorting is price high-to-low. I like to view my ads from the newest to oldest posting. The new ones are more likely to be open (and actually relevant). Furthermore, I don’t know a single person who thinks to themselves, “Ah yes, I’d like to search in the very tip top of my price range.” When I set price ranges, the high is the absolute most I would want to spend… aka the last resort. Absolutely not the first thing I want to see.
3. Hope you didn’t want to select a price range smaller than $400:

Really, I could write a better site than this in under a week. Node.js would be the server side, couchdb for the database, UI would be all AJAXy (and actually usable), and it would have a RESTy JSON API.

The reasoning here is that you don’t actually learn anything about computers. You learn marketing/business terms that vaguely relate to computers only in that computers are so pervasive, anything can be related to computers.

If I wanted to be in marketing / business, I would take a class in marketing or business. Me? I want to learn about computers. I would so much rather see IT 101 all about setting up Linux VMs, familiarizing with various unix flavors, gaining some windows sysadmin skills (policies, etc) or learning about low level computing concepts. Instead, what you’re getting is the definition of B2B, and tips on how to suck up to management.

Note: I’m not opposed to having a business class or two required for my degree. That’s a-okay… but make me take a business class.

• nginx
• jekyll
• couchdb (if necessary).

I want mine to work with wild card subdomains so i can set up anything on the fly. The nginx.conf I’m about to explain already has support for that, but you’ll need to make sure that you set up wild card DNS with your DNS host first.

In your nginx.conf we need a server block (this goes at the end of the http block) Here is mine:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name ~^(?<domain>.*techosaur.us);
  root /var/webapps/vhosts/$host/public/;
  try_files $uri $uri/ @nodevhost;

  location @nodevhost {

    access_log      /var/log/nginx/vps-access-log;
    proxy_pass      http://localhost:3001;
    proxy_redirect  off;

    proxy_set_header  Host              $host;
    proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

  }
}

So there it is. It’s neat, it’s clean, and it’s not very descriptive.  I’ll explain it line by line:

  server 80;

This just tells nginx to listen on the standard http port of 80.

  server_name ~^(?<domain>.*techosaur.us);

This sets server_name to whatever the wild card subdomain of the moment is. It’s totally dynamic and very smooth.

  root /var/webapps/vhosts/$host/public/;

Here we set the root of the site of the moment to the correct directory based on the subdomain ($host). For example, if we’re being accessed on lollerskates.techosaur.us then $host is set to lollerskates.techosaur.us. If you’re using the connect middleware vhost module that I do (and I think you should), then your directory names in /var/webapps/vhosts match the subdomains that you want to use. This is a key part of letting nginx serve static files for your wild card subdomains. Without this, nginx won’t be able to find the files.

  try_files $uri $uri/ @nodevhost;

This is the most important part of nginx static file serving. This line tries to serve $uri (/something/whatever.html) from the root that we defined above, if that doesn’t work it’ll try it with a / on the end, and if that doesn’t work then it’s probably a dynamic page and will and it off to location @nodevhost, which is our reverse proxy.

I’m going to skim over the location @nodevhost block because this is covered elsewhere, but essentially it’s just a reverse proxy to localhost on port 3001 which is the port that my vhost module listens on. We forward some headers in the 2nd part which allow the vhosts to see the real remote IP instead of nginx’s IP.

And that’s about it

To solve this problem I’ve decided to buy a new bike. A road bike. One that doesn’t include shock absorbers, has small tires instead of 2″ wide tires, and will be light enough to pick up with one finger. My budget is $1000 and under (preferably around $700). Right now I have no clue what bike to get. I was looking at the Trek 7.1 FX, but i really want drop bars and more road geometry. This bike is never going to leave the road. I took a look at Trek’s “Town” section on their website but all of the bikes there are fixies. I just don’t want a fixie. 50+% of my ride is up hill and it just won’t work out on a fixie. I need gears! So now I’m at square one, I have no clue what bike to get.

Maybe I’ll go into the bike store and just see what they recommend.

In other news I’ve had some major allergies lately and I think it may be related to the pillows that I’m using. I bought some pillows from Ikea about two weeks ago and I’ve been a little congested ever since then. Now I’m super congested and waking up with my eyes glued shut every morning. Really the only thing that I’ve changed in regards to my sleep situation is my pillows. I’m trying a different pillow tonight. If that seems to help then I’ll switch back to the Ikea pillow and see if it gets worse. It may just be seasonal allergies or a cold, but it’s possibly the pillows.

Do you see how awesome that is?

Something to work on I guess.

Partially because it clicks like a Model M, but also because I want to try out some new keyboards .

I’ve been using my standard Apple keyboards for a while, but something that has always bugged me is that on a Linux machine, in order to switch to a different virtual terminal, you have to hold the function key down as well as CTRL + ALT + F[1-9]. It makes it kind of awkward to do since function is clear over on the right hand side of the keyboard near the arrows. Also, it doesn’t have an insert key. Before I started using my Apple keyboards on Linux machines, my go-to terminal paste was Shift+Insert. Now I usually CTRL+SHIFT+V or just middle click. I also just learned how to move text around in Vim instead of copy/pasting by highlighting /clicking.