Nafisto the Great

I just read a blog entry from my friend Devin in Haifa about deciding on a blog theme. It seems like I’m not the only struggling with how to position my blog. Like Devin, I was attracted to the idea of a blog because of the promise of being able to publish my thoughts on whatever whenever. I rarely have enough to write a whole book, but occasionally it’s good to have an outlet for philosophical musings and whatever rant ing happens to hit me on a given day. It’s difficult, though, with that kind of loose (lack-of-)focus to generate the kind of traffic to a site that will come back time and time again.

For now, I’m happy just posting for friends and family… but a definite possibility is having several different blogs focused on the different topics I will be writing about.

Do you have any thoughts or comments? Please share them with me–I’d love to hear from you!

So far I haven’t seen much traffic on my site but I just ran across an excellent blog entry by Tris Hussey that provides some GREAT advice. For one, Thomas Korte’s FeedSubmitter is a great little piece of code that will hopefully spread the word about /dev/nafis. On top of that, you can be sure that there will be more in the way of topic-based entries–the whole point of setting up my blog in the first place!

For several months I’ve been running a Windows network at home, using a 2003 server to host AD and act as a file and print server. Over the few months that it was running, I realized that we weren’t using any of the features that the Windows network provided. So, in a fit of rage, I decided last night to scrap the Windows server and bring up a Linux box.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while because we’ve been talking about hosting our many Web sites, including this one, out of our house instead of using a co-lo provider. (Ahh the benefits of glass mile 100 megabit ethernet.) However, having taken me an entire day to install, configure and secure the Windows 2003 server, I was hesitant to wipe it all away with one swoop of fdisk. And then came the headache of installing a Linux server…..

Well, imagine my surprise when I popped in the Fedora Core CD and had a running Linux server in less than an hour! The setup was just as easy–if not easier–than any Windows installation I have ever run. The graphical interface was as comfortable to use as Windows, but gave me a lot of flexibility into the selection of packages without losing me in a sea of acronyms and project code names.

Microsoft definitely has something to learn from the folks at Fedora. Windows has always tried to be easy to use, but in the attempt to add functionality, the complexity has resulted in an operating system bogged down by itself. I’m a big advocate of making complex things simple to use without dumbing them down–and if critics better than me haven’t said it enough, I will say that Linux is finally beginning to match Windows in the UI race.

Don’t get me wrong–for the average user, Microsoft is still the usability winner. But the the open source community is catching up at a dizzying pace. Even Java apps are beginning to emerge from the UI stone age. And we all know what that means: the crew in Redmond has some dazzling things coming our way.

Google Labs has just introduced a new feature called “My Search History” which basically keeps a record of the searches you perform over time. (http://labs.google.com) Other search engines have had similar offerings but Google’s entry is particularly slick because it ties right into the normal search interface. Even queries from the Google toolbar or FireFox Googlebar are added to the history. They’ve introduced a host of conveniences (like searching across all of your historical searches), and of course it’s all accessible from any client machine. The most promising part of this is the benefit that will come over time as the search and clustering algorithms become more sophisticated.

This is yet another one of those ideas (like satellite imagery on maps, keyword suggestions, the ride finder) where Google’s implementation makes you say, “it’s about time somebody did that”.

The official web site of the Bahá’í Faith just got a facelift (http://www.bahai.org). Take a look!

When you check it out, make sure to look very carefully at the main banner image–on the very right in the first row you will see my wife, Shirin. (It still sounds weird to say “my wife”.)

I should take this opportunity to make a proper shout out to Farshid (aka .farshid, http://farshid.sedghi.org) and Devin (aka devin|Rychetnik, http://spaces.msn.com/members/devin/). Reading their blogs on a daily basis made me feel really left out, so thanks a LOT guys–now I’m obsessed with doing this thing.

Here it is! The first of what I hope to be many blog entries.

I toyed with so many blog applications on just about every platform (ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl) and finally decided to implement Movable Type. So far I am really impressed and have nothing but nice things to say about it. Installation was a snap and configuration took about 10 seconds.

Over the next few weeks I’ll probably be modifying the templates to give the site a custom look… and of course you’ll be seeing lots more in the way of syndication functionality.

For now, HELLO WORLD and look forward to chatting with you.