If there is a chance - any chance - that you have a random web application that you might hit more often than ten times an hour, do yourself a favor and stick it behind a caching proxy of some kind, like Nginx.

Now our hypothetical trusted and open computing platform needs applications so you can get real work done. Text editors, scripting languages, officeware, and probably a desktop of some kind. To stick with our security practice of keeping systems as spare as possible, I recommend only installing applications and their dependencies as you need them. In the last post I suggested picking a package management system of some kind if one isn't already a core component of the OS that we recompiled and installed. If you get in the habit of building and using packages now you'll save yourself a lot …

In an application development team consisting of n engineers, expect n distinct APIs or translation layers to be developed for use inside the application they are building, all of which are designed "To simplify the API of the other layers my code interfaces with."

A while back I wrote an article about web applications that can live wherever you can store a file and not necessarily on a web server out of your control. I probably should have posted a link to Google Group dedicated to unhosted applications, but that's neither here nor there. To recap briefly, what I discussed in the previous article are called unhosted communications applications, like social networking or instant messaging software. This begs a crucial question: Assuming that you're running an unhosted application in your web browser, how do you tell other people how to connect to you with …

Regular users of Gmail have no doubt noticed the new entry just below their Inbox tag called Buzz - if you haven't yet, chances are you will soon. From what I can tell it seems to work a lot like Twitter and Facebook status updates do: there's just enough room to post two or three sentences, links to other pages, comments on Buzz posts, and other stuff like that. It also hooks links to other sides listed in your Google Profile (if you've set one up) so that if you update one of them, it automatically posts a link in your …

ObDisclaimer: I don't design user interfaces for a living.

Originally, I was working on a post about Linux - about why I switched to it, and pontificating about why more people haven't. After writing about half of it I let the article soak for a while and returned to the text later, and I realized that I was having an un-earned grey beard and suspenders moment. There is no point in talking about why I started using Linux because the reasons for it are, in truth, not particularly relevant in this day and age of plentiful processor cycles and disk space …

If you've ever installed Microsoft Vista yourself (or looked around in the hard drive of your brand new box), chances are you'd be surprised to find that it's a hog for disk space. An install of Vista can take up anywhere from seven to fifteen (!) gigabytes of disk space, which most people can eat because hard drives these days are typically in the hundreds of gigabytes. Still, that's a hell of a lot of binary; maybe if you've installed a load of applications and patches over a year or so, I can see that, but when you factor in everything …