Quite a while ago now, a friend asked how [PHP, Frameworks, Servers, Software, the Internet, and Clients] are all related in the scheme of serving dynamic webpages. So I took some time and generated this diagram to hlep depict whats happens when a user requests a webpage that is generated with PHP.

I hope that this helps some others better understand what goes on behind the scenes.

Well I got fed up with fedora a couple of days ago. 

1. It wouldn't resume after suspending
2. Hibernate didn't work either
3. Gnome didn't like my netbeans
4. KDE seemed weird to use.

As it turns out, ubuntu's unity desktop is much cleaner. I don't much like the Mac OS-ness of the file menus, but that I can live with.

1. Ubuntu cleanly recovers from susoending
2. and hibernation

I just removed the wretched apache from my nice new fedora system. 
yum install nginx
Then a super simple configuration later, and I had my nice new webserver up and running.

It took longer to try and get apache's settings right than it did to remove it and install nginx, make a couple config changes and start it up.

I learned a couple of neat tricks in the process, First,
find / -name nginx
will find all files or folders named nginx on my system and it starts searching from the / directory.
Second, to start nginx
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nginx start
and to stop:/etc/rc.d/init.d/nginx stop
and to restart/etc/rc.d/init.d/nginx restart
On my system Fedora 16, nginx is living at /etc/nginxWhich is different than where the documentation says it should be, at /usr/bin/nginxAls, I find it annoying that it delegates PHP and CGI scripts to apache. I guess it makes sense, they say that nginx is designed to be a fileserver. Do I really have to use apache?

Today is the day that I have finally made the switch to linux.

I have been wanting to get away from windows for a long while now but I didn't have the commitment to change from what had become home. I must say that finding replacement programs for some of my most beloved friends, Macromedia Fireworks and Mathematica, just to name a few.

So I chose to dual boot my system, which actually turned out to be easier than I tried to make it. 

On the subject of partitions:
One can use the nice partition manager that comes with the Fedora 16 live cd to resize other partitions. When a NTFS partition containing Windows is resized, Windows will refuse to boot before a chkdsk has run. 

On the subject of Boot Loaders:
One can choose to put the linux grub in place of the windows boot loader, or just use the windows boot loader. I couldn't figure out how to add the option to boot windows to grub, so I went with using the windows one. I then preceded to use easybcd to add an entry for my new fedora installation (from windows).

On the subject of Display Brightness:
For some reason my fn+f2 and fn+f3 keys weren't able to change the brightness of my display (I am on a laptop). After much searching, I was sure that there wasn't a good solution. Which was really disappointing, so I decided to go onto the #fedora channel on freenode and see if any living beings would be able to help. Luckily for me, I learned that a bug in bash, a simple yum downgrade bash solved my problem.

Overall I am very impressed with how far linux GUI's have come in the past 3 years. I think that Gnome 3.0 is something even my computer illiterate parents could get to love.

Who decides whether the education System Works? Students, teachers, or standardized tests?  Tests can only allow others to see if the test taker understands the questions, and knows the information.  The teachers can only provide an opinion of a student, based on the student’s activities in class.  Students can only assess themselves based on other people.  Students only learn if they want to and they only want to if they think they might use what they learned in the world real world.  Students only think they might use the information in the real world if someone close to them, informs them of the relevance. Parents need to become involved in their children’s education to keep the student informed.

The education system only works when students are motivated to take an interest in their education. However, they only take an interest if they truly understand that the information they receive is an important building block for the future. No student wants to be told that, “education is important” but how else are educators supposed drive the message home? Teachers need to keep the subject matter interesting and challenging. Students like to explore new and exciting ways of learning and communicating.

Parents and teachers alike want students to learn the same way they did, but our generation has the trial and error methodology, while adults have more of a one shot methodology. An example would be the continual do-overs in a video game. A player might do the same action over and over until he masters the game. While in school, the one shot method of “a test” lends itself to the short-term memory, not necessarily committing the information into knowledge. However, the player of video game constantly repeats tasks with a new challenge each time; you’re only a failure until you have mastered the game. Once the player has mastered the game there is no point in playing it again because the knowledge to play the game has been committed to memory, especially when the challenge of a game is so great that it takes more than one sitting to master it. This is because then the player has to remember how to do all the previous successful tasks incase he fails and has to start over. The video game industry designs games as such so kids will talk to their friends about their games to learn how to win and so when a game becomes “old” or “mastered” they go out to buy a new game. Tests could be redesigned to incorporate a philosophy of “Dynamic testing”. Dynamic testing would allow the student to do the test over and over until they fully understood the material and acceptable grades have been achieved. Passing an assignment would provide a feeling of gratification to each student. The gratification would allow people to feel better about school.

 The key factors in a students learning are motivation and a positive feed back loop through praise and gratification. The education system is currently failing a large part of this dynamic generation. The ways have changed, everything is dynamic, why not education? Is the goal to see what the student knows, or to give them the knowledge to succeed? Parents and teachers need to be part of the positive feed back loop, while students need to gain self motivation and confidence through successful achievements. Adults need to help each student achieve to bring about motivation and confidence.