This is the personal website of, you guessed it, Nate Steffen.
The purpose of this site is to allow me to play with FreeBSD, Apache, Perl, and whatever other technologies I find interesting this week.
Being primarily a developer on Microsoft platforms in the past, I didn't get much of a chance to use other technologies at work.
With a lot of help from google and a coworker, I set up the machine that hosted this site, and came up with most what you see here.
I have since rewritten most of the content, and the site is hosted on a new box, although it still runs FreeBSD.
If this is your first visit to my site, you may find the articles section interesting.
[2/15/2010]
I saw a funny comment on slashdot the other day and thought I would expand on it a little bit.
We choose not to go to the moon. We choose not to go to the moon in this decade and not do the other things, not because they are hard, but because not doing so is easy, because that goal would serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are not willing to accept, one we are willing to postpone, and one which we do not intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision this year to shift our efforts in space from high to low gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
I thought it was funny, and by it I mean the edited speach. Seeing NASA's budget slashed to the lowest since it's 3rd year as an agency (as a percent of the federal budget) definately wasn't funny. If you don't know, NASA's proposed 2010 budget of $18.7 billion is only 0.52% of the proposed federal budget. So much for a Vision for Space Exploration.
[8/10/2009]
If you are like me you probably have a long history of using Javascript on both the client and server sides of web pages.
Also if you are like me you probably miss Classic ASP's JScript language for server side development.
Again if you are like me, you have probably been searching for a cross-platform
server-side Javascript platform with little success.
Well my friends, I have finally found one I like.
Myna is a really cool MIT licensed SSJS application server that uses the Mozilla Rhino Javascript engine and can be hosted in any servlet container.
It comes packaged with a handy development server that can run on Windows or *NIX, and while still considered to be in alpha stages of development it already has extensive libraries that you would expect from a very mature project and very few bugs that I have run into.
If you get a chance go check it out.
[11/19/2007]
Well I finally got a new car.
I had been without a car for a few weeks after the lease was up on my 350Z, and it was starting to get really cold riding my motorcycle to work every morning.
I had been wanting a beamer for a while after getting hooked on European cars with my VW, so I went out and bought a used BMW 330xi sedan over in Peoria.
The decision to buy a used car rather than buy or lease another new one was helped by the fact that I now have a motorcycle for the summer, so I don't necessarily need a super fun summer car.
If I get a chance I might throw some pictures up.
[7/7/2007]
Ali had a 2007 GSX-R also until last week.
We were riding through the country on a two lane highway when a deer jumped out in front of him.
He took a pretty good spill, but actually was very lucky to have minor injuries.
He ended up with a little road rash on his elbows, knees, back, and hands.
A minor surgery to fix his broken nut and he should be fully recovered shortly.
Check out the pictures
here.
[5/1/2007]
I went out and bought a motorcycle yesterday. It is a 2007 Suzuki GSX-R 600 sportbike.
This is the first street bike I have ever owned, hopefully it and I survive intact :)
Archived News
What's New:
| 8/10/2009: | Updates to the Rancid article. |
| 10/14/2008: | Added an article with a few patches for Rancid. |
| 05/28/2006: | Wrote a new article about the site's webcam. |
| 05/22/2006: | Rewrote the entire site in perl, with a totally new design. |