Category: Technology

Categories
Technology

The problems with virtual

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The problems with a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is that it isn’t Unix as you know Unix. I had this with my last virtual server that was FreeBSD based, but it wasn’t too bad. All of this is different with Ensigm and VPS on Linux. And none of this was helped by lack of documentation.

Bad boy, bad boy. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do… when your customers come for you because the documentation that comes with your fully released commercial application has “To be done” for most of it. They shoot people in Texas for this, you know.

documentation.jpg

However, after a chat with a supervisor to find out I have to specifically ask for certain things to be installed, such as Tomcat, they’re now installed. And I now have root access, and a pretty good idea of what I can, and cannot touch. But since I don’t normally customize the kernel for kicks, we should be okay.

Let’s say that the customer service experience today was a mixed bag, but alls well that ends well. I am what is known as a tough customer. Just call me Burning Bitch.

I can do so much damage on this new system! Expect frequent crashes and mayhem as I experiment and play around. I love the smell of fresh burning wire insulation in the morning.

It’s fun even going through this type of activity, rather than a count down of the hours until the site goes out for the count. And it’s fun playing with the technology again. So thank you all for this delightful headache. It’s good to be back in the mess again.

And see, I’m back into the threadneedle, ThreadsML stuff over here, too. Busting balloons, being a pain in the butt. You know, the usual.

Bad boys. Bad boys. Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when I come for you. Bad boys. Bad boys…

Categories
Technology

I’m going shopping!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This weekend I have the very real pleasure of shopping around for a new host, thanks to the generosity of friends. I am blown away by the support I’ve received, and hope you all won’t regret it because the fire’s back and I’m feeling hotter than ever.

I won’t be staying with my current host for a couple of reasons: space and technology support. There has been some performance problems with Hosting Matters in the past, but these seem to have originated primarily from the NOC (Network Operations Center) that HM was using. The company has since started the process of switching to a new NOC, and since I was moved to a new server at the new NOC, I’ve not had performance or downtime problems, and the support has been good. If it weren’t for space and issues of technical experimentation, I wouldn’t move.

All those photos I upload eat up disk space as well as bandwidth at a fairly quick pace, and I do so love taking photos and sharing them. In addition, I want to start experimenting around with technology again, including running Java applications through a Tomcat server and my current host doesn’t support this. Dorothea knows me so well when she wrote:

 

On the up side, an email from Jonathon indicated that the Burningbird campaign is going well. Could always be improved upon—especially given Bb’s tastes in server hardware—so ante up, folks.

 

Well, you did. Beyond wildest expectations. I am all agog with the dama…urh, new things I can do now in this year you’ve given me. And I solemnly promise to share whatever I come up with, including finishing my online C# book and the RDF Semantic Web Poetry Finder, and PostCon (yeah!) and a blackbox experimentation my evil twin is tentatively calling RSS Buster. Hee.

Ahem, back to technology requirements. Few plans offer Java support because of the potential for problems as well as the resource burden. No shared hosts allow for root access to allow new software installation. Based on these two requirements, I’m currently looking at several Virtual Private(Dedicated) Servers (VPS) at several companies.

A VPS is having root access to a server as well as dedicated CPU, bandwidth, and space, but without higher costs of a completely dedicated server. Software such as that built into some FreeBSD installations, and provided by Ensim literally partitions a machine’s resources among the VPS installed, preventing one from taking resources, or causing problems, for the others. By the use of this technology, I can do something such as run a BrownSauce RDF Browser for my experimentation and it won’t impact on resource use of other clients on the machine. Or I can create a Perl CGI script that goes insane and only worry about taking my own system down. Same with the other clients — they can’t touch me, my CPU, bandwidth, or space slice. Best of all, I can customize the software install without having to ask the host — something that pretty much eliminates software experimentation. One might say that shared web hosts really would prefer that their clients not experiment.

Among the VPS hosts, I have to find ones that provide high bandwidth and disk space, but also provide DNS (Domain Name server) support for multiple domains and sub-domains, with little or no additional costs. I still have multiple domains such as yasd.com and dynamicearth.com, and I want to park them pointing to burningbird.net without having to pay a DNS setup fee. The odd thing is that shared hosting plans such as Hosting Matters provide this service for free and make DNS management a snap; while companies that support VPS, such as Interland and possibly Web Intellects, and which one would assume would have more need of this type of service, tend not to provide this type of support, or only with a fee. Go figure.

I can use free DNS servers, but DNS management is a bear, to be honest. I’d much rather have a quick and dirty form that has me type in the domain and a process automatically adds the proper DNS records. I like to experiment, but not with DNS.

Anyway, I’m looking at several companies that provide VPS (suggestions welcome!). There might be a day or two overlap when the site ends at Hosting Matters but I’m not finished at my new host. If you can’t see this site May 1, be patient, it will be back.

I am having so much fun looking for a server, getting my current sites backed up for moving, figuring out what software to install, what new project to try first, and getting applications I have on my personal machines ready for re-load to a server; and all of this fun activity is thanks to your generosity. You are all steely eyed missile men, and very good people.

Categories
Just Shelley Technology

My life as a T-shirt

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

One of the boxes I brought back contained my t-shirt collection — a set of t-shirts that I’ve collected from various events over the last several years, but have never worn. If I had to put together a curriculum vitae, I would do so by taking photos of each of my shirts, putting them into a PDF album to be printed or attached to an email.

There’s the t-shirt I received for being one of the top 50 finalists for Microsoft’s Activate the Web contest. This contest, held in 1996, was used to launch Microsoft’s ActiveX web technologies. I and other contestants had to incorporate ActiveX technology into our web sites in some way. Mine was Hot Pink, using an ActiveX control to interactively tell the web page reader what technology was being used in the page. Coincidentally, Hot Pink was my first introduction of the “Flame of Knowledge” motif that I’ve used ever since, including Li’l YASD and eventually Burningbird.

There are t-shirts from several conferences where I gave presentations, including Internet Worlds and XML Dev-Cons, and even one from O’Reilly’s original P2P conference. Now that was a great conference — last of a kind, last of an era.

I have a Mozilla Hack t-shirt that the Mozilla team personally delivered to one hotel room where I was speaking because of my early promotion of Mozilla as a development tool and not just a browser. Back then Mozilla was getting a lot of flack for not delivering a browser right now

I have another t-shirt from Sybase to commemorate creating a sample application using Powerbuilder 5.0 that was included on the disk with the product. That application was a dynamic inventory control system that would allow a person to define their own categories of inventories items.

Groove gave me a t-shirt when I was meeting with the company about writing a possible book on the product. I also have a Microsoft Site Builder’s shirt, an Amazon Associate shirt, several from O’Reilly, and other shirts I’ve picked up for one reason or another.

My life as a t-shirt. Well, it could have been my life as a yo-yo or hacky sack.

tshirtjpg.jpg

Categories
Burningbird Web

Hosting does not matter because the internets is free

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Hosting Matters as a virtual host sucks little wormy, sour green apples. I’ve had nothing but trouble all week with my server (Clio). I keep hearing about slashdot, or this or that, but what it all boils down to, is there are over 500 virtual sites hosted on my machine alone.

This is too damn many.

I know this is a cheap service, but I’ve had inexpensive hosting before without these problems.

I’m paid up until May 1st. At that time, I may not even maintain a web site any more. I’ve had web sites since 1996, 1995 if you count a tilde site (~) I had at a local Portland ISP. I have five domains coming up for renewal this month. Maybe I should just let the whole damn thing go to dark.

Next time I read something like World of Ends, and hear all the glorious extoling of an Internet that isn’t owned, and which anyone can use, I’m going to print the thing out, shred it, and send it to the authors along with interesting and detailed instructions on exactly what they can do with the paper.

Categories
Internet

Think on this

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m about to head out for a new hike in a special place I’ve not been before. During the drive, I’ll wrap my mind around some things I want to write about, not the least of which are another beautiful protest, individualism and community, weblogging and writing, and possibly the World of Ends, though this will most likely get wrapped into individualism and community.

Question to the thousands who saw the World of Ends as a new definitive answer for the foolish masses who don’t ‘know’ the Internet: Exactly what will you do differently, today, after reading this essay, then you did yesterday before reading this essay? Just curious, is all.

I actually have a lot of things I want to write about. This is a very good feeling to have. Back to the burn.