twentyfive.
So yesterday I turned 25, and realised I’m finally old. Well, old by my own standards, but a young’in by most other peoples’.
Not much really happened, aside from receiving a coconut cake (I’m often called a “strange coconut” at home… heh) with letter candles spelling out “yay hat!”, the thorough breaking of general relativity, and a satellite falling to Earth over what’s looking increasingly likely to be the Pacific Ocean.
I went up to Norwich for an interview on the 22nd, and wow, it’s so much prettier than Chelmsford. It’s a city that insists it’s a rural village; I like that. Not only that but looking for local property turned up some real gems, like a very affordable 1bed flat in Cromer, which, while *on the seafront* is far too far from Norwich itself to be practical. The interview went pretty well though, aside from interview nerves causing a spot of sweatiness and forgetting the basics of SSL momentarily. Oops.
The train ride was a bit pants I must say. The cost wasn’t too bad — £33; Ely, which is closer to Chelmsford by a good county or so, is £48! I went on expecting power points and WiFi like most other train companies — forget it, not a single plug anywhere, and the WiFi was extra for us economy peons. *sigh* It’s National Express though, I’ve kind of come to expect this “image first, customers second” thing from them for a while now. Anyone who’s ever been on First’s X30 Southend-Stansted service will know just how epic the journey is, from the comfy leather seats to the six power points at the tables and *actually free* WiFi.
Anyway… belated happy birthday to myself ^^/.
automation.
I’m trying to get Sourceworx’s hosting infrastructure back up and running, whilst using CodeIgniter for a front-end. The idea is that a user can sign up for free hosting with a possibility to upgrade to additional features such as e-mail for a small fee. The sign-up itself, though, is a matter of providing just a domain name and email address.
In the course of this I created a script which sets up the apache vhost and ftp user in one, nothing special but it works.
movement.
A word of warning: Don’t go anywhere near Craig Dilks’ click-hosting.co.uk sham. The guy runs Plesk on a wayyy underspecced VPS (!) and does one hell of a shoddy job of it. (Elaboration: ports were open all over the shop, system load of 26.0 averaged over a day or so, lord knows how many network IOs but netstat filled my terminal buffer.)
Not only that, I suspect due to non-payment of bills, the whole outfit has dissapeared off the Internet, doing away with my entire posting history since 2007. So I’ve had to start all over again, with Allys as editor and general post-motivator.
I’ve taken this opportunity to update the somewhat dated theme (originally made on an ancient K6 laptop with Paint and Notepad) to a striking (but simple) green/orange noise gradient theme using 960.gs. It really does take a lot of the layout work, and I intend to post a tutorial on using the 960 Grid System at some future point in time. The original CSS for the template was less than 60 lines long, although it has expanded a bit since adding necessary Wordpress additions that I didn’t account for.
I have also moved the hosting over to Amazon EC2. Whilst there’s a moral question mark hanging over moving my hosting on Wikileaks’ old home, it doesn’t bother me that much, and I suppose they really should have been hosting on their own dedicated server anyway with a provider like prq.to, who hosts The Pirate Bay among others.. It is just like having a full featured free VPS (as long as you stick to the t1.micro tier) with infinite expandability as your site gets bigger, and it comes complete with a CDN. The only thing I do lament is that S3 should have an FTP interface, or the Wordpress Total Cache plugin should have S3 support. Either of the two would do me just fine.
Not planning on doing something like large-scale hosting on it, though.
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