Archive for the 'Techno-Babble' Category

Testing the Slice

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 4, 2008
in Hosting, Internet, Public Opinion, Questions, Techno-Babble and Wordpress
. 1 Comment

I’ve had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now1, I just hadn’t quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to.

Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I’d been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache2 and PHP, I was good to go.

The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I’d been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn’t seem it would be a problem.

The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine.

The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go.

All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I’ve used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement3.

I’m still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I’ve realized I’m being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly.

If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely.

One final problem, and one I’m looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I’m not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon4, but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible.

So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP…

  1. About 6 months, but don’t tell anyone. [back]
  2. I never expected it to be that different than other distros. [back]
  3. Going purely by the stats in the footer of my theme. [back]
  4. I use their massive storage for backups as well. [back]

AT&T TXT via Email Address

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 26, 2008
in Announcements, Commentary, Daily Grind, Internet and Techno-Babble
. 1 Comment

Just in case anyone else is wondering how to send an SMS text message to their AT&T wireless phone via email, the address apparently has changed through their recent acquisitions. Googling around only revealed the prior (non-working) domains, so I had to resort to the AT&T support page.

Horribly worded and a bit confusing as to which category you fall under, if you’ve signed up to “the new at&t” (as opposed to the prior AT&T, Cingular, etc.), your address is 10digitphonenumber@txt.att.net.

Happy texting!

Year-End Browser Stats

Published
by
Chris Meller
on December 31, 2007
in Commentary, Incoherent Code, Internet, Microsoft, Techno-Babble and Windows
. 0 Comments

Ed Bott published fresh browser stats this morning, and I thought I would comment on some aspects…

The point that Ed makes about the lack of increase in Firefox’s market share is disappointing, but are we really surprised? I’ve said for quite some time that Firefox is geared towards the tech enthusiasts among us and that it really offers no hard benefits for your average every-day user.

Back when Mozilla was competing only with IE6 (we’ll continue ignoring Opera and Safari), it offered great benefits like tabbed browsing and native popup blocking, etc. Unfortunately, by the time it caught any ground, Microsoft had already usurped a great deal of its momentum by releasing the most-needed features in IE7. Sure, Firefox’s amazing extension support offers a lot of flexibility to those of us who consider ourselves power users on the web, but does the average person who only has one computer need 10 different bookmark syncing extensions or the inspection capabilities of Firebug? No…

The most interesting thing I see in these stats is the market penetration of IE7.

I run some basic stats on all our sites at work (mainly to let me know what cool stuff I can and cannot use), and IE6 still has an 80% lead over IE7 in our user base. Since we’re getting traffic from totally technically inept users, that’s a somewhat unfortunate statistic. Even more distressing is that IE has a 95% lead over all other browsers combined.

Clearly both Mozilla and Microsoft have done a fair job marketing their newer products to technical users who keep up with such things, but they’ve failed miserably at extolling the virtues to the average user — and that’s something that needs to change.

How do we do that? I haven’t a clue… I develop the stuff, I don’t market it.

The really interesting question, given the recent announcement that IE8 has passed the ACID2 test, is whether this will matter in a year. If all browsers follow standards properly, do we care which browser anyone uses? Of course if IE8 doesn’t drastically improve upon the market adoption of IE7 thus far, it may take another 10 years before everyone is seeing the web as it was intended to be seen…

Kernel Madness

Published
by
Chris Meller
on December 27, 2007
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Internet, Techno-Babble and Work
. 0 Comments

I upgraded Zend Core for Oracle on our soon-to-be production webserver at work tonight so it was running the latest build of PHP 5.2, and while I was at it I decided to make sure all its other packages were current.

It was quite sad, but the kernel was over a year out of date, so I had to kill our glorious 385 day uptime to restart the machine. While I was checking the latest version installed, I found this:


[root@web ~]# rpm -qa | grep kernel-
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.2.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.0.2.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.0.6.EL
kernel-utils-2.4-13.1.105
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-67.EL
kernel-2.6.9-67.EL
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.0.2.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.0.6.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL
kernel-hugemem-devel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-55.EL
kernel-smp-2.6.9-55.0.6.EL
kernel-2.6.9-55.0.9.EL
kernel-doc-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL
kernel-smp-devel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-67.EL
kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL
[root@web ~]#

I could be wrong, but I think that may be a bit excessive… By my count, that’s 9 individual kernel versions, each with their respective dependent packages. Wow…

I’m a Zend Certified Engineer!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on November 16, 2007
in Announcements, Internet and Techno-Babble
. 2 Comments

As of 12:10pm today, I officially became a Zend Certified Engineer at the Pearson Vue testing center in Greenville!