Category: Off-Topic

Wow… this site still exists? Amazing! This old thing still sees a good bit of traffic, despite not seeing an update in a good many years. I’m very, very impressed with Digital Ocean, to be honest. Here’s why they’re really good:

It takes about 3 minutes to signing up, putting in billing information to having a shiny new SSD VM up and running, starting at a very reasonable $5.
To compare them with my previous hosting companies, Dreamhost gave me cheap ass shared hosting for $10. An Amazon T1.Micro instance and storage is $15 and change.
Security features all over. Upload your public key, root password disabled by default. 2-Factor-Authentication? Setup in seconds.
The control panel has a pretty uncluttered look, because they took off all the shitty knobs that everyone else plasters all over the place and never touches.
Want more knobs? Use their sweet API.

If you wanna give it the ‘ol heave ho, here’s a referral link that’ll put $10 in my pocket.
https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=b748068dd135

In the meantime, stay thirsty my friends.

As it is with everything in the world, good things can’t last forever. Dreamhost was great and has seen me through millions and millions of page views with just a few pennies thrown their way in return.

To scratch my own itch, I’ve moved this blog to Amazon on a micro instance. The bonus is that it’s a real, virtualized machine, and I can run my own stack on it however I please. CloudFlare seems nice, they’ll host my DNS records for free and cache bunches of stuff… Varnish is pretty damn brilliant, let’s turn that on. WordPress/W3TC, Apache and PHP APC round out the regular suspects. Giving MySQL some breathing room. Done! Seems like I should start writing again so that I can see if my machine can survive a good Reddit attack.

feelsgoodman.jpg

I’ve started a small new place for my thoughts to reside, which aren’t necessarily related to Linux. Visit my new blog about coding and such called importflying, totally infected with malware. It’s somewhere I’ll do nothing with for months.

Same style of humor and writing as you’ve always enjoyed at Fsckin w/ Linux, but a totally different topic. It just feels like there’s not a lot to write about anymore, because I’m able to find the answers I look for pretty easily.

Big news… really really big breaking news…

Starting today, I’m writing daily news blurbs for the Ars Technica Open Ended news-oriented journal about Linux and open source in general. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for quite some time, since the Ars name brings along with it some credibility and respect from the community.

I’m not stopping the presses, they’re just rolling somewhere else a little bit faster. I’m not going to stop posting articles here, and trust me – there are some things I’ve written about that Ars wouldn’t ever think of publishing in a million years… a quick search concludes that I’m not always the most politically correct blogger around – I don’t try to be someone I’m not, but just for Ars, I’ll try to clean up my act a little bit. 🙂

That said, there are a limited amount of hours for me to write, and I’ve wanted to be a part of something bigger – and I have achieved that goal. I hope you’ll congratulate me and follow to the new digs.

I kinda think they have a better web designer than myself.. right?

…it is probably going to take all night… I just HAD to try out COD4 after Yahtzee’s most excellent quote of being “a pretty excellent gun wank.” Sigh. I watched that review and immediately headed over to the WineHQ to check the status of the game, and it seems to play very well under Wine. I’d be able to write an article AND play an excellent gun wank at the same time, so that’d be a win-win. So I went ahead and purchased it immediately.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of my most recent “computer” upgrade… the most excellent Mirra Chair by Herman Miller. Since the ~24 hours after owning this chair most of my dull and nagging lower-back pain have completely disappeared.

I highly recommend the chair and there’s not much more I can say about the Mirra other than the fact that it’s marginally more comfortable than the Aeron I used 40 hours a week for 2 years when I worked for a company that spoiled all of it’s employees with Aeron-goodness during the DotCom Bubble. Also, the aesthetics of the non-mesh back appeal to me, which is a side-bonus. I don’t care if the chair looks like it’s 45 years old, and has sagging nockers that have been used to breastfeed a baker’s dozen of really, really thirsty babies, as long as it makes my back more comfortable, that is all that matters.

I got an email from a professor today asking for some input on Java and Solaris… 15-20 minutes of my time is not asking much… but it seems like Sun is the type of guy who is offering some candy from the sliding door of a panel van…

We are inviting you to provide feedback and input by participating in this survey. We are offering a chance to win one of 4 American Express gift cards, each in the amount of US$50. We anticipate you allocating fifteen to twenty minutes to complete the relevant sections. The deadline for completion is February 5th.

Our objective is to better understand the following:

* What is your experience so far with Java and Solaris courses?
* What is your opinion of the books and other courseware available?
* Do you plan to work in a field using Java or Solaris after graduation?
* What do you know about professional certification?

http://bookdev.com/Sun/student_survey/

*shivers*