Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

This bit of css is so beautiful I am physically weeping tears of joy just thinking about it.

1) Akismet — I’ve been using it to stop wordpress and trac spam for the past ~3 months, and I only just remembered that it exists, since it let one through (as opposed to the 20 a day I was getting before)

2) OpenID; which has been around a while, but might actually get somewhere now that microsoft have said they’ll be putting their weight behind it (although they may well end up doing their embrace / extend / extinguish thing…)

I shall add support for them to my webapps once I find APIs and time…

Chai (router) and Aru (server) are being turned off for the first time in 4 months; chai is retiring for now, aru is becoming a router + xen server. It’s pretty much the same setup as I’ve done in school — one upstream network, two downstream; serving DHCP on the two downstreams using dnsmasq. VPSes are bridged to one or more networks depending on who needs access to them.

The school’s moodle install has been moved to a VPS at context shift, since dreamhost were complaining that we were using too much CPU time. That seems to have gone mostly OK, except for me not knowing how to configure Apache + PHP to deal with more load than the server can handle (Lowering MaxClients seems to have solved the swappy death problem — now if the server gets more requests than it can handle it queues them, rather than trying to do everything at once)

Update: FastCGI’ed PHP seems to ignore MaxClients. Sigh.

Having tried mozilla calendar, evolution, and a couple of others, I found them all less efficient to work with than my phone calendar — the only desktop calendar app I’ve seen which looks nice to work with being iCal, and that’s OSX only D:

But lo; google have made something which looks (and I assume works) similarly to iCal, and it’s OS independant \o/ That alone would only be enough to fill it with Awesome though. There is one last feature which I consider the most important thing ever — it needs to be able to alert me to my appointments wherever I am, since I spend a lot of time not at my desktop. Google have this sorted though; entering a mobile phone number lets the calendar message me, and it seems free /o/

Although, it depends on me having a good enough signal to get SMS traffic D: I shall try anyway, since google calendar is so much more functional than the phone one that it may be worth it…

They let me use siag despite not owning is-a-geek.net <3 It's nice to work with a company who are willing to add features on the whim of a single user ^___^

Dreamhost prefers moral integrity to free customers. Also, their wordpress anti-spam mod seems to work, as I’ve had one spam comment since signing up, compared to 3-4 per day on my vanilla install.

Al|together 2006 is open for entrants.

Radio Wazee seems to have implemented my vision of a radio station powered by free uploads (aka. publicity) for artists and free downloads for listeners. (Or particular note; Reasonable Doubt and Krim)

Autopackage works nicely for things not included in ubuntu’s main repositories~

Again with the lateness, I’ve finally gone and bought some external hosting — the new server is at least 10x better than my self-hosted one in all respects, over 1000x in others. It’s shared with a hundred odd other people, but so long as nobody wants all the power at once, it’s hardly noticable~

Not only do they not suck, which puts them above most web hosts, they’re also actively good — their web based control panel actually makes a lot of things easier than going to the shell and doing it all by hand. Things that other hosts don’t have at all (Subversion, Jabber, raw log access, unlimited subdomains, multiple shell / mail / ftp users, per-site bandwidth throttling, etc), they make no more than a couple of clicks away \o/

They also installed rrdtool at my whim (I do make extensive use of it, but they don’t know that…), using what appears to be the ideal management system (Custom APT repository + bulk server-management tools). They also cite a couple of moral reasons amongst the many technical ones for being a linux-only host, and will match any customer’s donations to their charities of the month :O

And last but not least, they have a sense of humour which matches mine <3

Google is a lovely tool, moreso when you know how to use it — like so. Not only are there a load of dead sites, there are also a couple of sites which were probably meant to be looked at, some which aren’t too interesting, and one which is VERY interesting.

Hello~~

Science!

Rumbled!

A lovely short story every day~ Quite enchanting, the use of the main character in each story being “you” makes it easier to imagine that my life is that interesting ^_^

An imageboard, because danbooru + ruby-on-rails + postgresql were all being pains to install so I gave up after 4 hours, and had the basics of my own done from scratch in a half.

I’ve also set my local server to redirect missing images to the remotely hosted one, so I can have control over the dynamic parts and redirect to save bandwidth on images~