Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓

As of today, I am no longer using TekTonic to host my website, and in fact I can no longer recommend their services to anyone else. The performance on my virtual private server was never great, but it was generally adequate. But in the last few months, the server has slowed to a crawl for interactive login sessions (SSH). The TekTonic staff stopped responding to support tickets, and their customer community forum mysteriously stopped working during the middle of all my problems.

Eventually I had had enough and decided to host my website on a spare computer I have at home. So this site is now running on my Dell PowerEdge server, which seems to be mighty fast and working very well. It’s being hosted through a commercial-grade cable modem provided by Cox Business Services. (The small office cable modem service allows me to run a server: normally that’s prohibited for residential customers.)

I’ve switched blog software again. This time I’m using WordPress, an open-source application. I’ve also switched hosting companies, and I’m using TekTonic to host my site. I’m using their Virtual Private Server package, which gives me a Linux server with full administration rights, at a reasonable cost. This enables me to install a lot of supplementary software like web server upgrades, and other types of server software like Subversion. It’s not for everyone, but if you know what you’re doing, it can be a cost-effective alternative to renting an entire server.

Adobe just released a product called Adobe Premiere Elements. It’s a stripped down, easier-to-use, inexpensive version of Premiere, their video-editing software, for home and casual users users. It’s $100 by itself, or $150 in a bundle with Photoshop Elements.

I think it’s brilliant that Adobe’s producing products for the casual user, fully interoperable with their full products but a little simpler and a lot cheaper. In my mind, that’s a really great strategy. Probably because I’m their target market (a casual Photoshop wannabe).

There are a couple software programs to help combat spyware, which everyone on the Internet should download right away. The programs are Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot - Search and Destroy. The two programs both help clean up spyware and advertising on your computer, which has become a major problem for the majority of Internet users. I recommend downloading and installing both — they work fine together, so there’s no harm in using both programs. Together with a good anti-virus program, these applications should help you keep your computer running clean and fast.

If you really want to make your browsing more pleasant, use the new web browser Mozilla Firefox. It’s incredibly easy to use, it’s incredibly difficult for malicious advertisers to “hijack,” and it has a ton of great features that make your internet experience more productive and enjoyable.

If any of you are Java software developers, here are a couple of Java-related sites I’m fond of:

1.) James Gosling, the “father of Java,” has a blog online at http://weblogs.java.net/jag/. It’s always interesting to see what Gosling is thinking — he’s usually got some very geeky stuff on there

2.) The BileBlog is an unbelievably crude, yet hilarious, insight into one man’s struggles with J2EE. He goes on mad rants about developments in the Java community. It’s hilarious, because it’s so outrageous yet he has a kernel of truth in everything he says.

There’s a major open-source Java server project called JBoss. JBoss now has a corporation behind it; the CEO of said corporation is Marc Fleury. Marc is trying to tightly control everything related to JBoss; he wants his corporation to be the sole source of JBoss consulting, documentation, training, etc. That way he can make some money off his open-source product. But it’s open-source, so anyone can do that, and others do try.

Well, apparently at one point in time (about 15-18 months ago) someone was looking at writing a JBoss book, and got into a heated argument about it with Fleury about it. Fleury was opposed. His exact email quote, which has now been published for all the web to see: “YOU WANT TO FUCK ME OVER BY WRITING A BOOK ABOUT MY STUFF WHERE WE GET ZERO DOLLARS I WILL MAKE WE DESTROY YOU SO MUCH YOU NEVER THE LIGHT OF DAY AGAIN.”

And this guy’s allowed to run a software company?!?

Yay, I got my mobile phone number transferred to T-Mobile without any problems. Other than Sprint PCS ripping me off, as I mentioned last month.

Litigious bastards.

I’m looking at hard drive specifications, and I noticed that the 160GB Seagate hard drive has the following features: “350 Gs non-op shock, 3D Defense System”. I assume 350 G’s means that if you drop it out of an airplane (or at least off a desk) it will still work, as long as it’s not in operation at the time, which is quite cool. But what does a “3D Defense System” on a hard drive do, and will it result in accidents like this?

How do people partition their hard drives these days? I’m getting a new 120GB drive. It seems a bit large and I don’t know what to do with it. Right now on my 60GB drive, I think I’ve got something like 20GB for my C:\ drive, 16GB for MP3s, and 16GB for “Archives” (downloads, multimedia crap, etc.), and 8GB set aside for Linux.

On the one hand, I’m thinking one big partition might be the way to go. (Except Linux.) I shouldn’t limit myself to exactly 16GB of MP3s or downloads. But could I get better performance by splitting things up, or would it keep me more organized?