Yesterday the provider that hosted my blog let someone loose on the MySQL database causing my website to be unavailable. It was that very moment I decided I had enough of shared hosting.

I’ve moved the website to a Rackspace CloudServer, which basically is a VPS of which I have full control. It’s a lot faster than the previous host, although not as fast as I had hoped. But that could very well be the fault of WordPress.

I’ll let it run like this for a month. If costs do rise above $20 a month then I’ll move to a proper VPS from Linode. Why? More ram, more traffic and more space for the same amount of money.

I’m currently running nginx. First time I’m using this so am still having some problems. So don’t expect everything to work 100%.

Update: I’m now using lighttpd instead of nginx, but performance seems worse. The strange bugs got fixed though.

Update 2: Now it is…  curl wasn’t installed

After I updated my WordPress to the latest of the series, 3.0, I got notified that I could update my current theme (jQ). I had no problems with it, but the version number difference was quite big so I thought quite a bit of changes must’ve been made. And thus I clicked on the update button. Whoosh! No more working theme, yay!

So, for now this is the new theme. Until jQ gets fixed I suppose. I liked the older one better. Still, this isn’t too bad.

Which apparently is the slogan for launching Ubuntu 10.04. I think this is going to be a very nice LTS release. It’s too bad that they didn’t include Perl 5.12 in it, but that’s understandable as it just got released; although compiling your own is very easy. On the other hand, PHP 5.3 got in there thanks to the pressure of some fellow Dutchmen. Not that I’m a big fan of PHP, but PHP 5.3 has some nice additions such as closures.

My my, I managed to finish something that was on my bucket list. I finished reading The Game Producer’s Handbook. So far the most expensive book I had bought (in this genre). The biggest part of the book didn’t really interest me, but nearing the end of the book it got better. The thing is, I’m interested in Indie Gamedev. This book mostly focuses on AAA titles. Which means big budgets and huge teams. Nevertheless it was an interesting read as it gives a nice insight in the work of a game producer.

Happy new year to all! I hope you still have all your fingers?

Created by Oatmeal

Just testing if my syntax highlighter works!

This seems to be working and after some changes to my themes’ stylesheet it looks a bit better.

My latest post was already a month ago! So what’s up? For starters, winter has come and a lot of snow has fallen down. Other than that, not much really. I did start with my LPIC-1 study and hope to get a lot more done when Christmas comes. The current plan is to take the LPIC-1 101 exam around February, with 102 done somewhere before the summer. If successful I’ll be LPIC-1 certified around July 2010!

Other than that I’ve also been reading a bit from the books that I’ve listed on my bucket list. Game Coding Complete, 3rd edition is particularly interesting. Read about some cool stuff like a process manager and being able to execute a chain of processes after process gets killed. It’s not like it’s some sort of rocket science, but it’s an interesting technique to help write clean code. Another thing that gets quite some attention is resource handling and sticking it in a cache. All of this should make writing game prototypes a lot easier.

One particular thing that’s also on my bucket list is forming or joining a band. This was something I didn’t mean to happen very soon, but I got in contact with a drummer and we’re planning to jam very soon. Still looking for a bassist though. Looking forward to it!

Anyhow, although I just said that not much is up it looks like there is. I also plan on writing some articles on topics I come across whilst studying for my LPIC-1 certificate. Most of these articles will probably be reference material for myself.

Added a new page which contains a todo list of stuff I want to learn/do.

Why? Let me quote myself

“My head gets clodded with lots of ideas and things I need to do. So much that I decided I need to create a list.”

So, if you’d like to know what’s on the list, go see it yourself.

Today at work we decided to wait for the next LTS version of Ubuntu, 10.04. Currently we run 7.04 which is no longer receiving updates. For a while now actually. This summer I worked on planning the upgrade process from 7.04 to 7.10, and finally to 8.04. Which is the current LTS version.

I was able to do a dry run upgrade on our backup server. So I was able to document every step of the upgrade process. Ubuntu upgrades nicely and from 7.04 to 8.04 there are only minor changes that need to be done in our configurations. Even the HP iLO software, for which support on Debian based systems is a bit vague, works out of the box with a native driver. No longer do I need to manually compile the HP iLO driver after every kernel update.

Originally we planned on doing the upgrade somewhere this month or December. But due to tight schedules (it’s quite busy for us) January or February seemed be more likely. Since 10.04, the next LTS version with support until April 2015, is out in April 2010 it likely doesn’t hurt to wait a little bit longer. As far as I know every LTS version so far was easily upgradeable to the next LTS version. So I expect upgrading is going to be a breeze. But of course, I’ll be running tests first when 10.04 gets released.

Why not upgrade to 8.04 first and run that first for a couple of months? Well, support for 8.04 ends in 2013, so 10.04 gives us more years of updates. Also, the upgrade process takes (down)time, time to get there, man-hours that need to be paid etc. etc. Further more, without a doubt, with every upgrade there are some issues going to arise. Small and trivial or stuff that brings down every website that’s running on it. Resolving these issues also takes time, which delays the progress of other projects and what not. By skipping yet another version I think we’ll actually save time.

I’m looking forward to it actually. On of the cool things I’m looking forward to is being able to upgrade Zend Framework from 1.8 to 1.9+. I’m also planning to use memcached and perhaps some PHP optimizer to greatly speed up some of the webapplications. And of course, Perl 5.10 (perhaps 5.12 by then?). Although we, unfortunately, don’t use Perl for our websites I like to keep Perl up to date as we use it for several system administration programs. CouchDB also caught my eye .

OK, enough for now. Bedtime .