Chris Mueller's Web Home

Sunrise

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

After working all night at a 24 coffee house, I took a ride around the Headlands loop.

Server Migration

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The uuorld.com server used to be hosted on a standard dedicated box at a datacenter in Los Angeles. In an effort to consolidate resources, enable flexibility for future efforts, and save money, it made sense to move all of our servers to Amazon's EC2 cloud infrastructure.

The old server had been running CentOS. I opted to go with CentOS because it was considered a secure, well-supported standard. The hosting provider's sales team convinced me that I would be a lot better off if I also had CPanel installed, so I paid a little extra for that too. (CPanel provides a web interface for common administrative tasks on the server.) There were many problems with the whole setup.

I have a strong background in Debian and Ubuntu platforms, but lack the experience with RedHat based distros. This often made troubleshooting more complicated than it should have been.
The default installation of CPanel and CentOS included a lot of things we didn't need, including a full up DNS server, IP logging programs, phpMyAdmin, FrontPage extensions, etc.
The CentOS repositories contained old versions of a lot of software packages, and we were depending on some bleeding edge packages to provide the functionality we wanted. It was not just once that I was forced to uninstall the default packages and compile from source.
We were paying a lot of money.

The move to Amazon has proved remarkably painless. After spending a day getting acquainted with the EC2 concepts and terminology, installing the Firefox extension to manage my instances, and running the setup/teardown cycle a few times, it made sense to dive in. I launched a default instance of Ubuntu 8.04 and started poking around. A few apt-get calls later, and I had the core of the site replicated. Since the Ubuntu repositories had the latest versions of all the software I needed, this was a blissfully painless process. I loaded up database backups from the old server, pulled down all the code that runs our site, modified a couple lines in the Apache config files, and the new site was working great.

I'm convinced the Ubuntu guys are saints.

The Current

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

After a hiatus of several months, I've been listening to the Current (part of Minnesota Public Radio) again today. It has been great, and I've found myself really enjoying some artists I hadn't encountered before, including Santogold and Stars.

Especially helpful for me is that MPR publishes the list of songs they play.

I had been feeling unhappy with Pandora lately. The stations I've configured with Pandora quickly get stuck in a rut. I read once that top 40 stations are so popular because people tend to carry ~40 songs in their reserve memory. It's hubristic to think I'm better than average, but at the very least I like a diversity. The Current hasn't repeated any songs all day, which is much more than I could say for Pandora.

For today the Current has my vote. Two thumbs up.

This

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

% python

>>> import this

vimrc for Py

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

A great .vimrc file for coding in my favorite language: vimrc.

This is far superior to coding with Py+Eclipse integration.

Biking Photos

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I posted some photos from my bike rides around San Francisco and Marin.

Visit the Gallery.

Wow

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Dropbox is, um, amazing.

File sharing and syncing across computers. You can share files instantly and easily with your friends or family. Available on Linux, Mac, and Windows. They also support a web interface.

This is ridiculously cool.

Location Location Location

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Yahoo has some of the best mapping and geo-location APIs. Their GeoPlanet services provides a Where-On-Earth unique ID for millions of places around the world. Their API has a search feature, so it's straightforward to get a WOEID for any place based a plain-text query string.

FireEagle is another strong offering from Yahoo. It's a personal location tracking system. Combined with a SPOT Messenger GPS system that uses a satellite uplink, I should be able to notify FireEagle of my location -- literally anywhere in the world -- at 10-minute intervals. For now, my location data will be kept private inside the service, but I may open up some of it and post it here. The SPOT was ordered last week, and testing should begin later this week.