Joe's Blog

So, I’ve set up a Diaspora* pod. Diaspora* is a service similar to twitter/facebook, but it with (at least) one crucial difference. Rather than being run by one big company who has control over everyones data, many nodes (known as pods) are run by groups or individuals. Depending on how you see it, this could mean that your data is more secure – if you trust the owner of the pod, then you know that your information will not be sold or traded with anyone. I’m not expecting everyone in the world to abandon other social media sites – but it’s something you can try out if you’re interested. There is a lot more information about Diaspora* here.

I have recently acquired a few domain names, one of which is 23p.net. While this doesn’t really mean anything, I have decided to use it as the name of my Diaspora* pod because it is short, and easy to remember.

I hope to do a more technical writeup soon, but in the mean time, why not check it out? My Diaspora Username is josephredfern@23p.net.

Just a quick post – If you want to download a file using wget from a server that has an invalid SSL certificate (expired, not from a trusted issuer etc) then you can use the  --no-check-certificate switch to make wget ignore such errors.

I have decided to open source my “Web Applications” coursework. It is a simple bloggging engine written in PHP and mySQL.

If you’re interested in having a look, then check out the git repo here: https://github.com/JosephRedfern/RedBlog/

So, I’ve decided to try and publish more things to GitHub this year – starting with LogBox. LogBox will hopefully soon become a collection of scripts that can be used to monitor the performance of websites hosted on shared hosting servers. At the moment, LogBox contains only the one script, which goes by the name of “loadavg”. If you’ve every used a *nix machine before, you’ll probably know what the load average is – it is a measurement of the current CPU load, usually over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

The loadavg script will check the load average of the server which it is being run on, and if the reported load averages cross a certain threshold, then a warning email will be sent to an email address of your choice. In addition to this, the current load averages will be logged to a MySQL Database.

The script is designed to be run as a cronjob (which most shared hosts support) – however, if cron is not available then it is possible to use “fakecron”, which is available here: http://quirm.net/2008/10/02/fake-cron/.

Click Here to check out LogBox on GitHub 

WordPress should now be fixed. It’s not the ideal fix, as I am not 100% sure what was causing the problem – there where no obvious errors in my logfiles. However, I think it’s something to do with a combination of mod_rewrite, fCGI, suphp and the Portfolio Press wordpress theme. I have now switched themes, and I don’t have the same problem… fingers crossed, anyway!

I have been fairly busy during my week off from University developing a website for a local holiday Chalet – check it out here. It’s not 100% finished yet, but the general design is complete. I have also been doing some a little bit of SEO on Anglesey Sailing, in an attempt to boost it’s rankings. I can honestly recommend both sites, and the services that they offer – so if ever you’re looking to go on holiday to Anglesey, or to charter a boat in the Anglesey Area, check out the aforementioned sites!

For some reason, the category links on the right (as well as tag links) aren’t working – at all. I think this has something to do with either my server setup, (fCGI and SUEXEC), the Theme i’m using (Portfolio Press), a combination of the two or something totally different. This might be a good opportunity to start using Jekyll, so if you could hang on in there for now (all 0 of you), I’ll hopefully have it sorted in a week or so’s time.

Just a very quick post – I am now a paid member of Apple’s iOS Developer scheme. I hope that it’ll motivate me to learn Objective-C…. I will try and keep you updated with my progress, although it will probably be slow given the amount of coursework I have right now!

I had an alarming issue where one of my USB ports (the one closest to the display) wasn’t recognising any devices… It would charge them up without any problems, but things like USB hard drives and iPhones would not mount. I thought that this was a hardware fault, and was preparing myself book a slot at the Genius Bar.

However, by resetting my PRAM and NVRAM, I managed to fix the problem. To do this, first power off your Macbook Pro. Then, hold down the option key (alt key), Command Key, P and R simultaneously. While holding these keys down, press the power button once and wait for the computer to chime. Once your laptop has “chimed”, it will restart – you can then release the keys. Your NVRAM and PRAM will now be reset – and hopefully, your USB Socket will resume normal operation!

I hope that this helps!

I recently bought a Kimsufi-2G Dedicated Server from OVH (well, Kimsufi…). I’m using it to host project websites, where non-php programs might need to be run. Infact – I moved this blog over to the new server, so if you’re reading this, then all is well.

I’ve always wanted a dedicated server. VPS’s are good, but the thought of having a physical machine in a datacenter somewhere is, for some reason, very appealing to me. The server is costing me £16.80 a month, which isn’t too bad. I have  5TB of Bandwidth, 1TB hard disk, 2GB RAM and 1.2GHz Celeron. At first, I thought that the processor would be horrifically under-powered for my needs – but it’s coping very well. Infact, it’s doing better than another server I had, with a 2.66GHz Celeron Processor. The 1.2GHz Celeron is considerably newer than the 2.66GHz Celeron, and has 512KB L2 cache rather than 256KB – I put the different in speed down to that.

I opted to install Virtualmin, so that if any of my friends needed some hosting, I could quickly create them account. It uses a bit of RAM.. at the moment, with a couple of dynamic sites (including this one), memory usage is at 384MB. If this where a low end VPS, i would be slightly concerened – but given that I have 2GB RAM, it’s not a big issue for me.

I have set up the dedicated server to be my primary nameserver, with my $3.50/m BuyVM VPS being my secondary. This should provide a decent amount of redundancy, as the two servers are physically very far apart.

It is very tempting to get a Kimsufi 16G, which would have (as the name suggests) 16GB RAM, along with a quad core I5 (or better), a 2TB Hard Drive and 10TB Bandwidth for £43/m. However, I can’t really justify that price… especially since my £16.80 Server is treating me just fine.

After what feels like a lifetime of waiting, it has recently been announced that Google Plus is finally available for those of us who use Google Apps for Domains. You’ll need to be an administrator to enable it for your domain – if that is you, then take the following steps.

1. Log into the Google Apps control panel
2. Choose the “Organisation and users” option from the top navigation bar
3. Click on the “Services” tab (next to users)
4. Scroll down through the “Additional Services”, and find “Google Plus”
5. Click the “On” button