trisweb.com

During my server setup I discovered an interesting new way to solve the age-old http://domain.com http://www.domain.com problem, one that I think is less resource intensive and more logical.

The problem, for those unfamiliar, is that Google sees those two sites as separate, assigns two PageRanks, and can even duplicate content. That’s not good! To try to combat this, in their webmaster tools page, you can select which address you prefer, but that’s been unreliable for me. Zenphoto.org still has split PageRanks even though I told Google to always use the www subdomain. For that reason (and others, like consistency of the URL users see) I think it’s best taken care of server-side.

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Yep, that’s right, trisweb.com, zenphoto.org, and the rest of my sites have been moved to another new web server.

The previous moves were all opportunistic. Back in the day, I hosted on I was hosted on Berkeley’s Open Computing Facility, which was cool until I ran out of space. I moved and stuck with wha.websensei.com for a long time, who had a great deal going with a hosting “alliance” (same webmaster as caedes.net, highly recommended if you have some kind of artistic site).

Then I got in on a “startup,” and moved all my sites to their new dedicated server we got for “development.” I say “development” because no “development” actually happened, and in fact nothing ever happened. Great. They notified me that they were taking the server down in three hours, and that I should probably back it up if I wanted to keep anything. Bye guys!

From there I scrambled to find a host. I searched reviews and forums and settled on PolurNET, mostly because they had a 30-day money-back guarantee. Turns out these guys were great! I super-highly recommend them if you need any kind of general hosting, they really are a great company with reasonably-priced and feature-complete service. I spoke to the president, Anand, personally in a support chat, and he was surprisingly open and responsive to my problem.

But then I found slicehost a month later. Because, of course, you can never find what you’re looking for when you look for it–it has to be discovered when you least expect it.

Slicehost is awesome. Period. It’s a developer’s dream come true. Brand new servers with highly featured VPS plans designed for developers by developers. As soon as I saw the site, read the description, got the overall feel of it, I signed up. That’s marketing at its best, my friends. And no one was lying–they get it. My VPS server (”slice”) has been great from day one, except for a series of hardware-related crashes that I’m ignoring entirely for two reasons: one: they were on top of it immediately and kept everyone updated, and two: they refunded my payment for that entire month. I’ve had no problems since and only great experiences. Jason and Matt (owners/developers) really get it and it shows in their company. Thanks guys!

So I’ve been setting up my slice for the last month or so, off and on. It’s been fun and educational… it’s the first Linux server I’ve ever set up from scratch. I’ll post a couple of articles in the next couple days about the server configuration problems and solutions I encountered.

Also, now that I have my own server, Zenphoto will get Trac this week. It’s not JIRA or Confluence in usability, but it will work (and it won’t eat gigabytes of memory in the process… stupid Java… when will you learn…). SVN will move yet again so Trac can have access.

The bottom line: this should be solid for a long, long time. I’ve got full control over this server and my hosting now, no longer at the mercy of shared servers or bad sysadmins–except myself, of course ;-).

I was forced against my will (child labor) to mow my parents’ lawns, and while I was pushing the mower around in circles (some people go back and forth, some go diagonally–I’m a spiral mower myself) I got to thinking about my Artificial Intelligence class at Berkeley and how I was basically ridiculed for saying that Intelligence is complex!

I guess it sounds like an ignorant viewpoint for a computer scientist to have. Intelligence is complex–or should it be just a very powerful computer with the right program? It seems to me like most people in the strong AI group think this way; that it’s just a lot of complicated parts needing independent solutions and some putting-together. This view is almost required to believe it can be done in the first place! I do believe it can be done–in fact, I believe the only way it can be done is the way it already has. We need to simulate the evolution of a strong AI and all its sources–essentially, us. I believe the evolutionary processes of an intelliegence–artificial or not–are as important as the end result.

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Trying to install a new hard disk in my laptop, I found my way to some MS support article. I found this in it…

“To boot from the shadow of a broken mirror.”

Seriously now, tell me someone didn’t sneak that language in there. Or at least I’d think that if it wasn’t followed by “Please note that you may need to modify the Boot.ini file to do this.”

Parakey is a upcoming “Web OS” by one of the original developers of Firefox (some teenage kid) that seamlessly integrates the local desktop with the remote server. It does this by using a small server running on the desktop along with the remote web application to keep everything synchronized; work offline, work online, and everything’s still up-to-date.

I just want to say I have a whole notebook of ideas about making an OS for the web, and three or four pages were dedicated to this very problem. I’m just glad someone had time to get around to implementing it!

Some of the ideas sound hokey (like the sharing “keys”) but this should be a sign of things to come, with most user data residing on servers, and thin web clients all over the place to access and manipulate it. All that’s needed past that are various levels of cache (possibly full mirroring) for when you’re not connected, which is always going to be a possibility. A web-centric, connectivity-aware computing environment. Not too far off I don’t think. Anyone want to get started? I’m game.

I’m finally back up! I found new hosting immediately, but delayed restoring the backups for personal reasons. The break was nice; just one less thing to think about for a few weeks. I lost all ranking on Google, and probably many transient readers, but those aren’t things to care about much. It is, after all, only the internet.

Goings-on over the past three weeks, list style:

• Cal beat Oregon State, Oregon, Washington State, and Washington in four straight games. We’re now 7-1 and ranked 12th in the nation. Go Bears!
• My dad shipped me his Olympus E-500 to use for a while since mine was stolen. It should keep the pictures flowing. Thanks dad!
• I flew to Massachusetts for my grandfather’s funeral (he was 96 years old!). It was a fun family reunion of sorts and the fall colors were beautiful. I’ve got to get out there more, I quite like the east coast. Pictures of that will be up soon for those waiting.
• I’ve decided to apply to grad school at Berkeley, in the Computer Science HCI department! I’m taking the GRE in two weeks and I’ll go from there… wish me luck!

That’s about all I can think of right now. It’s been busy overall, just one thing after another with work and band and family and all. Just feels like every week there’s more and more, and nothing ever stops and everything’s always changing, and at the end of every day I just wish we could take a two week vacation in Hawaii. I guess that’s life eh?

Trisweb.com, zenphoto.org, and other of my services are going down for the time being. There’s been an emergency with the people hosting me on their private server and they have to get rid of it, so I’m currently frantically backing up everything.

I’ll try to be back up sometime soon, but no promises…

Went to Fry’s electronics today expecting to buy a replacement for my stolen camera, but their salespeople are so inept that I decided they didn’t deserve my money (”I’m sorry sir, but we can’t turn them on for you”–NO SALE FOR YOU). Instead I wandered into their speaker room (as I usually do at some point) and spotted a pair of these on the top shelf with a red reduced price tag…

Cambridge Sound Works M50 Bookshelf Speakers

They were store display models on sale at a discount, $95.67 for the pair. I compared them to some Polk speakers of similar size that were on sale for $40 a pair, but the Cambridge’s were much more lively and accurate, with a noticably better soundstage even in the horrible little listening room (that’s just speaker nerd speak for “where you can hear the sound coming from” — with good speakers, you don’t want to hear the sound coming from the speakers; you don’t want to hear the speakers at all, just the music). Definitely worthy of their $299 list price, and at $95, I couldn’t pass them up.

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