Shell history
Since everyone seems to be doing it:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
189 ./bin/redcar
51 cd
41 gst
29 git
28 irb
23 less
21 ruby
20 gca
19 ls
13 sudo
I guess it’s pretty obvious what I’m spending my time on :).
Matrioshka Hosting
For almost 5 years now, whenever I’ve learned a little bit more about the web, I’ve bought a new hosting package to support my new skills. And each time I’m kept the previous providers to avoid the hassle of moving things over. But it’s starting to look less and less convenient to have everything separated, and more expensive. Here’s my current situation:
Date Host Price Space RAM B/w
-------------------------------------------------
Jan 03 Yahoo £4.50 2GB n/a 100GB
Aug 05 1&1 £9.00 4GB n/a 40GB
May 06 Dreamhost £5.00 255GB n/a 3TB
Sep 06 Rails Machine £50.00 10GB 512MB 100GB
-------------------------------------------------
Totals £68.50 271GB 512MB 3.2TB
The Reviews
Yahoo Geocities I set this up in January 2003 because I needed simple webhosting and wanted my own domain name. It’s tinkertoy but I am not aware of any downtime whatsoever in 4 and a half years.
1&1 Business Hosting Account Bought this so I could set up a wordpress blog. They have a very wide selection of services, though they appear to have written most of them themselves, which is odd. For instance, you can install the “1&1 Blog” software. Ummm, no thanks. Again, solid hosting with little or no downtime.
Dreamhost “Crazy Domain Insane” Shared Hosting Got this when I started learning about Rails in 2006. Truly extraordinary allocations marred by frequent network problems. Having said that, I haven’t noticed much downtime on my own server so perhaps that’s too harsh. Excellent web interface for installing packages. Setting up a new Subversion repository with websvn and access control is the work of a few moments. Very convenient.
Rails Machine VPS Got this when I wanted to deploy a couple of Rails apps. Comes pre-installed with a Rails-stack of Apache, MySQL and mongrel. Using the railsmachine gem to deploy is a well marked path, even for a noob like me. Little downtime, excellent support. A tad expensive perhaps, and only offers CentOS (enterprise Red Hat), when I would really have preferred a Debian derivative.
Yet another: Slicehost
All told I have 4 hosting or VPS accounts, which I bought over a period of 4 and a half years, costing me £70 every month. I don’t even want to do the calculations of how much this has cost in total. So I’ve been planning a consolidation for a while, and last month I discovered Slicehost.
There’s been a bit of buzz around them and they have quite a long waiting period. They predicted two weeks for me but it ended up about four, with little information along the way.
I don’t want to give the complete thumbs up yet, because I’ve only had the server online for a few days, but so far they seem like an excellent package:
- They’re cheap. An Equivalent server to the Rails Machine one above costs just £20p/m and I’ve bought a smaller one for £10.
- They have a great web interface for rebooting, wiping and reinstalling your ’slice’. You can choose your distribution from a few options: Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo and Fedora. You can also use a browser based shell to get into your slice and use the interface to save server backups (for some more ££s).
- They have a really great set of articles covering common administration tasks (and building a Rails stack), and they seem to have just hired someone specifically write to more.
The Plan
So the plan is to consolidate my current hosting into two Slicehost slices. One for my blogs, pages, email, mailing lists and subversion repositories. Then, once I’m confident that Slicehost know what they’re doing, a second for Says Who?.
Host Price Space RAM B/w
-------------------------------------------------
Slicehost 256 £10.00 10GB 256MB 100GB
Slicehost 256 £10.00 10GB 256MB 100GB
-------------------------------------------------
Totals £20.00 20GB 512MB 200GB
Total saving, £48.50 per month.
Printing Double Sided Without Exploding Your Brain
Here are some things that make my brain hurt:
- Figuring out timezones
- Ice cream
- Printing double sided from a single sided printer
Today I decided that I have chucked far too much wasted paper away, and wrote down the algorithm for printing double sided:
1. If we are printing the first page go to 2, else go to 7.
2. Print odd pages from entire range.
3. If the last page is odd go to 4, even go to 5.
4. Take all but the last printed sheet and place face down
in printer tray, then go to 6.
5. Take all printed sheets and place face down in
printer tray.
6. Print even pages from entire range, in reverse. STOP
7. Print even pages from entire range.
8. If the last page is even go to 9, odd go to 10.
9. Take all but the last printed sheet and place face down
in printer tray then go to 12.
10. Take all printed sheets and place face down in
printer tray.
11. Print odd pages from entire range, in reverse. STOP
See… that’s not so bad.
About
Daniel Lucraft, London, UK. Interested in Ruby, Prolog and software.