jrsmith.net

I had the weirdest dream last night:

I came home, presumably from work, and one of my windows was slightly open, and the blinds were all fucked up. Obviously, someone had broken in. I ran inside and looked around… TV, game consoles, even my coffee table was gone. I went into the kitchen and noticed that whoever had broken in had written notes all over the whiteboard, then on the wall around it when they ran out of room. Then I noticed that the walls of the dining room and living room were also covered in notes addressed to me. I spent the rest of the dream reading them. The notes were all very critical and personal. The thief was my subconscious, and it was speaking directly to me, which is what made it so weird. I won’t share any of the messages here. They were far too embarrassing, and I don’t remember most of them verbatim anyway.

After a while I thought I should call the cops. Then someone pulled int my driveway. I went outside to find a middle aged woman and her daughter getting out of a car and walking towards me. They had the wrong address. End of dream.

I’ve switched my hosting provider from dreamhost to slicehost, and I’m pretty happy with it. I’d been with dreamhost for 2 years. In the last year or so, they’ve been fucking up. That last one is a doozy.

Still, I’ve been willing to put up with shitty performance, random outages and cumbersome account configurations, because the benefits outweighed those issues. They oversell to the point of insanity, so I get insane amounts of (theoretical) disk space and bandwidth. I’ve been basically using my account there as a remote backup system, since, as of today, my disk space allotment is 310.37 gigs. And that grows 2 gigs every week. For $10 a month, I may just keep that account and use it for storage.

But I’m rambling. The impetus for switching to a new host was the fact that php was completely fucked on their servers for about 4 hours on Tuesday. Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed, since php is shit and I don’t use it. But I’m using a small php script to gzip all of my css and javascript files dynamically, and when php went bye-bye, ALL OF MY SITES STOPPED WORKING! That’s because I was using the .htaccess commands “php_value” and “php_flag” to make everything work magically (as described here).

Needless to say, I was a little pissed. I sent them a support request explaining what was happening. Then I proceeded to go through all of my domains and comment out those lines, so that things would start working again. Let me say right now that I have a LOT of .htaccess files, so this was no fucking fun.

A few minutes later, I try to log into phpMyAdmin, and I find that the php problem affects even their own applications. They maintain those phpMyAdmin installations, not me. So I send another support request letting them know.

3 hours later, I get a response:

“I apologize for the problem with your website this afternoon. It appears that one of our admins prematurely removed some php support for all domains on our apache servers. The admin is correcting this on all apache services as I write this, but it may take about an hour for ever system to get updated.”

Amazing.

The gravity of this problem lies in the fact that when php can’t be executed properly, it just prints out its source. So, let’s say you’ve spent several months working on the Next Big Thing^TM, and you’ve written it in php for some reason. Suddenly, dreamhost screws up, and the source to your application is available to anyone who bothers to just visit your site.

That was the last straw for me.

I’d read about slicehost a while ago. I was interested, but the hassle of moving all of my sites to a new host prevented me from giving it serious thought. They’re a Virtual Private Server host, which basically means that you rent a virtual machine on their servers. You get full control over the virtual server. You can install several different flavors of Linux, format and reinstall as you see fit, and you can fine-tune memory settings. It’s far superior to shared hosting, where you’re basically just a low-level user on a server, and you have to beg and plead to get anything fixed/changed/added.

Normally VPS hosts are somewhat expensive, but slicehost is cheap. After the dreamhost fuck-up, I was sold.

All of my sites are noticeably faster. I have tighter control over databases, cron jobs, apache performance and programming language installations. I don’t have to jump through hoops just to install new python libraries anymore, and web frameworks like ruby on rails and django work without a hitch. I can force SFTP or FTPS connections instead of vanilla FTP.

It’s pretty sweet.

It’s been kind of a pain to sync up all that data, but I think I’ve mostly done by this point. The only site left to fix is Floris’s blog and image gallery. He had a gig of images uploaded. I’ve almost got him talked into getting his own hosting, though.

I’ve dropped the ball on my “daily drawings” things. I just haven’t had the time. Work has been kicking my ass. Weekends are spent with Jenn. On top of that, I’ve been trying to cook, so that’s more time spent at home doing mundane things.

I’m lying. I sort of enjoy it. It’s weird seeing how much random cooking knowledge bubbles up to the surface. I guess I’ve retained more from watching the Food Network than I ever realized. Thank you, Good Eats.

And thank you, Joanna, for buying me a George Foreman grill 3 years ago. I finally used it.

Sandra is pregnant. This is significant for several reasons:

• It takes the pressure off of me to spawn. Mom wants grandkids badly. Dad says I need to carry on the family name, as if there aren’t enough Smiths in the world. I can barely take care of myself. Kids are out of the questions until I’m 30, if ever.
• She supposedly couldn’t get pregnant. I don’t know why, but that’s what I was told, so it’s a “miracle baby”. I put that in quotes because… well, we don’t need to get into that. Sufficed to say, I’ve heard that before.
• Of my three siblings, she’s the only one in a position to have babies. I’m fucking irresponsible, and unstable as hell. My life is a ridiculous caricature of bachelorhood. Molly is 16. Crystal… heh. Sandra’s been living with Larry for however many years. They seem stable. She’s calmed down a lot. She’s really the only option.

I guess three counts as several.

So, anyway, keep your fingers crossed.

Things with Jenn are still going strong. It’s been three months and she hasn’t gotten sick of me or cheated on me with some douche bag from Florida yet, which is a good sign. She’s started talking about meeting her parents now, which fills me with terror. I guess it’s something that needs to happen, though, since I’d like to keep her around. I just make such horrible first impressions…

I haven’t really seen any movies worth mentioning. I haven’t read any books or found any new music since my last catch-up post. Like I said, I’ve been busy. I’m looking forward to Iron Man coming out in a couple weeks, as well as GTA IV. I’ve been playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl a lot lately, mostly at Jady’s house.

Rob and Big ended this week, and I’m giving serious thought to canceling my cable. It was the best show on TV right now, and now it’s gone, so what’s the point?

I have a lot of projects going on right now, outside of work.

• abillionthings.com - I bought this domain years ago with the intent of building a catch-all listing service. It would be free-form, so you could just create lists of whatever you want - to-do lists, favorite movies lists, shopping lists, wish lists, whatever. I love lists, and all listing systems I’ve used have been inadequate. I’ve started this project many times in many different languages and frameworks, and none have stuck. Recently, when Google App Engine started accepting beta developers, I got in and my interest was rekindled. I’ve been working on it little by little, and have a working version running locally using the SDK, but I haven’t had time to upload it and get it running.
• jennerwin.com - It’s mostly done. Jenn just needs to fill out the remaining bits. The backend works and the very, very minimalistic design is done.
• jrsmith.info - Needs to be done before June. I need screenshots, and I need to write a resume. I’ve never done that before. It’s kind of an intimidating task, since creating this is tantamount to admitting that I may be out of work soon in my mind. If I keep pushing it off, I’ll be safe. That doesn’t make any sense.
• overheardinhamptonroads.com - I just randomly registered this domain and whipped up something very, very quickly on tumblr the other day. Then I went through the entire internet and bookmarked 54 other sites that provide a similar service. My idea was to combine these bookmarks and Google Maps to add geolocation data to all of those sites, since the majority of them are focused around certain locations.
• new front page - This is an extension of the sidebar that used to be on the blog, but more advanced. It will replace the blog on the front page and work very much like FriendFeed, except it’s far more customizable. I basically set up a series of pipes on yahoo pipes to collect, categorize and normalize RSS feeds from my accounts on all of the different sites that one normally associates with “web two point ohhh”, plus a few non-standard ones. Periodically, that pipe is tapped and the output is stored in a database. Then a very simple python script allows browsing of those items by date and category (and eventually, tags). I think it’s pretty sweet. I’ve actually done this several different ways as well. Originally it was completely javascript-based, usng jQuery, and had lots of complicated transitions. I realized, though, that doing it that way would prevent search engine spidering, and that’s unacceptable, so I scrapped it. Anyway, it will be the default page for jrsmith.net soon, and it’ll make stalking me so much easier.
• recipe generator - Since I’m going to be cooking for myself in the foreseeable future, I wanted a way to take the pressure out of picking out feed to cook. I want to make a site that will maintain an inventory of my groceries (possibly synced from the ipod touch, which I use to make shopping lists). The site will have several recipe templates and will be able to produce random recipes based on available ingredients. It could then be scheduled to produce these recipes at convenient times, to take into account thawing times for meat, or whatever. It should be a simple thing to create. It could also generate shopping lists each week, which is a big bonus.

Those are just the web-related things. Jenn wants me to participate in some of the art projects she’s created or joined, one of which is the Five Five Project. Then there’s one that involves a wooden block and news clippings.

So, as I said… I’ve been busy.

Also, it makes me sad that I haven’t bought any t-shirts in so long.

Sigh.

Back to work.