Yesterday evening I setup a new server for the website of a friend.
He doesn't know a lot about the technical site of the internet,
so I had planned to give him the usual
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) + Wordpress setup.

Having played with Nginx with Phusion Passenger support last week,
I decided to have a little experiment with this clean new box,
that nobody would need before next week.

So instead of installing Apache I went with Nginx.

The setup was ultra easy:

• gem install passenger
• passenger-install-nginx-module
• install spawn-fcgi
• configure nginx

After this I only had to do the Famous 5-Minute Install and I was done.

Result?

• The system does everything it is suppossed to.
• The responses "feel" a lot faster than from my other servers.
• The system load is a lot lower.
• Memory consumption went down to nearly zero.

I think I'll just leave this system as is to get some long term experience.

Next stop?

Remove the toy MySQL from the equation and replace with a real database system (e.g. PostgreSQL).

Tweaking my templates to do what they are supposed to do.

I'm trying to stay away from reading the (Jekyll-)code to understand how to do things. The documentation should really be enough.

So far I have some workaround tweaks, but nothing satisfying.

Including snippets via liquid is still a little confusing.

Lunchbreak is over, so I have to get back to some real world.
(This site isn't live anyway...)

This site hasn't seen an update for a long time.

• I'm switching it to jekyll right now.
• And putting the source on github.
• And switching the server to one of my test boxes.
• Which will mean the site gets served by nginx instead of apache.

Just a quick note on what I've been doing.

In preperation for the upcoming work on Stoned 2.0, I created a new (wordpress based) website and copied most of the stuff from the old stoned site. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

I started to implement the POS (Point of Sale) System for Kathrin's Shop (Elfenrausch). Just some simple PHP and MySQL based stuff.

It will run on her MacMini with MAMP

Right now I'm looking for a good kiosk mode solution.

Firefox sucks ... in this regard, so it looks like I'm going the camino road.

There is a kiosk-extension, but I couldn't find a way to force camino into kiosk mode at startup, so right now I'm downloading the newest XCode installer, to build camino from scratch;

And add the missing features. (Fullscreen/Kiosk-mode that still allows user switching.)

A while ago I had the urge to write some stuff in my native language again, so if you understand german head over to anticast.de

I just joined the great games experiment.

The site looks really slick.

It might prove to be a good place to get in contact with other developers, but also with probable publishers and gamers/testers.

If nothing else, it's at least another way to get some players ;)

Just googeled for myself and stumbled over a lot of interesting stuff that I once participated in:

Here's a brief list ... in no particular order:

Newlib: Did the original CellBE SPU/SPE patch.

TwoLame: Added a switch to change verbosity.

Transcode: Wrote the plugin for twolame, since it encoded mp2 much faster then mp2enc.

SciTE: Made file dialog size configurable and keep their state. Using a 400px wide dialog to select a file where character 250 differs is bad. Especially if you work on a 3200x1200 dual head setting.

RedBook:

[argl] ... time to upgrade my wordpress... just lost 70% of this post. Don't know which key I hit, but it was bad :(

I usually don't just post links to other blogs, but this one made me laugh:

Name one way you are not Hitler...

I just wonder how it ended up on the gentoo world ;)

Long time no update, I know.

A few weeks ago our old provider (alturo) decided to piss everyone off and close its business. Got a pretty nice deal for a new server by haggling ... a lot.

Only tradeoff:

The new system runs plesk.

And plesk is the pest.

On the old server everything was in one database and all the configuration files (bind, apache, mysql, postfix) were created by one simple script.

The layout was something like this:

Customer
  ( 1 -> N  ) Login
  ( 1 -> N ) Sites

So if Customer "Thomas Test" had login "ttalpha" and "ttprod" with three domains (alpha.1.org, alpha.2.org + a.3.org and www.1.org, www.2.org + www.3.org), then the filesystem looked like this:

/home/
--ttalpha/
----web/
------alpha.1.org/
------alpha.2.org/
------alpha.3.org/
--ttprod/
----web/
------www.1.org/
------www.2.org/
------www.3.org/

With one login (and password/sshkey) shared per login/user, but a tight seperation of the test and production sites.

Now with PLESK ... argl.

For the above setup, I need about 400 Clicks in the Webinterface.

And then I end up with 3 users ... and have the subdomains (alpha+www) shared for each domain.

Or I get 6 users ... with 6 logins and 6 passwords.

Yuck.

I still have to get qmail to work right. Some of my mail is simply swalloed and I have yet to find out what happens ... I don't even get bounces :(

This PLESK-mess sucks.

And I will find a new host soon!

The DNS-disaster is a whole new story ...

Well, the real new news system has replaced the old one long ago...

Edit:
I removed the link to the "real new news system",
since that obviously doesn't exist anymore.

It was a wordpress 1.5 installation,
that I was using until the switch to jekyll.