RSS FeedIt’s been a while since I decided to rebuild my website from scratch. I’ve been really busy with other stuff, but I finally found some time to make a simple photo album system.
Not all albums are visible yet, which is due to a conversion mistake from the old system. The missing albums are still intact, but the timestamps have been messed up. As soon as I’ve figured out how to fix that, those albums will become visible as well.
As promised; you - the visitor to my website - can now post comments on my blog entries. It probably needs some tweaking here and there to keep the spam bots out, but it is working as it should be at the moment. 
You may also have noticed that the photos are working as well since a few days. Good grief, it might actually turn out all-right with this self-made code 
As you can see, the blog is more or less back online. It’s still in a very primitive phase, and lots of stuff still isn’t working. On the top of the to-do list are:
- The ability to add comments on a blog post.
- The ability to search in the text of the posts.
- The ability to see photo’s in the posts again (Photo’s aren’t working yet, video’s however are).
- Etc...
On the topic of video’s... I’ve made some changes to the system for the videos that result in much higher quality. The old videos were encoded in Adobe’s Flash Video format at 15 frames per second and used up 512 KBps. The old videos have been resized and re-encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 format at 512KBps. The difference is very noticeable, I think. New videos (such as the videos I shot at the Amphi Festival) are encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 format at 30 frames per second and use up 1000 KBps.
I’m all set. This next Saturday (July 25th, 2009), I will be moving my new web server from the “staging area” (read: my bedroom) to the data center in Amsterdam. Sunday (July 26th, 2009) the old server in Canada will be powered down and dismantled.
Aside from departing from the server in Canada, I will also be departing from Xoops (the CMS that I’ve been using for 2 years now). I’ve decided to write my own website code, for a couple of reasons: security, speed and size (also related to speed I guess…).
The more code you have, the slower a site is, and the more can go wrong. Xoops is a very large CMS, with a lot of functionality (most of which I don’t use). If I write a minimalistic CMS myself, with just the things that I use; it should - in theory - make the site smaller, faster and more secure.
So… this Saturday my server will go online, but my website will be offline for a while until I’ve made a basic blog module.
Wish me luck!
Today, my black magic woman arrived. Unfortunately, it turns out that the 2x1GB memory I had arranged doesn’t fit. But with the 1GB that was in the server and 4GB extra... it’s still 5 GB and that’s still plenty for a webserver.
Some snapshots for your viewing pleasure:
*purr* 
As some of you might, or might not know, I rent a dedicated server at iWeb in Ontario, Canada. They have some decent deals going on and starting at USD 69,- a month you can rent your own server. That is… if you stick to 1GB ram and either Linux or FreeBSD. If you want a different operating system, you have to pay extra, and if you want more memory, you also have to pay… extra. In my case it ended up at USD 109 a month for An Intel Celeron D 3.0 GHz with 2GB Ram and 300 GB IDE hard disk, equipped with Windows 2003 Standard Edition. The package includes a 10MBps uplink and 1 TB of traffic per month.
This is an average price for renting a dedicated server, but it always struck me as odd that I have to pay USD 10,- a month for an 1 GB memory module that costs € 15,- at my workplace. Time for change, I thought… so I did a bit of researching and found out that for € 49,- per month, I can collocate my own server on a 100MBps uplink with 1 TB traffic per month, at Trans|ip, the same company where I have my domains registered. It’s not rocket science to see that it would save me about €35,- to € 50,- per month, depending on the exchange rate of course.
I would get 10 times the uplink speed for less money. The only problem is that I didn’t have my own server. I had already decided that I wanted a certain minimal configuration:
- Dual Core processor
- 4 GB memory
- 2 Hard Disks in raid 1 configuration
First I checked the website of my employer, Aces Direct, of course. Unfortunately, the cheapest server that met my desired specifications was way over the budget that I had in mind. The problem is that most servers are sold without disks, and server hard disks are a bit more expensive than consumer hard disks.
Next I ended up at a company that sells reasonably cheap web servers. For € 399,- (ex taxes of course) you can get a simple server with either an AMD Athlon 64, AMD Sempron 64, or Intel Dual Core E2220 processor. A bit of research told me that neither of the AMD’s was Dual Core, and that the Intel was a first generation Dual Core processor and had performance that was comparable to a single core processor.
A co-worker told me that one of our suppliers might have something on stock. On our website, we prefer to sell the latest models obviously, but the suppliers might have an older model on the shelf somewhere. A quick E-mail here and a phone call there told me that indeed one of our suppliers had some older models on the shelf that might fit within my budget. The price would be comparable to the cheap web server with the AMD or Intel Dual Core processor, but it would be a Hewlett Packard or I.B.M. Of course I feared that it would end up way too pricy again due to the more expensive hard disks, but the supplier told me not to worry about it.
A bit of haggling and ass kissing later, I had made a very nice deal on my new server, which should arrive next Monday or Tuesday. I went a bit over my planned budget, but also managed to make a deal with my boss so that I can pay for the server in parts. I’ll pay half of the server in cash (which is well within my budget), and half of it will be deducted from my salary in 3 parts. So what did I get?
From a supplier I managed to get For € 819,91 inc taxes :
- Hewlett Packard Proliant DL 320 G5P with Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz processor.
- 4 GB memory upgrade kit.
- 2x 250 GB hard disk (hot plug)
Via another channel I also managed to get a 64-Bit Windows 2008 Web Edition license and an additional 2GB of memory for free (the guy owed me a favor :P). I think going from a Celeron D 3GHz with 2GB ram and IDE hard disk to a Dual Core Xeon 2.66GHz with 6 GB ram and raid 1 hard disks is quite a nice upgrade, and after the server has been paid off, I will save money and have more performance.
My Server should arrive Monday or Tuesday, so stay tuned!
I’ve been doing a little bit of research (read: I’ve been reading other people’s blogs), and came to the conclusion that my site has too much whitespace. One of the things that didn’t please me, is that my video’s and photo’s were small, which didn’t really look very good.
I’ve changed some code, added some code, and spanked the web server a bit; with the result being that the video’s and pictures will be more visible, and thus making the site a bit more pleasing to the eye. Both the pictures and the videos will be shown at 540x405 pixel resolution, except when there are multiple pictures of course. In those cases they will still be thumb nailed.
After lots of grumbles and annoyances with updating libraries and packages when trying to install a decent spam filter on FreeBSD (which is - in my opinion - still the best Unix/Linux in the world, though…), I decided to reinstall the server with Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
On its own, FreeBSD ran fine. Performance was super, stability was just awesome and the server ran flawless for almost a year and a half without rebooting. The only thing that always annoyed me was updating packages and libraries. It’s the curse of open source software. Each developer wants to use his/her own libraries, which means that you end up installing 3 or 4 versions of the exact same library, just because Programmer A wants to use a function that is used in version 1.0.7, but was removed in version 1.0.8; and Programmer B uses a function that didn’t exist in 1.0.7 yet, but does exist in 1.0.9, etc, etc… it’s just highly annoying.
On Windows servers that whole issue is non-existing, since all the libraries are either included with the software package, or are included in Windows Update. The same goes for security updates and new features; they’re just much easier to deploy on Windows. So from a manageability point of view, Windows definitely has the upper hand on FreeBSD.
The installation was a bit of a pickle. The hosting company installed the server promptly, but sent the welcome letter to an email address that was going to be hosted on the very same server that they just reinstalled. After a lot of poking, prodding and nudging they finally agreed to send the welcome mail to an alternative e-mail address so I could log on to the server and do my installation.
The initial setup went flawless, and the server was up and running in a couple of hours. The only things that are left to do for the next couple of days are fine tuning/tweaking and getting an upgrade for the memory. As opposed to FreeBSD, Windows 2003 doesn’t run optimal with just 512 MB. The website and server run ok, but there’s some delays and lowered performance issues that can easily be fixed by adding some RAM.
I will ask the hosting company to upgrade it to 2- or 4GB, depending on the costs of course.
I’ve decided to merge my old website (http://www.allodox.nl) and my new/current website (http://www.ajira.eu) together. I haven’t identified as AllodoX for nearly 2 years now, but I don’t want to just forget and scrap my past; It’s part of who I am today, so it deserves a place.
I’ve rebuilt most of the site from scratch (still some work left...), and added all the old content to it. The old content is posted by the user AllodoX, and the new/future content will be posted by the user Ajira. Don’t worry... I’m still the same person, just with a new/different style 
A little overview of what’s on the site:
- Home - the page you first saw. This is the news/blog area.
- Projects - here I’ll post writings, tutorials and information about projects I’m working on.
- Photos - speaks for itself, I guess...
Just photo’s of me, photos made by me and/or screenshots of games I’m active in.
- FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions. Here you can ask me pretty much any question - there are exceptions of course - and I will try to answer them.
- Downloads - Here you can download files that are associated to the projects section.
- Sitemap - a quick overview of what’s on the site.
I started working on my new site today. Previously I used a phpbb-based portal site, but I came to the conclusion that it’s major overkill for what I’m doing. So, I’m going to start from scratch, and make my own blogsite. No more 2mb patchfiles, no more weird spagetticode, no more known exploits, just pure functionality wrapped in a decent package. Stay tuned for more