powdahound.com

My site is now hosted on a VPS provided by VPSLink.com. It’s nice having the flexibility to run services like Subversion and Cacti as well as manage my own Apache configuration.

Their admin interface is really clean and fast, and they have tons of OSes to choose from. Check them out if you’re in the market for a host.

I installed Ubuntu on my desktop again since I felt like desktop Linux was getting much closer to a state where I’d be willing to make the switch. My experience has been so much better than previous Gentoo and Ubuntu installs (even my wireless worked out of the box!) but there were still a few critical things I had to fix myself.

1. Fonts
Fonts in Linux look like crap by default. The Sharp Fonts tutorial solved all my ugly font problems in about 5 minutes. This is a problem I never actually solved the other times I tried Linux on the desktop. Now pages in Firefox look just like they would in Windows Firefox (crical for web development!). I realize that Microsoft won’t let anyone repackage and redistribute their fonts, but someone could still automate the Sharp Fonts tutorial and distribute the script with the default installation.

2. Mouse buttons
I have a Microsoft Habu mouse with buttons on the side that I like to use as forward/back buttons while browsing. Of course these didn’t work with the default xorg config but this tutorial on the Gentoo Wiki had the exact config I needed! Debugging this yourself can take a long, long time.

3. Sound
It turns out that Linux or Ubuntu aren’t really to blame for my sound issues. The Sound Blaster X-Fi card I have just has really bad Linux support. Is Creative good at making drivers for any OS? Luckily the onboard sound on my motherboard (Asus M2N32-SLI) works just fine and is supported by ALSA and OSS.

4. Firefox’s backspace action
I hadn’t realized this before, but I hit backspace all the time in Firefox to navigate back. I’m not sure why this is disabled in the default install, but it’s easily switched in about:config by setting the browser.backspace_action preference to 0.

Some other thoughts about the switch…

• IEs 4 Linux - testing stuff in IE6 is now really easy! I’m not able to test IE7 without booting a VM, but luckily it behaves well most of the time.
• Thunderbird works much better with IMAP than I expected it to.
• I was hoping gedit would be more like Textmate than it is. This tutorial helps a lot, but I can’t find a way to get the keybinds to be the same. At the very least, I’d like emacs-style keybinds in gedit.

I’ve also been using Ubuntu as the OS on my new VPS from VPSLink.com which is hosting this site. More on them in the future…

For the past 6 months I’ve been using JungleDisk to back up most of my important files on Amazon S3. It has a great auto-backup feature which keeps me from worrying about data loss. Like many people, I never thought about data loss until after I lost an entire drive (which I’m still keeping in case I become rich enough to blow $2k to have it restored).

Amazon S3 is also incredibly cheap:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per gigabyte-month of storage used
• $0.10/0.18 per gigabyte of data uploaded/downloaded.
• $0.01 per 1,000 upload or 10,000 download requests
• Remember that you only pay for what you use! If you have 1.2 GB of data stored, you only pay 18 cents! If you only have 100MB that’s only 2 cents!

It gives me some strange satisfaction to receive my monthly 10¢ bill from Amazon. :)

The only problem I have with the setup is that Windows Explorer ALWAYS locks up when browsing my JungleDisk drive. I’m assuming it’s not a problem with JungleDisk since it works fine on my Mac.

Anyway, the Amazon S3 & JungleDisk combo is certainly worth checking out. It’s so ridiculously cheap for the amount of pain and trouble it can prevent!