Chris Meller

I was looking at the source code of the Twitter Status blog, mainly out of curiosity to see how Tumblr was put together, and the first thing I noticed was this odd block of meta tags at the very top of the header:

<![CDATA[ <!-- DEFAULT COLORS --> <meta name="color:Background" content="#fff"/> <meta name="color:Title" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Description" content="#777"/> <meta name="color:Post Title" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Text" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Inline Link" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Quote" content="#888"/> <meta name="color:Quote Border" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Quote Source" content="#555"/> <meta name="color:Link Post" content="#c00"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Background 1" content="#f4f4f4"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Background 2" content="#e8e8e8"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Border" content="#bbb"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Text" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Date" content="#ccc"/> <meta name="color:Date Block" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Date Block Text" content="#bbd5f1"/> <!-- END DEFAULT COLORS --> ]]>

Can someone tell me what the hell that accomplishes?

I’ve had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now¹, I just hadn’t quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to.

Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I’d been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache² and PHP, I was good to go.

The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I’d been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn’t seem it would be a problem.

The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine.

The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go.

All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I’ve used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement³.

I’m still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I’ve realized I’m being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly.

If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely.

One final problem, and one I’m looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I’m not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon⁴, but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible.

So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP…

1. About 6 months, but don’t tell anyone. ↩
2. I never expected it to be that different than other distros. ↩
3. Going purely by the stats in the footer of my theme. ↩
4. I use their massive storage for backups as well. ↩

I’m considering snagging a cheap refurbished Dell from HCDI Trading to use as an IPCop or m0n0wall firewall / router.

Both Belkin and Linksys have gotten on my ho-hum list for consumer grade routers recently with some poor performance overall. Two different Linksys WRT54G models (the early ones, pre-WRT54G-L branch-off) seem to freak out every few days to a week and die, requiring a power cycle to fix. The Belkin wants to restart itself every time you change absolutely anything in the admin interface, and its wireless seems to phase in and out of quality, even sitting 6 feet away.

I’m hoping that if I move the router / AP out of the ‘central’ role to a more peripheral AP role on the network, things will improve. I also miss some of the flexibility having a real OS and real hardware brings to the table¹.

Another option I’m considering, although a bit more pricey (yet more ideal as well), is a small “appliance” device, similar to the Linksys and Belkin offerings, yet more flexible and powerful.

Due to the increased shipping costs associated with overseas orders, the company I would prefer to deal with, Linitx, is kicked out. Instead, I would probably go for something very similar to the Logic Supply box George Ou at ZDNet talked about in this exact scenario.

Anyone have any opinions? Other great small devices that would make ideal (preferably cheap) solutions? What do you use at home?

1. No, DD-WRT, Open-WRT, Tomato, et al are not real OSes, they just play one on TV. ↩

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what title I should have put on my business cards at work (yes, at the job I want to leave). It seems that no matter what title I come up with, I feel I’m selling myself short in some area or another.

You guys have a vague idea some of the things I do at work… If not, check my about page for a huge list of crap. Any suggestions?

I totally missed NCIS tonight. I didn’t actually get home from work until after 7:00, so my evening was really thrown off-kilter as it was. Somehow, I just relaxed on the couch watching some old Remington Steele DVDs and totally missed it when 8:00 rolled around.

Don’t you love it the week before a vacation, when you’re running yourself even more ragged than usual trying to make sure everything’s ready so you can waste a week trying to relax? Ugh…

Someone please tell me that tonight’s episode was a re-run. Anybody?