Don't miss the new updates in the Origami page by Master Tuan Luong
The work accomplished there is really fantastic!
Don't miss either the masters of this discipline in the Tuan's links, and especially Kamiya Satoshi's gallery, which I just find stunning
While I was visiting some blogs, I noticed an interesting link to something called blogshares
It's actually a trading game, where you can buy shares of blogs, which stand for companies, the value of the share changing depending on the number of links pointing to the weblog, to its activity, etc.
I think the principle is quite funny and it may be fun to play, even if you don't have a weblog yourself, just to see how good you could be in trading ;)
As a competent analyst (arff ;D), I highly recommend shiromi's diary as a fast growing blog with a high potential ! :D
Have fun !
Do you get what you pay for? RCTHost, my hosting server has been quite good and incredibly reasonable until recently but what happened recently is just amazing...
It started a few months ago with the upgrade of the Cpanel, the interface
which allows you to control your website when you don't have a shell (telnet
or ssh access).
It seems that they just tried to upgrade that module but the server just
couldn't take it and was suffering from a high CPU usage, instability,
rebooting several times a day, etc.
That was still ok at that time, considering that I'm only using this server to host my homepage and receive emails. The only painful thing for me was that I didn't have access to the statistics of my website, to check the bandwidth utilization or the popularity of my homepage ! Obviously, nothing serious
However, what happened 2 days ago is just unbelievable...
In the afternoon, I noticed that the server was not responding anymore. I
thought about one more mere reboot again and let it go.
A few hours later, the server was still not responding. I was getting upset
because I was expecting some emails and dropped them a note in their helpdesk
interface to know what happened
The next day, the ticket was "closed" (there is apparently no status for
acknowledged, or at least, they don't seem to use it much).
The message was saying that the server had been compromised (understand
hacked) by a Trojan Horse.
As a result, they were not able to boot the server properly and had to go
for a full reinstallation of the OS and to restore the accounts and data. No
need to mention that this is obviously a lengthy process, which lasted about
36 hours in my case.
You want to hear more about this fascinating story ? When they tried to
restore users' data, they realized that the previous problems they had just
prevented them from "backuping" data properly, so the latest backup they had
was the one made on April 19th !
They could have tried to take the physical harddisk of the crashed server
and mount it on a healthy one to copy data over to ensure data integrity...
Instead, they just went for a full reinstallation, assuming that they had a
recent full backup, which would allow them to recover data(which is IMHO a bad
choice anyway, since data is likely to have changed since the latest
backup...).
Well, to be honest, they claim they have tried to convince the actual
engineers in charge of their datacenter to do so, but they just didn't listen
to them... right...
Fortunately enough, I had done a backup of my site 10 days before that
catastrophy happened and I "just" had to upload the files again and to
readjust what I had done between my last backup and now.
However, I just do not know how many mails I've lost because people didn't try
to resend the message, or tried and gave up since the server was down for more
than 24 hours :(
I'm still among the lucky ones. Some people there are running a business
there and every hour of unavailability is more money lost, not to mention the
reputation of their business, which is way more difficult to restore then just
data on a server.
Some others don't have local backups for the last 2 years and were relying on
the hosting server's stability or were hoping that the backups would work...
Big mistake !
I will stay with rcthost as of now, because I'm not running anything
critical on their server and for their very low price, but I'll make sure I
make backups on a regular basis. I was just lucky this time but it could have
been much worse.
After the accounts were available again, Rcthost was claiming that the server
should be stable and running without problems (although I started to upload my
files when I got an error message and realized that the server had rebooted
again).
Yet, I can't help wondering about the actual stability of the company behind this service and I do not know whether this was just an exceptional situation or if this is how it starts, until the customers start leaving because data is lost...
One more thing today: the code of this weblog is a valid XHTML 1.0 transitional code...
The XHTML 1.0 strict is just too difficult to achieve right now !..
I'm not quite sure I will be able to convert all the other pages too, that
sounds like a lot of work but I guess that could be done easily with some perl
script after all ;-)
I finally got this writeback plugin to work !
It was working all along actually, it's just that because of my stupid setup,
the plugin was "confused" about all the redirections and all
I believe some day, there will be a patch to take this into account, but in
the meantime, I set blosxom the way it should work and the plugin is just
working perfectly !
What I had done: set a .htaccess file to redirect all requests to
index.html to index.shtml.
Then the index.shtml file was calling the /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi script.
Somehow, that didn't work
What I did to make it work: use the same .htaccess file but instead of using a index.html, I redirect the request to /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi directly.
The downside of this is that the cgi-bin script appears in the path of the
browser.
There are some instructions in the faq of blosxom (which I have to confess I
only read today !) to prevent that, but I need to look into it later on
Feel free to leave a comment now !
I've just added one more Blosxom plugin, which allows you to see the tree
of categories and pick the one you like right away.
I've tried to sort all the previous entries and put them in the right
category, but I still have to split some since they were dealing with 2
different topics ...
It's actually really fun to work on my homepage from a different point of view and providing new features, instead of just updating the contents :-)
I've actually changed my weblog from movabletype to blosxom after Bruno brought me back to reality, while I was so proud to have set up my weblog a few days ago !
Basically, Movabletype is quite a nice weblog, but on the contrary of
blosxom, it's a propriatary product, under a certain license and any change in
the source code is a violation of this license ...
Also, if you run a commercial site, you are to pay a certain amount since the
type of your license changed ...
Although it was quite unlikely that I had to change anything in the source
code (since the default weblog is quite nice ance that there are tons of
plugins available on the Internet), and even more unlikely that a I would get
sued for doing something like this, I didn't like the fact that this thing was
not in the trendy way of GPL.
I was kind of
challenged to rebuild everything by myself with blosxom, in perl (finally
something I can understand !), to have something I could really be proud of
(yeah, I know, it's not that hard, but still ... ;-) )
Also, I was thinking that if I ever had to advertise my site to sell some of my pictures (still praying here !), then I'd be in a position to have to pay this license, unless I migrated the weblog to something else, so I figured I could just do it right now, while there are not too many entries ...
The cool thing about blosxom is that the system is very simple, using a cgi
script and the Unix file system. Therefore, you just need to create text files
and blosxom will create the entries directly for you, with the tree refering
to your own file structure and marking the date from the date of the file !
This also made the migration much easier since I was able to parse my old
diary and create a new file for each entry on the fly with a quick and dirty
perl script, do a "touch" (to change the date of the file) to make it look
like it was created in the past ! Cool, isn't it ?
Again, I don't know how long it would have taken if I hadn't used a Unix and
if I had tried to do it on Windows ... That'll probably make Bruno smile and
laugh at me again, since he's been very pushy for the last few months for me
to use Linux instead of Windows ...
The only reason I'm still sticking to Windows, although I reckon I really miss
Unix' features, is because I need some programs to convert the pictures from
my camera to JPG ... until Bruno finds something for me, just like that, out
of the blue with a GPL license !
This also means that the search feature (provided by a blosxom's fan, see
the credits) is finally meaningful.
There are also other nice plugins available but I'll have a look at them
little by little
Finally, I'd like to congratulate Fred for his perseverance (I'm not quite sure until when this is going to last, that's why I'm congratulating him now !) in updating his weblog ! You can tell he's been thinking the whole day about what to write in the weblog for each day though :D !
Please, also have a look at George's homepage and leave a message in the guestbook, I personally think his homepage looks pretty cool!
Big change in the design of this diary, which is more like a weblog now.
So far, I didn't really see the benefit of using a weblog, instead of copying
and pasting the last entry to recreate the style. That was until I saw Fred's weblog and found out more about
Movabletype.
Not only this tool will create the page automatically, it also uses a database to show the individual entries, allow any visitor to leave a comment, to run a search...
It looks pretty good too in my opinion, close to the simplified design I was trying to implementing a few months ago.
Unfortunately, converting my old diary into this weblog was not something
easy since I had to change the links on all the pages.
I finally ended up using a 4 line-csh script:
foreach file (`find . -name "*htm*"`)
cat $file | sed 's/diary\.html/weblog\.index\.html/' > tmp
mv tmp $file
end
Done ! How would you do it with Windows ? ;-)
Also, I had to input the contents of the previous diary into one new single
entry of this weblog (well I could have inputted them one by one but I figured
it was not worth it at 2:30am !). Therefore, the design is still in a
transition phase and the search feature may not be very useful as of now,
since you might as well use the search function of your browser !
I have added a few links to some of my friends' homepages:
- Xavier and his thousands ideas (inexprimable.com, globemania.com and paulbocquet.com)
- Tuan, the paper folder magician !
- Don't forget to visit Fred's page again, it's much faster now that he moved his website to another provider ! The design of the pages is just delightful...
I finally started "putting in production" the pages I was working on for the
last few days.
It took me about 3 days to understand the basics of css:
- the first night,I wanted to know what it was and what it was doing... but it
looked a little painful to read (several references to different files, etc.
(it was after work, I was tired, ok ? ;) )
- the second night, I actually starting studying a little more and found some
interesting references on the Internet to leaern quickly about css (see the
links)
- the 3rd night, I did the tutorials and I started changing my own pages
...
I still need to modify the design, I'm still not satisfied by the way it looks
(colors, background, etc.) but at least, I now have the layout and any change
in the css will be applied to all pages at the same time :)
I'm still in the process of migrating all pages so it might take a while
before everything is homogeneous ! In the meantime, please bear with my old
non standard HTML pages !
One last thing: if you ever have to do the same thing as I am doing, I would recommend to use a nice editor such as emacs and work on the source code directly instead of letting yourself get confused with your editor (GoLive, DreamWeaver, Frontpage): it will be more difficult to control what you do and to keep a clean HTML if you let those programs rewrite the code for you ...
Finally, my last remark:
If you see some grey boxes in the banner which don't look really good, ask
yourself whether you are using a browser which respects the norms ...
(Microsoft Internet Explorer ... hmm ?...).
Those files are PNG files and should have a transparent background but only
the browsers which respect the standards will properly display them. Try Mozilla which will also help you get rid of
the irritating popup windows generated by javascripts of some pages...
I started working on the design of my homepage again but this time, I really
wanted to go deeper than just the look of the site.
I was actually a little upset that the search engines only return the frame
where the keyword is in (how could they do it otherwise?...) instead of the
whole page as it was orinally designed.
In parallel, Bruno started talking to me
about valid HTML, CSS and other stuff for which I didn't care before but I
tried the validator (see at the bottom of this page, and it was actually very
frustrating to get errors (my geek's soul is speaking) !
I am now back to the root and writing my homepage with emacs and checking its
validity with the W3C's validator.
I am also getting rid of all the java scripts, which I don't find useful after
all and which pollute the code, in my humble opinion.
It's actually very fulfilling to have a clean code, written by yourself and it
doesn't take as long as you would expect, once you understand how CSS works
...
I still have to 'migrate' the other pages though but now that the design is
ready, it should be quite straight forward ... hopefully !
Since Yves is going to shutdown his server, I needed to transfer all my
files to another server.
The one suggested by Yves as a replacement of his own is actually pretty good:
http://www.rcthost.com
They are quite cheap and the service is rather good (crontabs and cgi-bins allowed). There is no shell available but a web-based interface enables you to do the most common maintenance tasks.
Also, it comes with some cgi-bins, like the well-known counter and
guestbook.
I suggest you have a look at the guestbook, it looks
really nice now, and leave a message :)
The server is also faster, so I hope it will make it easier to browse through all the pictures.
Enjoy !
In order to face the popularity of the smiling picture of me, I picked up some photos which were taken when I was just a little boy and put them up on my homepage :)
Here's the link. Don't hesitate to go further and browse more pages !
I added a new feature in the guestbook to enable
people to include HTML tags.
It means that the signer is able to include links, pictures in the message
itself.
I hope it will incite people to write more often :)
