George Pearce - iamPearce

In the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Cloud Servers, from RackSpace. I posted a couple of days ago with the news that I’d gotten a nice server up and running – Ubuntu with Apache.

Well it turned out pretty quickly that for anything more than.. a hit an hour, the Apache server was going to be very slow (I didn’t go for a very powerful server, granted) so I started looking around for something with performance more in mind.

I’m now running a CentOS server, with nginx as my webserver – with built in rules to handle wp-super-cache. I spent hours reading various posts online about different ways of doing it, and ended up doing a combination of all of them – with much improvisation and many failed attempts. I am very pleased with the speed difference though, generation times are fractions of a second on this server, rather than four or five with Apache/Ubuntu.

It’s also highlighted just how handy the functions in RackSpace Cloud Servers are – reimaging instantly, paying per hour, and taking disk images- all of which made what I was doing this past week (mostly on Sunday) so much easier.

I plan to write a little more about what I’ve been doing as and when I get a chance (and once I make sure it can handle all four of my blogs)

phpMyAdmin, by default is configured to work with Apache and Lighttpd (not positive of the last one) – and not nginx. This website’s server runs on nginx, I tracked down a way of making it work – assuming you have some way of loading PHP, like FastCGI (post coming soon) installed.

Firstly, install phpMyAdmin (I used centOS / Ubuntu so I ran # yum install phpMyAdmin  or apt-get install phpmyadmin respectively).

Once that’s done, open up the virtual host config file for nginx – in CentOS it’s /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf and add the following:


server {
listen (IP ADDRESS):80;
server_name phpmyadmin.domainname.com;

location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/phpmyadmin$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_config;
}
}


Notes-

/usr/share/phpmyadmin should be replaced by the directory that phpMyAdmin is installed in, run
# whereis phpmyadmin
to locate.

The latter section is specific to the FastCGI process I’m using and may be different for different PHP handlers – but in general that’s how it works.

Save that file, and reload nginx, head over to phpmyadmin.domainname.com and boom – phpMyAdmin running on nginx.

Even before I decided to order an iPhone 4, I knew I’d need a case for it. Sure, it’s a shame to cover up the very thing that makes Apple products quite so special- the design, but I knew it’d be necessary, if only to protect it from my lifestyle.

The same day I ordered my phone, I settled on the Feather, by Incipio (on the advice of a  customer support rep from Natwest – best rep ever)

It actually arrived before the iPhone did – I ordered it at 2pm on a Friday and it turned up the next morning – which is impressive. It came from an Amazon Marketplace Seller, called eoutlet-uk – with free delivery. All in all, it worked out at about £18.

This was all, of course, before I found out that Apple were going to offer free cases to everyone – even though I doubt I’ll be claiming one.

The Incipio Feather protects the entire back of the phone (with a hole for the camera) as well as the sides – as you can see in the picture. It’s made of a rigid plastic which is ~1mm thick.

When my iPhone did arrive, one of the first things I did was to pop the case on, and I have to say it feels nicer to use and type on with the case (although that might be me – I have huge hands).

Paired with a screen protector, despite the best part of two weeks *very heavy* use, my iPhone has yet to sustain a single scratch.

With that in mind though, the matte finishing on some of the corners is scratching away – it’s so small it’s barely noticable, but it does look as though it’s just rubbed away in my pocket. Which is a shame, my case is less than two weeks old and it looks somewhat tarnished.

Apart from that though, it’s definitely the best case I’ve seen so far, and accordingly I won’t be applying for a free case from Apple – I don’t need one.

The incipio feather is available from Amazon UK for £18.39.

In the past week; a ‘debate’ has been raging between WordPress (chiefly @photomatt) and the developer of the well known Thesis theme, Chris Pearson (@pearsonified), about whether the Thesis theme, being a derivative of WordPress, must follow the same GPL-2 licensing. Legally, because Thesis contains code from WordPress itself (and runs as part of WordPress) the WordPress people say it should be, and I agree.

However, Chris Pearson believes himself exempt from these licenses, and refuses to license the theme under GPL-2 (which would make it open source) – presumably for income protection reasons (although several other premium theme producers have gone GPL and not looked back).

For this reason, I’m taking the Thesis theme (that I bought) down from my blog, and for the time being I will use the Twenty-Ten theme – until I sufficiently develop the new design I’ve been planning anyway. My understanding of or involvement in GPL is very limited indeed, but having read some choice quotes from a conversation between Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg, I was astounded by the arrogance of Pearson, and the argument presented by the WordPress team is sound. Thus, he has lost my support.

As it is, I love the Twenty-Ten theme, and if I didn’t want to have my own custom layout and design, I might have stuck with it.

Today (and yesterday), I did something I’ve been wanting to for a long time.

I sat down, created a virtual server with Rackspace, based on Ubuntu 10.04, and had a play. I irreparably damaged my first attempt while playing with things I don’t yet understand, but on the second go, I got LAMP up and running, and then created some virtualhosts.

Result? PlusPhysics is currently running from a cloud instance server. It’s pretty damn fast, fun to maintain and adminster, and so far only super caching isn’t working (I’ve yet to figure that one out – normal wp-cache is fine, but super cache just does nothing).

Currently, I host about half my sites with MediaTemple, on a (gs), and half with ThisWebHost, on regular shared hosting. MediaTemple are wonderful, but the (gs) platform has serious performance flaws, and even though the (cs) is coming, it’s not here yet (and hasn’t been for years since it was announced). As for ThisWebHost – I love them. I have no complaints at all, and for simpe budget hosting, they will be my recommendation for a long time to come.

But I want to use something more advanced. Something that doesn’t come with a pretty control panel.

I did consider the (ve) that MediaTemple now provide – but the equivelant Cloud Server instance from Rackspace is approximately a third of the cost – and their support does trump MediaTemple, without a doubt.

I’d like to thank Donald Kelly for poking me in the right direction with this – he has actually moved his website onto the Rackspace Cloud already.

[update] It looks like Donald has written a post with an identical title to mine, and a very similar post structure. Oops.

One of my favourite features of the upcoming WordPress 3.0 (so far) is the custom post types functionality, which means I can create a whole new post type, with a whole new permalink structure (and single post design / archive) to my main set of posts.

I’ve spent a little of the last couple of days reading around online, and having a little play-  I’m going to write a proper post about it on BlogPremiere at some point in the next week or so, before the official launch sometime at the start of May.

I’d like to go through how anyone can use a custom post type on their blog, and how easy they are to get setup – because they really are and they could add an extra dimension to a WordPress site (as well as making a multi-user site far easier to manage).

I’ve added a new post type on iamPearce called photos, I’m going to see how that works out, and then extend it for use on BlogPremiere – I have a couple of ideas for new features that could be separate from the main blog, and beneficial to the site users.

I’ve yet to work out how to enable categories in the custom post types, but I’ve got tags – I love the challenge of learning new stuff about what I consider myself an expert at

Expect a post on BlogPremiere sometime in the next couple of weeks!

Today, the Large Hadron Collider, a CERN project, finally acheived a sustained 7 tera-electron-volt partile beam (which was scheduled to happen last year, I believe), and it also successfully collided protons at this speed (which is record-breaking already, and it’s not even close to full power).

With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson. The fact that the experiments have published papers already on the basis of last year’s data bodes very well for this first physics run.

- ATLAS Collaboration Spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti

I’ve always been interested in the LHC project, I actually attended a video-conference about how its run in the last couple of months- I’m looking forward to seeing it operate at it’s full capacity, and maybe just redefine everything we think we know about Physics.

I’d love to (once I do my degree) have a chance to work with the engineers on the LHC, it’d be an amazing experience and something amazing to say I’d been part of.

A couple of days ago, on impulse, I picked up a hosting package from ThisWebHost, just to have a play around with. I did so on the advice of a friend, Donald Kelly, because while their virtually unheard of, he thinks the world of them. My hosting time with GoDaddy is coming to an end (after a month and a half, and I’ll post to explain why soon), somewhere new was needed.

I was attracted by the fact that they don’t oversell, they don’t pretend to be anything their not, and on Donald’s word, their servers really are monsters.

So far, I’m pretty impressed (although, I was the same with GoDaddy. Then it slowed down to a halt), the support was quick and they even offered to move my sites, although I’m still only playing with two other domains on there at the moment.

The other attractive thing about this*, is the lack of negative reviews. I can’t find one. For a company that’s been in business two years, that isn’t bad at all.

My great plan, is that I have a months hosting with them- normally after a month I know whether I like a host or not, and if I do like them, then I’ll move a couple more domains and shut down my GoDaddy account, stick with This* for the time being. With my exams coming up, I can see that happening.

(as a note, this entire post is a HUGE spoiler to Skins series 4 episode 7, don’t read if you haven’t watched it and intend to).

I just watched the most recent Skins episode on e4 OD, and it’s really hit home on what I’ve been thinking about series 3 and 4 – it’s not like it used to be. The relaxed, funny attitude of the series 1 and 2 episodes isn’t there anymore, it’s gotten very dark (this episode culminated in the bludgeoning to *presumed* death of one of the main characters).

It’ll be interesting to see the finale next week, and as E4 just commissioned the creation of two more series’, I hope they’ll return to the spirit of the original two, s 3 & 4 have been very dark indeed. They also killed off the character that is probably the public’s favourite, which is an interesting move, and has been met with varying degrees of fury on the “condolence” page.

I’m looking forward to seeing next weeks episode, but I wish it would be more like series 1 & 2.

Yesterday, after over a year with them, I closed my MediaTemple account. I’m now hosted on much cheaper European servers for the time being – and this is why I decided to move away from MT.

- Speed. Over the last six months, I’ve found that speeds for anything other than standard HTML/Image files have decreased massively, and the load times for my (dynamic) blog have increased beyond what I’m happy with. I know I could have used caching and I will be on this host, but I didn’t expect to need to.

- Support. The MediaTemple support is *amazing*. I would still recommend them to anyone. Thing is, it’s slow. 24/7/365 support is all good, but with 18 hour response times, I’m finding it less easy to believe. Granted, I sometimes ask complicated questions, but a note that they’ve read my note and are working on it would be appreciated.

- Price. $20 a month (granted, I had a discount), is paying for stuff that I don’t need or use. My traffic levels aren’t massive; and I’m a student. All my income goes into my “uni pot”, so I decided that MediaTemple were too expensive for what I was looking for.

That said, I love MT. Their products are amazing (and I’m looking forward to seeing the CS product). I would recommend them to anyone; but the drawbacks I found after a year of service caused me to move on.