Alright, I'll say right now... this is old news. I moved back around the middle of May. This apartment came up unexpectedly and I was told about it by a friend. The rent seemed pretty reasonable for all the space I was getting, and I like the building. It's not a high-rise apartment, just a 3-story building with a store below.

Full Gallery

Ok, sorry, this is a teaser to a series of more posts I'll try to get put up over the course of the week, but I will give out free samples:

1) IRL: Wow... where to begin. I moved into my own apartment by myself, it's quite a different experience. I've been working 5-6 days a week just to cover my expenses, and managed to get promoted to assistant manager in less than a year. Now if I could only get a raise...

2) Server tweaks: Because no server is ever good enough, I've been very busily working on my servers and network infrastructure. Long story short, I've made some major architectural changes to my LAMP stack by replacing Apache's mod_php with PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager).

3) Introducing Connor Behan: My friend has been renting space on my server from me for 2+ years and he only recently got around to actually using it. Lots to share about our adventures with Arch Linux + Lighttpd/PHP-FPM (and some caveats about the latter), and setting up multi-core Apache Solr to serve search queries for two Drupal sites.

4) APT repo and LAMP-related back-ports: I needed to back-port PHP to get PHP-FPM on Lucid, and while I was at it I decided to do the same for Apache, and Lighttpd. And since I went to all that trouble, naturally I needed a repo to house them in.

So, that's what I plan to cover over the week in more detail including how-to's and pictures. Stay tuned.

Zenoss is a web-based SNMP management/monitoring tool that you can use to track the health of your servers and networking infrastructure. Zenoss comes in two editions, Core and Enterprise. This will be a short how-to on setting up Zenoss Core to monitor your home/lab network with SNMP. I won't go over setting up the various options of Zenoss, I'll let you read about that on their docs.

Start by downloading and installing the appropriate version of Zenoss for your distribution, or a VMware image if you want to go that route. I installed the Zenoss stack on an Ubuntu 10.04 virtual machine.

sudo dpkg -i zenoss-stack_3.1.0_i386.deb

The next thing to do is configure SNMP on all the machines you want to monitor.

My cellphone contract came up last month and I was finally eligible to get a free or discounted phone. The obvious choice from the outset was an Android phone, and Telus had two that looked like they would fit the bill. It came down to the HTC Desire and the Motorola Milestone (AKA Droid). I ended up getting the wonderful HTC Desire, my first smartphone, and I wanted to write about how it's changing the way I use the web and communicate. I know I'm late to the party, but who wants to pay $500 for a new phone without a contract when you can get it for $80 + your soul for the next 3 years?

It's been a while since I last checked out Drupal 7, but now that the beta is out (old news) I've taken another look and I was absolutely amazed at everything they've done with it. It's come so far in the last year. I love the new admin overlay and the new theme is almost beautiful enough to keep enabled. It seems like a few staple modules for Drupal 6 have been made obsolete, the default install profile has a lot of useful features included.

With that all being said, I like it so much that I think I will attempt to upgrade this site to the beta as soon as I test everything on a cloned install first. Look forward to another post about how it goes and hopefully an upgrade in the near future.

My life changed pretty significantly starting January this year. My parents announced their impending divorce, my girlfriend of the time broke up with me not long after, my grades in college began to slip... It's been a crazy year to say the least. In the last 6 months I've moved twice, put up with 'temporary' accommodations, and generally felt like my entire life was in flux. I'm glad to say things are finally starting to balance out now. I have moved closer to town where I don't need to rely on others for transportation, and managed to find a job not far away (no small feat in a blue-collar city like Hamilton where the job market has really hit the dumps).

I finally got my servers and other infrastructure online today, as you can see if you're reading this. Not only that, but I've finally gotten a brand-spankin' new server as well. This site is now hosted on a very fast Core 2 Duo 2.93ghz with 2gb of DDR2-800 RAM, and a couple 500gb hard drives. I took the opportunity to also upgrade to the latest long term support release of Ubuntu, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. All-in-all, I'm very impressed with this release. I've had to do barely any manual configuration for any of the services I'm running: Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3, MySQL 5.1 and Tomcat 6 with Apache Solr. Getting Drupal back up to date after months of being offline was quite a chore however...

In conclusion, I am very much still alive, and good things are coming my way. This is a new life, and I don't intend to let things get as bad as they were before this time around.

I've been sucked back into EVE Online, which is a massively-multiplayer online sci-fi game. You basically fly big spaceships. In space.

I've been playing this game off and on for almost 5 years now, and for the first time I've joined a player corporation (equivalent of a guild in WoW). I've just completed a website for my corporation, SWARTA (State War Academy Rapid Tactical Assault) using Drupal again. It has forums with strict access control so would-be spies can't view our plans, and will feature galleries and blogs in the future.

I created this video of demo footage I took the other night playing Team Fortress 2 as spy. Not my best work by far, but it was fun making it,so I'll be making more with better action :)

Standard definition, high quality

Getting Solr to play nice with Tomcat on Ubuntu was an interesting journey, I almost gave up entirely at one point. I'm compiling this how-to from tips I got from multiple websites. I'll try to make as complete a list as I can remember at the end of this post.

I wrote up this script to take a screenshot and upload it to my webserver a while ago and I want to share it, so without further adieu, I give you ShotUp:

Use the script by placing it in /usr/bin and calling the command shotup in the Gnome run dialog box or equivalent for other display environments. Please note that the upload will only work if you've setup SSH public key authentication.