supersonic feet

I’ve spent a good portion of my weekend banging my head against the desk after getting the hare-brained idea, following my success in setting up Apache 1.3.x with mod_proxy and Mongrel, to get Apache 2.2 running on my server so that I could then use mod_proxy_balancer and therefore mongrel_cluster.

As anyone who’s ever asked the question “How easy is it to install Apache 2 on a cPanel server?” knows, the answer has always been “don’t bother”. In the past couple of weeks however, CPanel finally added support for Apache 2 in their latest EDGE builds. After a quick bit of reading of the cPanel forums, it seemed people had it working well enough and so I embarked, without much forethought, on the upgrade.

A day or so and many, many hours of frustration later and I have it working, so I thought I’d round up my experience as before to try and save some poor souls the same experience. (more…)

The site was down overnight after I took the leap and started updating to Apache 2.2, support for which has finally been added to CPanel EDGE builds.

Once I had everything installed and updated, DNS was broken. I’ve just been sifting through the CPanel forum trying all kinds of ‘fix’ scripts and in the end, 15 seconds after submitting a support ticket to my hosts I found the solution by way of:

yum update bind-libs

Was some kind of problem that quite a lot of people seem to have had when updating CPanel.

Anyway, seems to be working now - I just need to find out how to recompile Apache to get mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer enabled without breaking CPanel (the whole point of this was to get Mongrel clustering).

Orange M3100

My new Orange SPV M3100 arrived today.

All seems very good so far, but haven’t had much chance to use it yet.

microSD cards are also seriously tiny. It’s not right for a card that small to hold gigabytes of data!

Forget my previous want for the Sony Ericsson W950i, I think I’m gonna try and get the Orange SPV M3100 this weekend. It basically seems to be a new version of my O2 mini, with all the niggles fixed and some great new tricks added.
A couple of bits had been nagging at me with the W950i while I waited for its release, largely the fact that it runs on Symbian OS rather than Windows Mobile. The Nokia 7710 that I had before getting my current O2 XDA mini ran on Symbian and while it was quite good, I’ve really grown to prefer Windows Mobile over it. Windows Mobile just seems to work better as a PDA OS to me (though I do think the 7710 probably had some PDA bits pulled out) and one major factor is that I have TomTom for Windows Mobile. If I got a Symbian phone I’d have to buy a new copy of TomTom. That’s more a gripe at TomTom for not allowing/providing software for both on the same discs, but it’s a big thing anyway.

The W950i also lacks a camera. At first I didn’t really think that would bother me, but then when I thought about the number of times I’ve taken quick snaps with my phone because I didn’t even have my little IXUS with me, it was also going to be a miss. It’s a shame as the W950i looks like it’s had a camera area designed and kept out, probably to release a higher model later or to prevent it being an uber-phone and making the 990i pointless. The 2mp camera on the M3100 should do nicely as the 1mp job on my o2 mini is a bit iffy. The M3100 tops it off with a second front-facing camera for video calling. Both the W950i and M3100 are 3G phones, but only the M3100 will do video calls and they thankfully haven’t skimped, as many 3G phones seem to, by making you turn the phone round to use a single camera on the back and then stopping you seeing the person you’re talking to. Now I just need to find some friends with 3G camera phones

Both phones have a touch-screen (something I’ve got very used to with the Nokia and then O2 mini) with stylus and the M3100 also seems to have a selection wheel like the Sony jog-dial, but I haven’t found out exactly what it’s for yet. The M3100 tops things off with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard for writing messages, documents, etc. which should be great.
The M3100 has a very similar set of keys on the front to my O2 mini, with two added. The Sony uses the new fashionable touch-sensitive keys which seem to be turning out to be more style over practicality judging by people’s experiences with them on other new phones. They look a nice gimmick and certainly aid the aesthetics, but if they’re gonna be too easy to activate by accident then I won’t miss them.

Next plus for the M3100 is wi-fi. It’s one major thing I was disappointed not to have on the O2 mini so it’s great to see it on the M3100. Find a wi-fi hotspot and you can get online with the wi-fi either for free or for whatever rate the hotpsot charges. It should also make for quicker synchronisation with PCs.

The major bonus the Sony has over the Orange is it’s 4GB built-in storage. I don’t imagine a 4GB microSD card will come cheap for the M3100, but then if I’m honest I don’t feel the need to listen to my music that often when away from a computer. A very quick check found a 2gb microSD for £53 which ain’t cheap, but I can leave that until later when I have a bit more cash. A 1gb card is about £26 which would probably do me fine to be honest.

So all the above, plus the fact I can get the M3100 now and probably some stuff I’ve missed, is why I’m going for the SPV M3100. Hope my little comparison is of help to someone else - it’s just how I’ve weighed up the pros/cons. Who knows, when I get an M3100 in my hands it might feel horrible, but based on my O2 mini, I’m pretty confident it’s the phone for me.

As I looked at my taskbar yesterday and saw three different text editors/IDEs open at once, it brought home the fact that there’s no one tool that’s the best for any job. At the time I had Zend IDE, jEdit and RadRails open on my work PC, while my laptop had Komodo on the go.

So why not just use one for everything? Because different editors have different features that help when developing in various languages. RadRails has built-in tabs for running generator scripts or quickly starting and stopping Webrick servers. jEdit allows you to clone/split windows infinitely to make better use of the space on your screen. It’s unlikely any editor will notch up all the features you like as well as support all the programming languages you use (though it’s easier if you just use the one language), so we’re stuck switching between apps.

As such, here’s my personal view on each of the editors installed on my computers, either at home or work: (more…)

Now that’s a nice surprise - browsing play.com and finding there’s a new J5 album out next week.

Pre-ordered.

Done.

After hankering after trying OS X for quite a while, I’m pretty much decided on going for a Macbook now that Windows can be run on Intel Macs. So much so that I just bought Parallels in advance (virtualisation software that allows you to run Windows and any other OS alongside OS X). Well, the introductory price offer does run out tomorrow

Now all I need to do is raise the cash to buy a Macbook. I reckon I can do so by selling my video camera (Sony DCR-SR90/100) followed by my existing Windows laptop. The video camera was only bought in May, but after my two week road trip, I found that I basically just didn’t use it. I’m very keen on still photography so lugging a camcorder around as well as my EOS 350D (plus spare lens) was too much on holiday and in the end we only used the camcorder from the car (largely trying to capture the V6 roar going through tunnels in the Alps).

So as cool a piece of kit as it is, it’s not something I’m likely to use enough following my holiday experience - if I didn’t use it then, when will I? As such, it’ll be going on ebay soon in the hope I can make most of my money back.

If I get the Sony sold, I should be pretty close to getting a Macbook (hopefully close enough to buying one before having to part with the Dell D410 laptop). If I can then get a decent price for the Dell I should be sorted.

Yes I’m impatient and stupid

Just finished the coding on my first (work) Rails project yesterday. We’re still waiting for the finished logo and content from the client though, so I’ll wait for that before posting a link as I doubt people will be too impressed with pages labelled things like ‘Blibble’.

Microsoft shuts down Windows 98 - they’re finally ending support for the Win98 operating system. It astounds me that anyone who uses their computer more than very occasionally could still be using it, but there are a lot of people who still do (according to the BBC article, 70 million of them!).

I reckon anyone who’s still running the same PC they bought 8 years ago should be congratulated for somehow managing to not have any major part/software failures in that time, but still pointed in the direction of a cheap XP computer (which will presumably be supported for a few more years yet with Vista only out next year).

Can’t believe the disgrace of Zidane last night. I can only hope Materazzi said something seriously bad to him to go at least part-way to explaining such an insane attack.

Anyway, Cute Overload have a little guy that Zidane was obviously learning from. Check it out!