I spent the evening moving formatting my desktop and moving to Linux full time for my desktop. In some ways this was a difficult move and in other ways it wasn’t. What made it difficult is that there are applications in Windows that I have not found a decent replacement for. An example would be FlashFXP, I have tried other apps, but so far none have given me the feel that FlashFXP did. Another is Photoshop… now I am aware of GIMP, but I am not a fan of it, I am sure over time I would enjoy it, but right now I enjoy the feel of working in Photoshop. Also with the way I have everything setup Windows wasn’t bad. Most of the complaints I hear about Windows are from people who hardly ever use Windows, or haven’t used Windows since 3.11. They complain about things they don’t know anything about or they say they tried to fix a Windows machine for someone and spent X hours trying to get something to work. In some cases it was simply because they don’t have a lot of experience with Windows and it is not fair to blame Windows for that.

I use Linux on my company laptop, so I have gotten pretty used to using it the majority of my day for all kinds of stuff. I found myself coming home and getting on my Windows machine needing to write some bash scripts or integrate with Linux machines better or just little tasks that are, in my opinion, easier in Linux. All the days of using Linux I never said to myself… if I only had Windows, but at home I have countless times said… if this was only Linux.

I do need to continue to run a Windows virtual machine so I have been testing out VMware server and VMware workstation on Linux. Server is free, but does not handle USB and will most likely not support unity anytime soon. Unity will make a lot of things much better, it will allow me to use the few apps I need to without having to be inside the Windows vm all the time.

When I opened the Linux VMware server client it would crash and I would get the following errors.

I had to install gcc 4.3, and run the following commands to get it working

I couldn’t resist upgrading… even though it was expensive. Now I pay like 115/mo for TV and internet

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Slicehost, but it is a VPS solution that is affordable and very stable. Slicehost does not oversell system resources, so when you purchase a “slice” you aren’t getting some bogged down server loaded with virtual environments. I have been using them for many months now and I encourage people to sign up. I have 2, 512mb RAM Slices that have 20gb hard drives and each get 200gb of bandwidth each costing $38/mo. I run Pingdom on each one and there have only been a few occasions that I have been emailed about downtime and most of those were self inflicted. This website was taken down and just moved over, but since it has been on Slicehost the slice has been up 100%. One of my client’s has a Slice as well and his has not dipped below 99.9% for the past 3 months and the only times it went below that were for events unrelated to the virtual environment. All Slices are prorated so if you only use one for an hour the money would be refunded, or if you start a new one mid month you are only charged for the percentage of the month you used.

For those of you wondering what distros you can choose from:

• Arch 2007.08
• CentOS 5.1
• Debian 4.0 (etch)
• Fedora 8
• Gentoo 2007.0
• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (dapper)
• Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (hardy)

If you decide to try them out, I would appreciate it if you used my referral link below.

First is that the site is back online. About 2 months ago I stopped updating the blog and during that the version of Wordpress I was running had a exploit and the pages (not posts) were deleted and I decided I should just take it down until another major version came out. There are a couple things that are out of place and pages will slowly start coming back after I update the contents of them so they are accurate.

I passed my Offensive Security Certified Professional test, so now I have that certification and in a few weeks I will be preparing for LPIC and Linux+ exams. I would also like to start working towards my CCNA. I know nothing about routing and I need to work on my subnetting so it will be good for me.

I will try to post some pictures of the apartment, my digital camera took a crap so it will have to wait until I get a new one. I recently bought an LG42LB5D 42″ 1080p LCD TV and a Playstation 3… boy does 1080p look good.

Hello again everything.

Sorry for the downtime, I signed up for a Dreamhost account to take care of static content and downloads since the connection is fast and the accounts are cheap. After signing up for it I wanted to wait a month or two before colocating that server again. I would like to get it down to a 1U and do a few upgrades to it. I also have some new projects to get integrated so I need some time to do all this. I just got around to putting everything on Dreamhost this evening so that is why everything was down for so long.

I should have a few new posts coming up in the next few hours or days, but not a whole lot has been going on for the past week.

I just finished moving everything over to the new server. I just colocated DIGITAL39 and a few other sites on a box I have. It is a Pentium 4, 2.6HT with 1GB of DDR400, which will become 2GB soon. I have two SATA 120gb drives in RAID1 and thats about it. You should notice better performance and now that I am back on Linux I will be adding some more cool stuff to the site.

I just looked at wp-shortstat and I just hit 100,000 page views. That only covers pages within Wordpress and posts, nothing outside that. That is since June 2006. It started out very slow though, only recently did traffic really go up, but I don’t market my blog so all traffic is from search engines in most cases.

I have had some posts I wanted to get out today, but I have been having some problems with either my network connection on the server or the server itself. The problem must have been more than just me because my traffic drastically dropped about 11am this morning when I began having problems.

So to anyone having problems visiting the site today I am very sorry for the unavailability and I hope it will be resolved soon. When things are back to normal I will add the posts I had planned and enable the google content from earlier.

Should I have the line under the post title like I have had

Screen Shot

or use boxes like I have setup right now

Screen Shot

I can’t decide so input would be appreciated

I decided it would be a good idea to add a change log to the site. This way visitors can see what I updated and when. This log does not cover blog posts for obvious reasons.