Take More Risks

I’m finally moving to a VPS after thinking about doing it for God knows how long. Spent most of this week selling some of my smaller websites on Digitalpoint and it has went pretty well. So far I’ve used the money mainly for hiring copywriters for a few of my other sites. I’m not gonna buy any new sites. I’ve wasted a lot of money buying pages on subjects I know nothing about. From now on I will invest my money into my own project ideas. And I have a lot of them. I just can’t create them at the rate I think about them.

Things are going pretty well at the minute although I’m spending a lot of my time on final year uni work. I’m actually enjoying this year so far. It’s been cool.

I’m gonna move this blog over soon to the new server in a minute so comments will be disabled until then. Although this place is something of a ghostown since I haven’t updated regularly in about 60,000,000 years.

I installed Google Desktop again last night on a whim after seeing a preview of the analogue clock widget. To my surprise it’s been quite useful so far what with the “To Do” and “Scratch Pad” extensions

What’s more impressive is that you can develop your own tools with the Google Web Toolkit. Wahey – I now have a reason to learn Java!

The Google Sidebar could add a whole new dimension to viral marketing. Digg and Myspace already have widgets developed to provide better user interaction. Surely the average viral marketer would be able to provide a widget which adds value to a users experience whilst building awareness of their brand? It’s something worth thinking about.

With Myspace I think it would be cool if you could bind the widget to your account it then reads in all of your interests and then automatically shows your the profiles of people with similar interests. Instead of displaying “Cool New People” on the website it could display the profiles of a number of users who like your favourite band.

Now to go off on a bit of a tangent – the major problem with communities like Myspace (besides the fact it’s crap, heh) is that it is difficult to make friends. It’s ackward having to ask someone to be your friend – especially when you have none on your list to start with.

What I really liked about My Blog Log is it’s openess. For instance when people visit your profile, a link is back to theirs on the main page, making it easier to get in touch with others.

It’s a pity that the friends system in Digg seems to be so alienated from the rest of the site. I can’t really see any means for interaction bar replying to each others comments on Dugg stories. I guess this keeps focus on where the creators want it – on the news.

I think I’ve deviated ever so slightly here…….as always.

Last Saturday I set out to buy a 56k modem for my sister, she had just bought a PC for the first time and required dial-up as her phone line was not yet compatible with broadband. I won’t reveal the exact location but she lives in a reasonably remote place where there are very few computer stores about.

I ventured downtown, found a store and bought the Conexant Soft56k Data FAX Modem for £20. I didn’t really have much choice. I would have scoffed and made for the door if there were a PC World just across the road, trust me!

For £20 I was expecting a worldbeater of a modem – one which would leave even a 32meg connection languishing behind in the dust. It turns out that I was to get much more for my money in the end……..

I placed the card securely within the PCI slot and turned the computer on, Windows immediately recognised the modem and the New Hardware wizard popped up as normal. I then inserted the cute little mini install CD into the drive and THIS appeared within about 10 seconds.

It wasn’t boding well at this stage. How much would it take to cost to buy the full version of the software for gods sake? $30 tops? I’d never seen anything this shoddy before….. ever! This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “shit-o-rama”.

But still, the best was yet to come!

Can you spot what’s wrong here? Conexant have managed to misspell their own name AND install in the space of three words within the title bar. Now I’m hardly pedantic but this is taking the piss.

Wahey, a click later and the Setup Wizard starts. You’ve got to love the retro feel of the buttons at the bottom. Perhaps this was made in Visual Basic 5? It certainly looks god awful. Now I don’t know how exactly to describe what happens next. I click on the funky double blue arrows, the driver supposedly installs and then…….nothing. There is no pop-up balloon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen notifying me that my hardware has been installed successfully. Absolutely nothing happens.

As always if something happens like this, I rebooted Windows only to find that the PC would not switch on at all. Great!

I yanked out the modem and promptly smashed the card into smithereens. I felt like chewing on the CD for a while but my stomping foot was urging me on, and much to the bemusement of my sisters’ neighbours – I promptly performed a one man rendition of Riverdance on top of it.

After my tantrum had subsided, I drove home with the tower, plucked my 3 year old Intel 56k Modem out of a drawer, placed it into the PCI slot, turned the PC back on and Windows configured the modem correctly within 3 minutes. Bear in mind that I spent £8 on it back when I first bought my own computer in 2003…..

I’m still quite pissed though. I should have returned the modem to the shop. Thinking about it, I probably still could, afterall the card couldn’t be of any less use now that’s in 1000 pieces compared to how well it functioned when it was intact.

The look on the store owners face would have been worth the trouble alone.

Thanks to mason for pointing this out.

To stop the red links from appearing simply access the SEO for Firefox options menu in Firefox -> Tools -> Seo for FF -> and uncheck the highlight links in red.

Alright, I’ll admit that this is starting to get a little bit repetitive. I just can’t seem to rid the idea of picking up a VPS out of my mind. At the moment I’d say that all of my sites put together use about 5GB a month, which isn’t that much really. I’m just wondering – is it better to push my shared hosting accounts to the brink of their usage limits or transfer all of my sites across to the VPS to avoid any downtime?

The lack of shell access on Hostgator is becoming a serious issue especially now that I’m using Cake PHP. I mean I could Bake all of the files locally and then upload them but it kinda defeats the purpose of the application.

I’ve been checking out servint.com based on a number of recommendations and they seem to be extremely reliable. I’m really close to signing up here but I’m afraid that I’ll be wasting my money. Should I go all out and acquire a high end VPS account or even a dedicated server to show that I’m serious about this? I honestly don’t know.

All that I know is that my money is burning holes in my pocket. I never was very good at managing cash.

And so ends my longest ever spell running Linux on one of my machines! I would’ve kept Ubuntu if it wasn’t for the spillage on my laptop’s keyboard but alas it had to go! I desperately need to start developing!

I enjoyed my time with Linux and I’d definitely consider installing it again in the future. Hopefully a serious contender to Dreamweaver appears on the platform within the next while. I underestimated just how much I rely on it when I was running Ubuntu. The ability to specify and configure sites is a necessity to me. It’s great having a facility which automatically uploads files to your server via FTP upon save.

Linux seems to be getting easier to use as time goes on and I hope it can continue to evolve so that in the future it becomes a serious contender to Windows in the desktop market. Obviously it needs the support of hardware vendors to roll-out compatible drivers for the operating system and whilst it seems to be improving there are some companies out there who just ignore Linux completely. Emu/Creative I’m glaring at you………

Next time around I think I’ll opt for Kubuntu over Ubuntu. I definitely prefer the KDE over GNOME. Hails back to my days with – Mandriva Free 2006 which started almost a year to the day coincidentally.

The next step is to get off my ass and find a replacement keyboard for my laptop. I’ll need to ring Acer during the week to find the spare part number. I also have to sort out my passport application. G’ah!

Bluefish sucks, Screem and Quanta Pro are mediocre at best. Don’t get me started about the GIMP either. I just can’t work with this god damn operating system any longer! Ok that’s not strictly true, Ubuntu is good for browsing and email. It’s downfall is that it doesn’t have anything nearly as good as Macromedia Dreamweaver for web development. Ok, I’m sure there is a way that I could run Dreamweaver through Wine or another Windows emulator but why would I want to? Why not use XP instead?

I’m earning less and less each day now and it’s down to a general lack of upkeep with my sites which aren’t based on Wordpress. It’s so easy to maintain a website in Dreamweaver – particularly with the Sites facility. You download the file, edit it and then save it and it’s updated automatically. With Ubuntu it’s hell. I won’t go through the process because it’s mindnumbing. It’s nowhere near as smooth as Windows I can assure you!

I’m going to reinstall Windows on my desktop tonight. I want to begin developing in PHP properly again. None of the Editors for Linux offer function recognition so if you’re making use of an unfamiliar function you have to look up the PHP manual everytime and it slows everything down.

Oh well…….at least I’ll be able to listen to music again on my PC.

Since the keyboard failure last week I’ve been using Ubuntu for everything and thankfully it’s becoming easier to find my way around the interface. I’m seriously thinking of keeping Linux on a long term basis – especially if I can get my EMU 1212M working with this distro. Support for the 1212M is built into the kernel by default – it’s just that the card requires another piece of software called Patchmix DSP to run and it isn’t compatible with Linux.

I tried playing around with the GIMP last night and felt like I was getting nowhere. I had set out to create a top banner for the Gothic Fairies website but I just couldn’t get it working for me so I booted up the laptop and created it within Macromedia Fireworks. I’ve been a Fireworks fanboy ever since I started out with web development. It’s efficient for churning out simple web graphics and I’m bummed out that Adobe have decided to phase the series out as part of the terms of the Macromedia buy-out. As they say – all good things must come to an end!

I seriously need to find a better FTP client than gFTP. The interface is horrible and it disconnects regularly. Grrrr.

Back on topic – I’ve been reading this thread about Ubuntu’s support for the Emu 1212M and it seems as though a few developers are working on making it fully compatible with Linux. Let’s pray that this comes about as I’m starting to fall in love with this system. You wouldn’t have heard me say that a few months ago – particularly when I was first trying to install it. Stranger things have happened!

God damn it, this is really frustrating. I just don’t have the energy to put any of my plans into fruition. Visiting Edinburgh may well have been a mistake! Now that I’m back home I feel completely unsettled……I want to travel and meet new people now! Argh. I’m just going to have to wait until June.

I’m trying to keep the whole Internet Business plan together by completing a task each day which will put me a step closer to where I want to be. And God knows where that is. Hopefully this will all shift soon. I need to seriously clarify my plans. Re-evaulate exactly what I want out of this and why. I just never know where to start. Isn’t there some snazzy Web 2.0 site that could take care of this.

I feel really pissed off with myself about the laptop too. I’ve wasted so much money recently, it’s an absolute disgrace. I just don’t really treasure possessions that much. I’m a careless little shit. Welcome to Negativity Central – Population One. Part of the problem is that my laptop is perfectly set up for web development whereas my Ubuntu box isn’t. I’ve tried messing around with Bluefish but I just can’t get used to it’s interface. It feels wrong or something. I’m going to persist with it though at least until the laptop is repaired. I’m going to take it to a company who specialises in laptop repair locally. They’ll probably rip me off but at least it beats me making a botched job of it.

I want out of this country for a while. That’s partly why I’m doing this, isn’t it? God knows. I need my own place too. Right enough of the mindless self pitying…….

This is appalling! My connection is cutting out every other minute. It takes about 5 requests to get a page to load up. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. A bit of background, I first subscribed to 512k DSL in 2002 with BT. Everything was fine. The service rarely ever cut out and I could download at full capacity almost all of the time. A few years ago BT upgraded my service for free to 2MB and everything still worked swimmingly.

Fast forward to summer this year, we decided for some strange reason to try out Talk Talk Broadband. The offer was highly tempting – free broadband for life. What could possibly go wrong? Well, where can I start? Ever since we’ve been connected to the service the download rates and line reliability have been appalling. The week after our line was activated we weren’t downloading over 8kb/s. Now I’m barely scratching 4kb/s. Would you believe that a 56k dial up connection could outpace a 2mb broadband line? I’m trying not to believe it. I keep telling myself it’s just a bad nightmare.

Anyway we can’t move provider because there is 15 months left to run of the 18 month contract. I don’t know if I can put up with this crap much longer. It’s truly despicable. I would gladly pay an extra £10 a month for them to provide a worthwhile service because at the moment it’s barely usable.

If you hear a volley of gunshots in the distance you’ll know I’ve shot up my computer out of pure frustration