5tags

The following is a mirror from osocio.org

This banner from SOS Mata Atlântica seems to be a view from Google Earth unless you start zooming out.“We are sorry, but only 7% of the Atlantic Forest is left in Brazil.”SOS Mata Atlântica is the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest conservation foundation, Mata Atlântica is the name of the eastcoast of Brazil and is one of the world’s most critical regions as we speak about deforesting.The destroying of Atlantic Mata is responsible for the disappearing of almost all the fauna and the flora, contributes for the heating of the atmosphere, the lack of water in the cities and with the increase of the levels pollution.The banner was on the shortlist at the Cannes Lions 2007.

I am really loving my iPhone thus far and am also very happy to see the iPhone on some of the latest TV shows. Although they are on the right track in using the hottest consumer electronics as props, sometimes the actors may not know exactly how to use them.

As nearly all of you know the iPhone’s back has a black “band” at the bottom of the phone, near the microphone and external speaker. So obviously you would talk into this, thus having the black edge near you mouth apposed to your ear. There have been two recent mishaps in Hollywood.Bionic Women (video clip): Two and a Half Men: Come on Charlie Sheen, you should know better.  

I have been on the hunt for an iPhone for the past 3 weeks. Last week I decided to ask a friend that lives in the United States to buy and ship a brand new iPhone up here. The price would be $399 + 6% tax + shipping + gift for their service. A few hours after asking this I found a 4GB one on eBay that hadn’t been activated or used at all. I decided to buy it. The auction closed at $395 and shipping was $10. Excellent. I will be unlocking it the second I get it. Now I just need phone service. Rogers is the only GSM provider in my area. I just want unlimited texting and a few minutes of voice. This could get expensive!

A 13 year old girl from Beverly Hills, CA think that taking the hike to Malibu is like going to the wild. You must listen to this segment from Ryan Seacrest’s Morning Show regarding Kid Nation. “Omg, a blackberry, I have an iPhone.”

Click here to listen

Remember in 1997 when Microsoft poured $150 Million into Apple for $5.43 per share?Well just 10 short years later Apple’s share price is $122.06 which would makes Microsoft’s shares worth $18 billion. 

Apple shares were then selling at $5.43 a share. They closed Friday at $122.06. The potential gain on the shares: $18.1 billion.By comparison, if Microsoft spent the same money on its owns shares, then selling at $17.67 and closing at $28.25 Friday, the gain would have been (only) $89.8 million.-barnako.com

Everybody thinks differently in terms of tips. Tips were originally just little extras for superb service and now they are a must. Since I have never worked in a business were I was tipped, I think tipping is ridiculous. The employees get paid a per hour rate and that should be good enough. If they do something special then a tip could be given. I know some restaurants split the tip throughout the employee crew and if no tip is given, it comes out of the server’s salary. Now that is stupid! Here is a list of what is acceptable to tip, but by no means should you totally follow this.

RESTAURANTS/BARS

Waiter/waitress:	15% of bill (excl. tax) for adequate service; 20% for very good service; no less than 10% for poor service
Headwaiter/captain:	often gets a cut of table server’s tip; so tip your server extra to reward captain, or tip captain separately
Sommelier, or wine steward:	15% of cost of the bottle
Bartender:	15% to 20% of the tab, with a minimum of 50 cents per soft drink, $1 per alcoholic drink
Coatroom attendant:	$1 per coat
Parking valet or garage attendant:	$2 to bring your car to you
Washroom attendant:	50 cents to $1

DAILY LIFE

Taxi driver:	Varies depending on locality. Assume 15% will be enough; an extra $1 to $2 for help with bags.
Food delivery person:	10% of the bill (excl. tax), at least $1 for bills up to $10. Should tip 15%-20% for a difficult delivery.
Grocery loader:	Check with store policy if tips are accepted. If so, $1 for bringing bags to car; $1.50 to $3 if you have more than 3 bags.
Barber:	15% to 20%, minimum $1, for a haircut. For other services (shampoo, shave or manicure) tip $1 to $2 to service provider.
Hairdresser:	15% to 20%. (It is now acceptable to tip owner, unless he or she says otherwise.)
Shampoo person:	$2
Spa service (e.g., massage):	15% to 20%. If service is provided by owner, no tip.
Staff at coffee/food retailers with tip jars:	No tip required. It’s completely optional.
Handyman:	No tip
Gas attendant:	No tip

TRAVEL

Skycap at airport:	$1 per bag if you check-in curbside; $2 per bag if skycap takes bags to check-in counter.
Hotel doorman:	$1 per bag for help with luggage; $1 per person for hailing a cab
Hotel bellhop:	$1 per bag for bringing luggage to your room (but a $2 minimum if you have just one bag)
Hotel housekeeper:	$2 to $5* per night
Hotel concierge:	$5 for getting you tickets or reservations ($10-plus if they’re hard to get). No tip required when you ask for directions.
Cruise:	Varies. Ask cruise line about customary gratuities.

Don’t you hate when you need a tiny 1.5V button-cell battery for some small device but hate paying around $5 for the stupid thing? Well did you know that a 12 volt battery contains 8 of these 1.5V button-cell batteries? It’s true and here is a video to illustrate the hack. 

12 Volt Battery Hack! You’ll Be Surprised… - video powered by Metacafe

I bought the new Apple keyboard the day it came out to the online Apple Store which was August 7, 2007. I just got a knock on my door today from the Purolator man with a package for me! It was huge, but it was indeed my keyboard. The packaging was ridiculous, the keyboard box was in a box, which was in a box that was about 1500x larger than the keyboard box its self. Talk about a waste. Here are some photos of the stupid box along with the keyboard on my desk with my MacBook Pro. 
 

One month ago I said that I have moved back to Media Temple’s grid server. My previous experience with Media Temple as a company was great, but my experience with the grid server was horrible. The MySQL server was down during peak times, and the service as a whole just felt “new”. I moved back to Dreamhost for about 5 months watching (gs) grow month after month. Suddenly last month I realized that some of the projects were growing quite fast and that a move back to the grid server would be great. The grid seemed to be very stable and some of the new features like the MySQL container made it very compelling. So I picked up a coupon and paid $17 for one month of service.

The Movement of Data

Moving everything back to Media Temple was so easy. Last time I moved data to Media Temple was during the shared server (ss) days when they were using an extremely old version of MySQL, thus forcing me to convert all of my databases and downgrade to the older version. It just didn’t feel right. This move was super easy. For the data I simply compressed all of my domain directories on Dreamhost, threw it into a web accessable directory, downloaded it via SSH on Media Temple (using real 12MB/s download speeds!), and then distributed the data amongst the domains. As for databases I simply exported the databases as .sql and then imported it via SSH on (mt).

GPUs (Grid Performance Units)

Since right now my sites aren’t terribly large I knew that I would now go over the 1000 GPU limit. I was very curious as to how many GPUs my site would use. As I mentioned a few weeks ago I have optimized my site greatly. Some of these optimizations included removing plugins from Mint and Wordpress, making sure that lost files and pages were not being redirected to the 404 page, thus burning useless GPUs.

I usually get about 4000 to 8500 hits on Thursdays, which is by far my busiest day. Other than Thursday my traffic is generally a lot lower than that. These Thursdays use about 7 GPUs which is almost nothing. 1000/31 = ~32 allocated for a day. I still have a lot of room to spare. I began to do some tests so I added polls and a photo gallery. Surprisingly these did not add much to the GPU total. It really does take a lot to burn thru 1000 GPUs. Today, being Thursday I really wanted to use as many GPUs as possible to just see what would happen. In order to test I added an include to 10 javascript files that do not exist. Since I have wordpress, these would spawn the generation of a 404 page, which involved database queries. In the first full hour 20 GPUs were burned. In the main and busiest hour of the week, the GPUs still have not been calculated. My best guess would be that I used ~30 - 40 GPUs in that hour! We will have to see. So in all I probably used ~120 GPUs in the month. 12% of my GPUs is not a lot considering my major tests that made up about half of the usage.

So if you are wanting to start or move your blog to Media Temple’s grid server you should be fine. They offer a ton of resources for the low cost of $20 per month. There are tons of hosts that are cheaper except you just can’t beat the reliability of Media Temple along with their amazing customer support. What a great company.

Containers

Right now there are two grid containers available the Ruby on Rails container and the MySQL container. You get a free 64MB of RAM RoR container with every grid server account. If that isn’t enough then you can upgrade for a small monthly charge. If you outgrow the default MySQL SmartPool then you can purchase a container starting at $20 per month for $128 MB of RAM, but there are options up to 512MB of RAM. These are very powerful and not many blogs would ever need more than this.

Media Temple is also beta testing a Django container. Since I am getting into Django I am really hoping that I can get in on the beta testing. It would be very cool to get a Django site out the door and it would be even better to have it on the grid.

Bandwidth

I am really happy that they give you 1TB of bandwidth. It really goes a long way. For large images and standard assets on my sites I usually use Amazon’s S3. Aside from the fact that there is only one data center, the “bandwidth” is great. I didn’t even use 10GB this month.

When downloading files via SSH you are able to use the super fast connection available to the grid servers. I have only downloaded one file from SSH and it was downloading at 12 MB/s, thats 12 real MB per second. Thats a 100MB file in 8.33 seconds! My home connection is only a tiny fraction of that to say the least. I still want to test using the grid as a video server where there are tons of concurrent connections downloading large video files just to see how (gs) can handle it.

Disk Space

They give you 100GB of disk space on (gs). This isn’t your run of the mill, crappy disk space either. They use lightning fast SAS disks. With day to day usage you may not see a major difference but if you ever get Dugg then you will deeply appreciate it. I only used about 4GB since I host large files on Amazon S3.

Overall

I really love Media Temple now. Not only do they offer very high quality service but they are so reasonably priced. They have such innovative products and also seem to be updating the grid service product all of the time, thus taking advantage of the newest technologies.

If you have a large or small website or blog then I really suggest you look at Media Temple. They not only cater to the small guys but can also handle huge sites like Techcrunch. Why not try them out?

Introducing Dreamhost’s “Private Server” or PS for short. Dreamhost, my old web host, just launched a new and innovative product which combines the benefits of Amazon’s EC2 with the ease of use of shared hosting. Shared Hosting is what the majority of people use to host their blogs, sites, and small web apps. The problem is that these sites can grow very quickly and outgrow the shared hosting environment. This forces the creators of these websites into a predicament. They either have to pay big bucks to get a fully managed server or take a significant amount of time to learn how to properly run a server. Some opt for the fully managed route and get faced with huge bills which hinder the future of their website. Others choose to run their own server, that is located at a data center, but often run into problems with security. There has to be a better and easier way to scale your website beyond shared hosting.

What is “PS”?

Dreamhost PS is our new invite-only premium shared hosting service, available only as an add-on to a current DreamHost hosting plan. DreamHost PS uses Linux-VServer to give you your own “virtual machine”, thereby protecting your CPU and RAM from all other users on your physical machine.

Essentially you can simple drag a slider to scale your site up to an additional dedicated 2300 MB of RAM and 2.3 GHz of CPU. Dreamhost makes it very easy for you manage your website thru the same control panel that you have been using prior to this new add-on.

What Makes This Better?

Unlike other virtual dedicated servers where you have to pay for additional features such as backups and performance stats, Dreamhost continues to offer their amazing disk space and bandwidth along with full automatic backups and performance stats. If you are running a single dedicated virtual server at a competitor then you are forced to run not only Apache (if you use Apache as your web server) but also MySQL, and your email server on the same “box”. With PS you still continue to run your MySQL databases on other dedicated servers and you still get the load-balanced email.

Ideal Situation

PS is perfect for many situations but I can think of one right now that it would be excellent for.So you run a website to promote a yearly event. The event happens in August so your traffic spikes around August. When it comes to August you need the full 2300 MB RAM and 2.3 GHZ CPU, but in November you only need standard shared hosting since your traffic is relatively small. The old solution would be to build around the August traffic. You maybe would need to purchase 2 servers, pay for the hookup at the data center, and also pay for the bandwidth. Your total money spend would be very high and although you would get the full potential out of the servers during August, your setup will be fairly overkill for November.With PS you can simple adjust your server resources based on your projected traffic. When you approch your busy season you can boost the resources and when it comes time that traffic slows down, you can scale back to a cheaper solution. Rather than spending several thousands of dollars you would only spend hundreds.

• You get your own protected CPU and memory!
• You can still burst up to the full 2.3 GHz cpu and double the memory!
• It works just like your current shared service!
• We’ll never kill a persistent process / cronjob you run!
• You can name your own “server”!
• You get 2 unique IPs (a $9.90/month value)!
• You can change your memory and CPU on the fly… no reboot needed!
• You can reboot your own server from our panel instantly!
• You get historical memory / load graphs on our panel!

What’s Bad

• It’s currently invitation-only.
• It’s $1.50/month ($1.00/month forever if you pre-order now!) for each 10 MB and 10 MHz.
• There’s a $100 (waived for now!) one-time set up fee.
• You don’t get root access… remember, it works just like our regular hosting.
• (But hey, no root means no breaking things… and our hosting is already super flexible!)

I first have to say that this was just launched and I nor anybody that I know has used the service. The main problem is that their is no root access. I suppose that this is a major drawback except for the fact that if you read thru the Dreamhost Wiki you will see that the users have made work arounds to install almost anything. The fact that their is no root access I suppose just emphasizes that fact that this service is designed for users with little to no experience with servers, except the product is so strong that it is also ideal for people with some knowledge and experience. It is very early to weight in all of the cons but I would have to say that the concept looks very strong.

How Much Will I/You Need?

It is always hard to guess how much you will need but I suggest starting out with the lowest 150MHZ and 150 MB of RAM, unless you know for sure that you will need more. Once you run your site off of this for a day or two then you can see how much you actually need. If you are usually the majority of your resources then I suggest boosting it up. If you know of an event like a digg then you an always adjust on the fly in order to get the most out of the digg effect and not lose traffic due to a bad host.Dreamhost also listed some of their websites and how much resources they would need to run on PS:

• 150 MB / 150 Mhz: 99% of all predominantely static sites. (e.g. www.dreamhost.com)
• 300 MB / 300 Mhz: A top 100 blog. (e.g. blog.dreamhost.com)
• 515 MB / 515 Mhz: A busy forum. (e.g. discussion.dreamhost.com)
• 2300 MB / 2300 Mhz: A very popular web app. (e.g. panel.dreamhost.com)

Will I Use It

I will have to be honest and say that I will probably not use PS. I am currently using Media Temple’s grid server and I love it. Not only does it never go down but when I get sudden traffic spikes it handles the traffic very well. They give out 1000 GPUs which is about 32 per day. Currently, my highest day since I switched was around 7.5 GPUs in one day. I must say though that my site is heavily optimized, and I try to make it as simple as possible for the server to serve m site. I still have a lot of room to grow though.

COUPON CODE!!!

I have an exclusive coupon code for Dreamhost web hosting. Simple use the code “50OFFALLPLANS” to get $50 off any plan or use “5TAGS” to get $30 off. Since you have to have a Dreamhost account in order to use PS, I highly suggest using these codes to get a great deal.

Closing

I still have a Dreamhost account but I can’t see myself using PS in the near future. It is a great concept and I really hope people use it. If you have any comments please make them below.