Moving from Shared Hosting to a Virtual Private Server

Until recently I have been hosting this blog, and a few other sites and proof of concepts, using a reseller account provided by 5quidhosting costing, well £5. Now before I continue I should say that I have been very happy with the service they have provided me over the past two years or so and have no hesitation in recommending them for standard hosting services. The server performance was good and on the few times I needed to contact support their response was prompt and efficient. So, why have I moved this blog? Well, it’s all about access, or more accurately the lack of it.

I am of course talking about SSH access which was not provided on the 5quidhosting servers due to previous hack attempts. This is fair enough, most users will have no need for this level of access – indeed neither did I for two years.

When is a backup not a backup ….. ?

The answer is of course, when you can’t restore from it. This is the situation I found myself in last weekend after receiving an email from a friend saying that he tried to post a comment but only received a blank page for his efforts. Sure enough, when I tried I got the same result. Logging into the WordPress admin panel I was greeted with a message saying that the Akismet anti-spam plugin had not been loaded due to an error. Sounds like the most likely suspect, so what do I need to do about it? Well there was not an update available so it can’t be that. However, I had recently upgraded to WordPress 3.1 so maybe that’s the culprit. So clicking on the Reinstall button might sort me out right …. that’s where the problems really started.

Android: Not Free as in Speech, but does it really matter?

So I was at work the other day and a tweet grabbed my attention. It said “Steve Jobs vindicated: Google Android is not Open” and linked to an article on The Register. After reading through the article I was reminded of my childhood when kids would say things like “yeah, well you eat snails!“. Steve Jobs vindicated!! Well I bet he’ll sleep better for all of that!

It’s not that I am an Apple basher, I have an iPod Nano after all, but how can a company with no Open Source culture to speak of start pointing the finger at another? It’s like being back in the playground!

Upgrading my HTC Hero to Android 2.2 (CyanogenMod-6)

When I bought my HTC Hero I was both impressed and disappointed. Yes it was the best phone I’d even owned but as it was running Android 1.5 it didn’t do some of the whizzy things that I’d read about; things like Turn-By-Turn Navigation, Speech to Text etc. When the official upgrade to Android 2.1 was released I was pleasently surprised to find that Google Navigation (along with Turn-By-Turn) was now available but again disappointed that Speech to Text was not. Indeed, contacting HTC they confirmed that it would not be available for the Hero. Nevermind I thought, I’ll survive – and until recently I have.

Accessing my Netgear Stora from Ubuntu

Like many tech-savy people these days I’ve been thinking about buying a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) for some time but being more into software than hardware I’ve never really understood enough about them to lay down my hard earned cash. Well recently my hand was forced by my external hard drive starting to act up and my girlfriends son filling his 70GB HDD with downloaded Flight Simulator extensions (and god knows what else!). After quizzing the infrastructure guy at work about his thoughts I ended up buying the Netgear Stora enclosure along with a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive (another drive to follow next month).