I’ve not long finished reading Shadowmagic by John Lenahan – it was free on the iTunes Store at some point in the past but I can’t remember whether it was a Starbucks promo or if it was just the free book of the week.
It’s got magic and plenty of humour and I don’t care if it’s for young adults – it’s still a good read. You can get the paperback from Amazon or an ebook from iTunes.
A couple of friends mentioned they were having a look at http://www.digitalocean.com/ as a VPS provider so I thought I’d take a quick look myself.
The signup process is painless, just an email address and a password required and you’re into a control panel that is relatively uncluttered. Just a few important options down the left side and as you click each one, the top right has a large button with what appears to be the most commonly selected option. For example, click “Billing” reveals “Manage Payments”, “Droplets” (their name for a VPS) results in a “Create” button and “Support” gives “New Ticket”.
There is plenty of space around the various options so no danger of accidentally clicking the wrong button and most of the icons have a tooltip pop up to say what they are (although it’s generally fairly obvious anyway).
There’s a well documented API available – just a couple of clicks to create an API key and you can do anything from create a new droplet to add a domain to their DNS. All the API functionality can be accessed from simple HTTP GET requests and results are JSON formatted so you could easily write a Javascript page to perform sequences of the common actions.
Support tickets get a fast response and there’s an active IRC channel (#digitalocean on Freenode) with plenty of helpful people and even some DigitalOcean staff.
Creation of a droplet takes just a couple of minutes. It says less than 55 seconds, but it took just over 2 minutes for mine – I guess there’s a certain amount of dependency on the load of the host servers. If you upload an SSH public key, it can be pre-installed on the server.
The billing is hourly and you can put some credit on your account with PayPal or add a credit card and then just create/destroy droplets as required. The control panel has a clear amount that the current month has cost you and it’s possible to create a snapshot, destroy the droplet and not incur any more costs until you restore the snapshot to a new droplet (this is apparently changing and snapshots will cost a small amount per month).
A couple of things I’ve noticed so far that aren’t so good:
They have datacentres in three locations: NYC (North Bergen, NJ), San Francisco, and Amsterdam, but only San Francisco is available for new droplets at present due to capacity issues in NYC and Amsterdam. This is supposed to be resolved soon and it’s possible to move droplets between locations by creating a snapshot and then recreating a droplet at the new location from the snapshot. I would imagine there will be limitations such as IP address changes and some downtime whilst the snapshot is made.
I created a CentOS 6.4 droplet and upgraded all the packages – when it rebooted, the kernel was still using an older one and not the one that just got installed. It turns out that you can’t boot a custom kernel, although there is a selection to choose from within the control panel (just not the most recent CentOS kernel).
Overall though, quite a nice system and not a bad price either!
After two years of not posting anything and letting my blog stagnate, I figured it was about time I started posting again. The first job was to update all the software and it seems Moveable Type (MT) has moved on considerably from the really old version that I was running. Since I last posted I’ve used WordPress for other things a few times and it seemed like a good idea to convert my blog over to it. The fact that WordPress 3 was recently released also meant it was a good opportunity to try it out and see what had changed.
Continue reading
I’ve just finished reading “Not dead enough” by Peter James. It’s a crime thriller set in Brighton and Hove in the UK, and has plenty of twists although a few of the events were obviously going to happen. It was a very good read though.
Although I use Safari for much of my browsing, I still use Firefox for a number of things. I find that playing Shartak with anything other than Firefox is painful because the Greasemonkey scripts for Shartak make it so much easier to find out where my character is. I also use Firefox whenever I need to dig into some HTML/CSS problems – the Web Developer add-on makes it easy to find out which styles are being applied to an element.
Here is a list of some of the Firefox add-ons that I’ve come across and would recommend.
We just got back from the MacLive Expo in London – it seemed smaller than last year although I could be mistaken. Here are some pictures of various parts of the expo.
It’s nearly that time of year again – Talk Like A Pirate Day is this Wednesday, September 19th.
To learn more, please use one of these links:
International site
UK site
Just recently our fridge water filter needed replacing and because the recommended supplier (some place in Birmingham) was out of stock I decided to look around. After a bit of searching, I found this site –American Fridge Filters.
They were about 20 pounds cheaper than the place in Birmingham, replied to my enquiry quickly, had the filter in stock and shipped it promptly. All in all, excellent customer service and I’ll be using them in 6-9 months when the filter light comes on again.
I’ve been reading Dragon by Clive Cussler – it’s a good book. Plenty of action and despite not having read any other “Dirk Pitt novels” (he’s one of the lead characters) it didn’t seem to matter at all and I was able to still get into the story.
Before you start complaining, I didn’t go crazy and add a dodgy midi track to the Shartak website. I stumbled across a forum thread this evening and apparently Shartak players are forming their own record label.
Once finished, the Heads Down tracks will be available at a MySpace account – http://www.myspace.com/headsdownriot
*EDIT* URI of MySpace account changed – 3rd March 2007.