Over the 4th of July weekend I finally broke down and decided to migrate off of my own mail server and over to Google Apps.  Between the space, SPAM filtering, Android syncing, reliability, and cost, I couldn’t justify running my own mail services anymore.  It has been a great run for the last 10 years or so, but I doubt I’ll miss it.  That being said, here is a bit of a sysadmin journal of the migration, in case this ends up helping anyone, or more importantly myself, in the future.

On Saturday I went on a treasure hunt for a UPnP / DLNA server that would work with Deena’s iPhone, the XBox 360, and my Nokia N900.  I wanted to be able to get our large music collection to every device in the house without any fuss, and I figured out how to do that with FUPPES.  Here is a copy and paste style install guide for getting everything setup and running using Ubuntu Linux as the media server (FUPPES supports other operating systems as well).

Welcome to the new site.  I hope you like it.  It is now a bit more robust in talking about my work life and I have basically turned it into a long form of my résumé.  I had a very difficult time writing the new content, but the design was an absolute blast.  Hopefully, it will entertain you enough that you won't have noticed my lack of recent blog updates on the old site.

The reason for the redesign was a desire to get off of my old CMS (Drupal), and move onto a Django based site.  It was also a fun opportunity to push some of my front end design and development capabilities like using animation and AJAX based deep linking to create a smoother and faster Web viewing experience.

Today I released version 2.2.0 of Formunculous.  Check out the release notes or download it by going to the Formunculous Website.  This release was primarily bug fixes and interface improvements.

I just finished the launch for DeenasDomain.com.  This is the site of my wonderful girlfriend Deena.  It was a lot of fun to design since she gave me quite a lot leeway in how it looked.  Be sure to check it out.

So recently I have run into some fun to do with the apache Web server, and I thought it was worth sharing.  Well I didn't really, but my buddy Jeff did.  Just about every time there is a holiday over the weekend at my work, at some point the Web server would run out of memory so badly it would crash.  It would crash so hard in fact, that it had to be hard power cycled.  I have tried just about everything short of sacrificing a chicken to try and figure this out.  Everything from cron jobs to bad PHP scripts (not mine of course ), but never really figured out the root cause.  Of course that was until MLK Jr. Weekend.

I just finished designing and rolling out a Website for my brother in-law Alan.  I didn't really need to do it, nor was I asked too, but as I am currently working on my design skills and thought it would be a good Christmas present.  He gets a site, and I get to play around with design and try out using a new CMS.

I have been waiting years for something like mod_gnutls to show up.  Finally I can use named hosts with SSL/TLS.  I just setup a new VPS and needed to setup three sites with SSL.  The problem is that I only have two IP addresses and an additional one would cost $1.50/month.  I was going to be happy with paying that extra money to have secured Web communication for authentication purposes, but I'm a cheap skate.

I have been quite feverishly moving alot of my Internet services to new server.  As I have been going through these, I thought it would be a good time to make a change to the site's theme.  I decided to roll my own, and go with a dark background type thing.  I am still working on it, but I figure it is good enough for now.  I doubt the dark will last very long, as while I love the idea of a dark background with light text, it almost never ends up looking good.

Well, welcome folks. This has got to be like the 2,318,266th Web page I have put together for my hubris. These "personal" pages/blogs never end up working and I always get sick of them and give up. Well this time it's for real--yeah right. I'm hoping that if I focus on security/network/computer postings and don't fly to far afield with random stories that I may actually stick with it and post pretty regularly. Just thought I would make my actual first post and get this thing out onto the inter nets and try to spread some truthiness, peace, and love. Hasta