iDude.org

Gotta love FoxNews!

I love this Internet streaming that FoxNews is doing during the DNC and can’t wait for the RNC version of it.

Keep it up Fox! (And Shep, your commentary is priceless!)

http://www.foxnews.com/video2/live.html

I have, for years, been developing web apps and so on using ASP (Classic) on IIS.  It’s a “fine” platform, but I have, over time, become weary of the Microsoft bloat that accompanies running a Windows Server… Especially in a colo/dedicated/VPS environment.

Over the last few months, since my major GoDaddy Windows Dedicated servers got hit by a worm or something, I’ve seriously started learning PHP with MySQL.  I used MySQL quite a bit with ASP and am quite familiar with it, but PHP experience was rather limited.  In the last few weeks, I’ve written a few things and ported a customer’s website over from an ASP CMS I wrote to PHP (still need to finish the CMS in PHP).  The site runs so much faster and I am now able to host it on my new Slice VPS that I setup earlier this month.  In 15 minutes or so, I can have an entire new Slice setup with Apache or Lighttpd and PHP/MySQL and, with a little tweaking and securing, have a server up and serving sites.   Can’t do that with Windows that quickly.

Slice is still running strong and I’m going to do my best to get ALL my ASP sites “ported” over to PHP over the next few months.  I’ve been using ASP/PHP cross reference sites like Design 215 and a few others and have been able to do things very quickly.  The database part was the only part I really needed to find good samples  for, but they aren’t even too hard once you use them a few times.

SliceHost has inspired me to really learn Linux and abandon the Microsoft OS, but there is still one caveat to Linux that I am very disappointed with.  There is not a single (that I’ve found), reasonably priced, multi-domain, domain level administratable email server with a nice webmail interface for users and administrative functions.

I know there are a ton of “pieces” that I can put together to get something like that, like Postfix, EXIM4, Dovecat, etc., but I just simply don’t have the time to wade through the massive pile of config files to get all those pieces working together in a nice secure and highly reliable fashion.

So, I am going to continue moving all my websites over to Linux/Apache/Lighttpd/PHP/MySQL and keep a small (30gb, 768mb RAM) Windows Virtual Dedicated server running with SmarterMail 5.x mail server on it. SmarterMail is probably one of the BEST email servers for a web hosting environment.  It is a snap to setup, backup and move to a new server if needed (Trust me, I know!). I already own an Enterprise license and am just waiting for one last very important domain to move off a temporary dedicated server before I move it to a new Windows VPS to serve the remainder of my customer’s email needs.  SliceHost isn’t a fully “managed” solution, but with the Slice Backup capability, you can have daily and weekly images made and restore to them quickly at anytime in case anything happens…

Mosso is good and is finally rectifying the Compute Cycle issue I mentioned previously,  I may keep them if I can break even with the few sites I still host on there, but their servers aren’t nearly as responsive as a VPS or Dedicated server probably due to the massively clustered setup they run.  I don’t really need individual site scalability… If a site has high requirements, I’ll just stick them on a new slice and charge the customer accordingly.  Most of my sites that would need to scale are Wordpress Blogs and could easily handle being Digg’ed etc, by installing WP-Supercache.

Ultimately I plan on hosting all websites and blogs on Ubuntu 8.04 @ SliceHost and email on a Windows VPS @ GoDaddy (for now) until I find a Windows VPS provider as excellent as SliceHost is (hint hint to SliceHost)…

That’s all for now…

If anyone knows of any turn-key type mail servers that are free/inexpensive (< $500) for Linux please leave a comment.

Genetics works in weird ways… I take after my mom’s side the most physically, but hair wise, I’m on my dad’s side of the gene pool.

I used to have a full head of hair when I was younger…

But genetics started taking over and as the top of my head thinned, I started cutting my hair shorter to make it look less obvious…

Finally, I just got tired of trying to make it “look fuller” up top… So…

I shaved my head today for the first time in my life…  It took a few minutes to get the nerve up, but I finally told iDudette to take the buzzer and take it all off… Still planning on shaving it clean, but the above is about an hour after I buzzed it close.

I created my first HDR style shot last night using the method from this website … Basically, I just took 3 shots, 1 -2 EV, another @ 0 EV and a third at +2 EV. The software then takes the 3 shots, combines them and allows you to tweak the level of surreality to your liking… My basic 0 EV shot was crappy, but it still ended up coming out much better than I expected.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on HDR(I) :

In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows. HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term "HDR" is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. This composite technique is different from, and generally of lower quality than, the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

I am going to tinker around more with this method using Photoshop instead of the full PhotoMatrix software that the link above used. PhotoMatrix has a Photoshop plugin that is compatible with Photoshop CS2 according to their website. I run CS3 though, so I’ll have to find out if it’ll work with it.

There are some really cool sites out there with some amazing HDR photos.

Here are a few:
http://abduzeedo.com/superb-hdr-pics-grafitti http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/10/35-fantastic-hdr-pictures/ http://abduzeedo.com/20-beautiful-hdr-pictures?=main

Then a U.S. Contractor needs to HIRE this guy for a huge sum of money, perfect this suit and mass produce it! If he could build this on his OWN in his own home, imagine if he was working with others with more sophisticated equipment!

Troy Hurtubise is a modern day genius. This suit, called the Trojan Suit, could protect our troops in the war and greatly reduce casualties and it would be VERY intimidating to the enemy as well.

Original Article

Troy Hurtubise’s Trojan Suit

He’s lost his family and his truck, but not his will to see Canadian soldiers wearing his armored suit.

Troy Hurtubise, 43, is travelling from North Bay to his hometown in Hamilton this week to make preparations for a three-day tour of Ontario war memorials. He plans to gather signatures on a petition pressing Ottawa to test the effectiveness of the Trojan suit he created in his home lab.

Hurtubise became an Internet sensation last winter when he introduced the suit and put it up for auction on eBay, drawing media attention worldwide.

The Trojan takes design inspiration from movies and video games and puts it into light armour that Hurtubise says is bulletproof. The suit offers 95 per cent head and body coverage, and also features such extras as a helmet ventilation system, arm-mounted pepper-spray, magnetic sidearm holsters, and even a crotch-mounted, pull-down clock.

When the suit failed to draw any substantial eBay bids, Hurtubise ran out of money and his family was evicted from their home. Hurtubise said his 16-year marriage crumbled under the stress. He sold his pickup and gave his wife the proceeds to start up in a new home, and now it’s just him and the suit.

He’s planning to visit three war memorials daily between Saturday and Monday, arriving at the cenotaph in Hamilton’s Gore Park at 9 a.m. Saturday, and wrapping up at the National War Memorial in Ottawa at 3 p.m. Monday.

He plans to walk “a soldier’s mile” to each memorial wearing the Trojan suit, then stop and salute.

At each stop over the three-day tour, he’ll be gathering signatures on a petition he hopes to present at the Parliament buildings also on Monday.

Here is the blurb from it on Wikipedia…

In early 2007, Hurtubise made public his new protective suit which was designed to be worn by soldiers. Calling it the “Trojan”, Hurtubise describes it as the “first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.” Weighing in at 40 lbs, he claims that the suit can withstand bullets from high powered weapons (including an elephant gun). Hurtubise claims that he has been unable to test the suit against live ammunition because no one is willing to shoot him in it.

The suit has many features including a solar powered air system, recording device, compartments for emergency morphine and salt, and a knife and gun holster. He estimates that the cost of each suit to be roughly $2,000 if mass produced. It has been called the Halo suit, after the fictional MJOLNIR battle armor the Master Chief character wears in the Xbox game.

In early February, after failing to receive any offers to buy the Trojan, Hurtubise - now bankrupt from the expense of creating the suit - was forced to put the prototype up for auction on eBay in the hopes that it would bring in enough money to sustain his family. Unfortunately for Hurtubise, the auction’s reserve bid was not met. There was a raffle for the suit on the Mission Trojan website, who’s goal is to raise money for further prototypes and testing of the Trojan Suit to demonstrate its abilities for military applications. The suit was won by Sara Markis of West Palm Beach, Florida.

Besides this suit, Troy also has invented other things that in conjunction with this could advance modern day war fighting and law enforcement to the next level.

1313 Paste

One of Hurtubise’s latest projects has been the creation of a new paste that he’s called 1313 and believes could be put to good military use. It is a mixture of all his previous concoctions applied to a kevlar fiber pad and then subjected to high pressure for the period of a day in a press. The result is a board or tile-like panel. The panel is placed in layers with other materials such as tiles. The resulting composite material can withstand a direct assault by shotgun slugs, rifle fire, and enough high explosive to demolish a car, yet is quite inexpensive to manufacture.

At an enthusiastic demonstration taped by Daily Planet, Troy displayed its capability to a Canadian military observer. In one of Troy’s demonstrations, the composite material was placed in cushions meant to be placed over the outside of a Humvee. In the tests, the material successfully blocked explosive charges greater than those of a rocket propelled grenade, although they were not shaped charges, and was able to block shot after shot on exactly the same point of impact by a sniper rifle (which is a feat no material in use by the U.S. nor any other military has matched in public demonstrations).

It is Troy’s desire to see military vehicles, currently in service in Afghanistan, equipped with such protection in order to stand up to a landmine explosion, which has already claimed the lives of Canadian soldiers serving there. That, along with his younger brother serving in the Canadian military, inspired the creation of 1313.

On my endless search for cool software I came across a web server daemon called Abyss from a company called Aprelium. Personally, I had never heard of it or the company before and had my doubts it would be any good at all.

The website was nice looking though, so I didn’t immediately close my browser and decided to look around a little. The screenshots looked good, the specs looked good, they had a public forum which their developer was active in. To me that denotes that they aren’t afraid to have users openly talk about their products and answer questions about their software.

Well, I decided to go ahead and download it (the free Abyss X1) and give it a try. The file size was amazingly small, weighing in at only ~344k compressed.

The install was virtually brainless and the server was up and running. I followed the simple instructions in the support section of the Aprelium website and got PHP & ASP working. The quick setup of these two languages on a simple and easy to use web server solved a lot of my aggravation with other servers. IIS isn’t extremely easy to get PHP running stably. Apache can run ASP, but for the best experience, you have to use Sun ASP. IIS has an “OK” GUI for configuration and Apache is virtually all a bunch of CONF files and even though there are some GUIs out there for Apache, they aren’t “clean” and can clutter up your CONF files.

After getting these two scripting languages working on Abyss, all my websites I tried on it “just worked”… The web software I used was Wordpress to test PHP, of course using a MySQL database. I also tried ASP/MySQL & ASP/Microsoft SQL. These worked just as good as Apache & IIS respectively, except there was no aggravation getting it all setup. I think it took about 15 minutes to install.

Performance wise, everything is served virtually instantly. No noticable lag. Dynamic ASP & PHP sites are extremely fast. Static HTML (which I didn’t really test) would probably be even faster.

I liked Abyss X1 so much that I went ahead, after a day or so, and bought Abyss X2 (full version) with the 2 year upgrade protection for a total of ~79.99 + tax. I immediately received an email with a download link, my serial numbers and was off and running. Abyss X2 even upgraded from X1 without loss of configuration.

Abyss X2 adds a few additional features. I specifically upgraded so I would get Virtual Hosting capability.

I plan on initially moving all my Wordpress blogs over to Abyss from IIS6/PHP. If that all goes ok, I will start moving over some of my ASP websites. Perhaps converting some of them to PHP to hone my skills and make them more portable across multiple platforms.

Here are two of the sites I host that are now on Abyss X2.

* This website (iDude.org)
* The Angry Conservative(s)

To finish up, I plan on using Abyss X2 for all my web server needs as long as they keep up the good work and keep growing the capabilities of the daemon.  The only reason I may not use it is if I HAVE to use one of the others for web server specific features.

Here are a few of the primary features of Abyss (X1 & X2).

Low requirements for great performance

Abyss Web Server does not require huge memory or excessive computing power to run. That’s why it can be used without problems even on small or out-dated systems. It performs at least as well as the common web servers available on the market.

Easy configuration

An intuitive web management interface called the console makes the web server configuration as easy as browsing a web site. No need to edit configuration files, the console helps you setting the server parameters in an effortless manner and can be accessed from a local or a remote computer. It is available in many languages such as English, French, Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish.

Fault-tolerant and robust

Abyss Web Server is based on the APX architecture. APX, which stands for Anti-crash Protection eXtension, was created, here at Aprelium, to make the server crash-proof. If it happens that the software causes a critical error and crashes (which is by the way very improbable), a report will be generated if possible and the server is automatically restarted. The downtime in such a case won’t exceed 1 second!

Secure

Security is the #1 priority in Abyss Web Server. In addition to its advanced URL decoding engine which rejects malicious and suspicious requests, it features an efficient anti-hacking system which detects at an early stage hacking attempts or denial of service attacks and bans dynamically their originating IP addresses.
It is also equipped with an anti-leeching system to automatically prevent other web sites from directly linking to your images or files.

SSI support

Abyss Web Server supports the standard SSI directives to help you create dynamic HTML pages with the least effort and without requiring the use of a scripting language.

Unicode compliant

Abyss Web Server supports file names and URLs written in any human language.

Runs your ASP.NET applications

Abyss Web Server features a native support for ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. You can install your ASP.NET applications and ASPX files and start serving them immediately with no performance loss and no incompatibilities issues.

Abyss Web Server’s ASP.NET support is not limited in anyway and can execute small test scripts written in C# or VB.NET as well as large applications which use the advanced capabilities of ASP.NET such as custom web controls, database access, authentication, web services and XML processing.

Powers your Ruby on Rails applications

Abyss Web Server can run Web applications based on the Ruby on Rails framework. Their execution speed will be optimal thanks to the use of the FastCGI interface.

Installing Ruby on Rails has also been made easy on Abyss Web Server: clear instructions and full Ruby + Ruby on Rails packages are provided to make deployment of the framework quick and straightforward.

Hosts your PHP, Perl, and “Classic” ASP scripts

Abyss Web Server has been specially designed to make using scripts the simplest possible even on Windows platforms. Thanks to its CGI and ISAPI extensions interfaces, Abyss Web Server supports various scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, “Classic” ASP, Python, Ruby, Rebol, and TCL.

Languages which interpreters are FastCGI-compatible (such as PHP) will even experience a significant processing speed boost on Abyss Web Server while reducing in the same time your system load.

Whether you are going to test a simple script or install and run a complex database-driven web application, Abyss Web Server is the best choice in terms of ease of configuration and optimal performance.

Total control over the bandwidth

You can configure the total bandwidth that Abyss Web Server is allowed to use when answering the requests. You can also configure the bandwidth that is allowed for every visitor.

Finer bandwidth control is also available in Abyss Web Server X2 and can be used to configure the allowed bandwidth per file, per directory, or per group of files or directories.

Password protection

Password protecting files or directories has never been easier. You can define users and groups of users and create advanced access rules with a few clicks.

Custom directory listings

With Abyss Web Server, you have a total control over the layout and the look and feel of your directory listings. You can define a template using simple SSI directives or you can write in your preferred programming language your custom directory listing script.

Virtual hosting

Abyss Web Server can serve more than one web site from the same computer. This is often called virtual hosting or support for multiple hosts. Each defined host has its specific configuration and is completely independent from other hosts. Virtual hosting is only available in the professional edition Abyss Web Server X2.

URL Rewriting

Abyss Web Server includes a URL rewriting engine conforming to industry standards. It can help you hide the complex URLs of your Web applications and make them look more user friendly.

Although URL rewriting is usually considered as an advanced feature, it remains easily controllable in Abyss Web Server through the comprehensible user interface of the console.

Funny Link Mattbob sent me…

I ran across this guitar player recently on YouTube… I’m a fan of acoustic guitar playing and this guy really makes it unique. Here are a few of the videos I like.

This is a bit old… From Jan, but quite funny.

But for real… Here is a closeup of it with a CBS reporter.

I am blocked in China. I feel honored. Must be my conservative politics and pro-gun stance on things. I’m assuming their “national involuntary forced proxy” pre-scans websites before allowing Chinese surfers visit, scanning for keywords and so on.

I looked at my Google Analytics over the last 6 months and have only received a single Chinese visitor (probably the test server scanning me).

Must be pretty effective.