Google released their new Chrome web browser shortly before the end of a video announcement about it at 11am PST.  I had the download page ready at the beginning of the video (http://www.google.com/chrome) and was only getting a “404 - not found” error.  At around 11:45a I hit refresh on it and there it was.  

The install was amazingly fast and simple.  Didn’t even require a file that needed downloaded to my HDD and run from there.  The install launched directly out of my Firefox and was done in less than 1 minute. 

It is very heavily based on Apple’s Safari Webkit engine.  Here is the HTTP_USER_AGENT from a test PHP page I made:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Overall, I’ve always sort of liked Safari, but always had issues with minor glitches and random lagginess.  I’ve not encountered any issues at all with Chrome so far.  Google has probably done massive internal testing to insure that there are no obvious glitches and/or bugs.  The GUI is very simple and seems fully functional and the memory usage is EXCELLENT compared to Firefox.  

I’ve had Firefox take up to 400-500mb RAM without much even going on.  Even just after starting Firefox is the Google homepage, it takes up 62mb RAM.  On my system, Chrome only consumed around 25mb.  

The only thing I’ve run into when it comes to rendering is my company’s Intranet.  It is only optimized for IE and Firefox and looks pretty bad with Chrome/Safari but is still usable.

All other sites I frequent are just fine, loading faster than ever.

UPDATE 5pm EST:

After running some memory tests, I opened up 4 tabs in Firefox, IE8, Chrome, Safari and Opera, which included logging into 2 of the sites and just displaying two others.

Tab 1: My company’s ticketing system
Tab 2: My personal GMail (Google Apps for Domains)
Tab 3: This blog’s admin section login page only
Tab 4: MSN Money Stock quotes with 6 stocks on it

Firefox 3.0.1: 124.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Firefox loaded everything pretty well, was a bit sluggish on GMail tab.

IE8 (version 8.0.6001.17184): 95.5mb RAM (2 threads)
IE8 loaded everything that it loaded pretty quick too, but completely failed to load GMail, getting stuck on the loading <Email adress> progress meter…  Rendering on the front page of my company’s site was screwed up, but was fine in all other browsers tested.

Chrome: 112.5mb RAM (6 threads)
Perfect loading of all tabs, very fast, no issues.

Safari 3.1.2 (Windows): 98mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, a bit sluggish, but not as bad as Firefox. 

Opera 9.52: 75.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, little slow on GMail, but it came up. All other sites where just as fast as Chrome.

In conclusion, I like the feel of Chrome the best.  Very simple and easy to use, I really like the multiple thread/tab paradigm.  Safari has that nice “Appley” interface I like.  Opera is Ok, but does have more rendering problems, on sites not tested above, than the others.  IE8… Bleh… no comment…  

And as for Firefox, and I thought I’d never say it, it falling behind on both memory usage and speed.  I’ve also encountered quite a few Firefox crashes when shutting down the browser.  This is happening occasionally on all my machines on all operating systems I use, Mac, Linux and Windows.

Later today Google is expected to release a new web browser based on Webkit (what Safari uses) and Firefox.   I feel that it will be a welcome addition to the browser wars.

I used Firefox, but have notice a lot more browser crashes with 3.x than previous versions and it feels quite laggy sometimes even on a Quad processor machine with 3gb RAM.  It gets to the point sometimes where I just load up Safari or Opera to surf sometimes.

IE just sucks.  I ONLY use IE for site testing during web development and for the “best” experience accessing my day job’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) for email.  Other than that, IE is not a part of my day to day browser use.

If this Google takes the best of Webkit and Firefox and makes it “better, faster, stronger”, then I will use it.  Of course I will be frank on my review of it and will do my best not to be biased since I use Google almost exclusive for my search needs, Email (Google Apps for Domains), Analytics for stats, etc.

I will post up a review once I get my hands on it and can put it through it’s paces.

I think Google will have more downloads of this browser in the first 24 hours than Firefox did on it’s 3.0 launch day if it posts up something on the front page of Google.  This could be huge.

Sarah Palin on Vogue Cover

I’ll have to be honest, I had only heard a little bit about Sarah Palin in the past.  I don’t keep up too much

with Alaskan politics, but after reading her bio, article about her, her family, record and Wikipedia entry, I connect with her 100% on the issues.

Superfically, any female politician that can look this good on the cover of Vogue and still have the brains, political conviction and garner an ~85% approval rating in her own state, has my vote.

More pictures at the bottom of the post

Here is her Wikipedia entry:

Early life

Palin was born Sarah Louise Heath in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Sarah (née Sheeran), a school secretary, and Charles R. Heath, a science teacher and track coach.  She has English, Irish, and German ancestry.  Her family moved to Alaska when she was an infant. The Heaths were avid outdoors enthusiasts; Sarah and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, and the family regularly ran 5 km and 10 km races.

Palin was the point guard and captain for the Wasilla High School Warriors, in Wasilla, Alaska, when they won the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982; she earned the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” because of her intense play. She played the championship game despite a stress fracture in her ankle, hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds.  Palin, who was also the head of the school Fellowship of Christian Athletes, would lead the team in prayer before games.

In 1984, after winning the Miss Wasilla contest earlier that year, Palin finished second in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant which won her a scholarship to help pay her way through college. In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and also won Miss Congeniality.

Palin holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Idaho where she also minored in politics. She married her high school sweetheart, Todd Palin, on August 29, 1988, and briefly worked as a sports reporter for local Anchorage television stations while also working as a commercial fisherman with her husband.

Pre-gubernatorial political experience

Palin served two terms on the Wasilla City Council from 1992 to 1996. In 1996, she challenged and defeated the incumbent mayor, criticizing wasteful spending and high taxes. The ex-mayor and sheriff tried to organize a recall campaign, but failed. Palin kept her campaign promises by reducing her own salary, as well as reducing property taxes by 60%.  She ran for reelection against the former mayor in 1999, winning by an even larger margin. Palin was also elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors.

In 2002, Palin made an unsuccessful bid for Lieutenant Governor, coming in second to Loren Leman in a four-way race. After Frank Murkowski resigned from his long-held U.S. Senate seat in mid-term to become governor, Palin interviewed to be his possible successor. Instead, Murkowski appointed his daughter, then-Alaska State Representative Lisa Murkowski.

Governor Murkowski appointed Palin Ethics Commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where she served from 2003 to 2004 until resigning in protest over what she called the “lack of ethics” of fellow Alaskan Republican leaders, who ignored her whistleblowing complaints of legal violations and conflicts of interest.  After she resigned, she exposed the state Republican Party’s chairman, Randy Ruedrich, one of her fellow Oil & Gas commissioners, who was accused of doing work for the party on public time, and supplying a lobbyist with a sensitive e-mail. Palin filed formal complaints against both Ruedrich and former Alaska Attorney General Gregg Renkes, who both resigned; Ruedrich paid a record $12,000 fine.

Governorship

In 2006, Palin, running on a clean-government campaign, executed an upset victory over then-Gov. Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Despite the lack of support from party leaders and being outspent by her Democratic opponent, she went on to win the general election in November 2006, defeating former Governor Tony Knowles. Palin said in 2006 that education, public safety, and transportation would be three cornerstones of her administration.

When elected, Palin became the first woman to be Alaska’s governor, and the youngest governor in Alaskan history at 42 years of age upon taking office. Palin was also the first Alaskan governor born after Alaska achieved U.S. statehood. She was also the first Alaskan governor not to be inaugurated in Juneau, instead choosing to hold her inauguration ceremony in Fairbanks. She took office on December 4, 2006.

Highlights of Governor Palin’s tenure include a successful push for an ethics bill, and also shelving pork-barrel projects supported by fellow Republicans. After federal funding for the Gravina Island Bridge project that had become a nationwide symbol of wasteful earmark spending was lost, Palin decided against filling the over $200 million gap with state money. “Alaska needs to be self-sufficient, she says, instead of relying heavily on ‘federal dollars,’ as the state does today.”

She has challenged the state’s Republican leaders, helping to launch a campaign by Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell to unseat U.S. Congressman Don Young and publicly challenging Senator Ted Stevens to come clean about the federal investigation into his financial dealings.

In 2007, Palin had an approval rating often in the 90s.  A poll published by Hays Research on July 28, 2008 showed Palin’s approval rating at 80%.

Energy policies

Palin’s tenure is noted for her independence from big oil companies, while still promoting resource development. Palin has announced plans to create a new sub-cabinet group of advisors, to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions within Alaska.

Shortly after taking office, Palin rescinded thirty-five appointments made by Murkowski in the last hours of his administration, including the appointment by Murkowski of his former chief of staff Jim Clark to the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority.^[19][20] Clark later pled guilty to conspiring with a defunct oil-field-services company to channel money into Frank Murkowski’s re-election campaign.

In March 2007, Palin presented the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) as the new legal vehicle for building a natural gas pipeline from the state’s North Slope. Only one legislator, Representative Ralph Samuels, voted against the measure, and in June Palin signed it into law. On January 5, 2008, Palin announced that a Canadian company, TransCanada Corp., was the sole AGIA-compliant applicant. In August, 2008 Palin signed a bill into law giving the state of Alaska authority to award TransCanada Pipelines a license to build and operate the $26-billion-dollar pipeline to ship natural gas from the North Slope to the Lower 48, through Canada.

In response to high oil and gas prices, and in response to the resulting state government budget surplus, Palin proposed giving Alaskans $100-a-month energy debit cards. She also proposed providing grants to electrical utilities so that they would reduce customers’ rates.  She subsequently dropped the debit card proposal, and in its place she proposed to send Alaskans $1,200 directly and eliminate the gas tax.

Social issues

Palin is strongly opposed to abortion and supports capital punishment. While running for Governor of Alaska, Palin supported the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in schools, however, she noted she would not use “religion as a litmus test, or anybody’s personal opinion on evolution or creationism” as criteria for selection to the school board.

She opposes same-sex marriage, but she has stated that she has gay friends and is receptive to gay and lesbian concerns about discrimination. While the previous administration did not implement same-sex benefits, Palin complied with an Alaskan state Supreme Court order and signed them into law. She disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling and supported a democratic advisory vote from the public on whether there should be a constitutional amendment on the matter. Alaska was one of the first U.S. states to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, in 1998, along with Hawaii. Palin has stated that she supported the 1998 constitutional amendment.

Palin’s first veto was used to block legislation that would have barred the state from granting benefits to the partners of gay state employees. In effect, her veto granted State of Alaska benefits to same-sex couples. The veto occurred after Palin consulted with Alaska’s attorney general on the constitutionality of the legislation

Matanuska Maid Dairy closure

When the Alaska Creamery Board recommended closing Matanuska Maid Dairy, an unprofitable state-owned business, Palin objected, citing concern for the impact on dairy farmers and the fact that the dairy had just received $600,000 in state money. When Palin learned that only the Board of Agriculture and Conservation could appoint Creamery Board members, she simply replaced the entire membership of the Board of Agriculture and Conservation. The new board, led by businesswoman Kristan Cole, reversed the decision to close the dairy.  The new board approved milk price increases offered by the dairy in an attempt to control fiscal losses, even though milk from Washington was already offered in Alaskan stores at lower prices. In the end, the dairy was forced to close, and the state tried to sell the assets to pay off its debts but received no bids.

Budget

In the first days of her administration, Palin followed through on a campaign promise to sell the Westwind II jet purchased (on a state government credit account) by the Murkowski administration. The state placed the jet for sale on eBay three times. In August 2007, the jet was sold for $2.1 million.

Shortly after becoming governor, Palin canceled a contract for the construction on an 11-mile (18-kilometer) gravel road outside of Juneau to a mine. This reversed a decision made in the closing days of the Murkowski Administration.

In June 2007, Palin signed into law a $6.6 billion operating budget—the largest in Alaska’s history. At the same time, she used her veto power to make the second-largest cuts of the construction budget in state history. The $237 million in cuts represented over 300 local projects, and reduced the construction budget to nearly $1.6 billion.

Commissioner dismissal controversy

On July 11, 2008, Governor Palin dismissed Walter Monegan as Commissioner of Public Safety and instead offered him a position as executive director of the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, which he subsequently turned down.  Monegan alleged shortly after his dismissal that it may have been partly due to his reluctance to fire an Alaska State Trooper, Mike Wooten, who had been involved in a divorce and child custody battle with Palin’s sister, Molly McCann. In 2006, before Palin was governor, Wooten was briefly suspended for ten days for threatening to kill McCann’s (and Palin’s) father, tasering his 11-year-old stepson (at the stepson’s request), and violating game laws. After a union protest, the suspension was reduced to five days.

Governor Palin asserts that her dismissal of Monegan was unrelated to the fact that he had not fired Wooten, and asserts that Monegan was instead dismissed for not adequately filling state trooper vacancies, and because he “did not turn out to be a team player on budgeting issues.” Palin acknowledges that a member of her administration, Frank Bailey, did contact the Department of Public Safety regarding Wooten, but both Palin and Bailey say that happened without her knowledge and was unrelated to her dismissal of Monegan. Bailey was put on leave for two months for acting outside the scope of his authority as the Director of Boards and Commissions. Commissioner Monegan received no severance pay, though at the same time another dismissed Commissioner, Charles Kopp (who served only 11 days) received $10,000, implying some animus on Palin’s part toward Monegan.

In response to Palin’s statement that she had nothing to hide, in August 2008 the Alaska Legislature hired Steve Branchflower to investigate Palin and her staff for possible abuse of power surrounding the dismissal, though lawmakers acknowledge that “Monegan and other commissioners serve at will, meaning they can be fired by Palin at any time.” The investigation is being overseen by Democratic State Senator Hollis French, who says that the Palin administration has been cooperating and thus subpoenas are unnecessary. The Palin administration itself was the first to release an audiotape of Bailey making inquiries about the status of the Wooten investigation.

2008 Vice-presidential candidacy

On August 29, 2008, Palin was announced as presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate, or running mate. Palin’s selection surprised many Republican officials who had speculated about other candidates such as Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, United States Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), and former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge.

Palin is considered to have similar policy positions to John McCain in most respects. One major exception is drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which Palin strongly supports and McCain has opposed. Palin is expected to try to convince McCain to change his position on ANWR drilling.

Palin is the second U.S. woman to run on a major party ticket, after Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, under former vice-president Walter Mondale in 1984.

Personal life

Palin’s husband is a commercial fisherman. Outside the fishing season, Todd works for BP energy corporation at an oil field on Alaska’s North Slope and is a champion snowmobiler, winning the 2000-mile “Iron Dog” race four times. The two eloped shortly after Palin graduated from college; when they learned they needed witnesses for the civil ceremony, they recruited two residents from the old-age home down the street. The Palin family lives in Wasilla, about 40 miles (64 km) north of Anchorage.

On September 11, 2007, the Palins’ then eighteen-year-old son Track, eldest of five, joined the Army. He now serves in an infantry brigade and will be deployed to Iraq in September 2008. She also has three daughters: Bristol, Willow and Piper.

On April 18, 2008, Palin gave birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who has Down syndrome. She returned to the office three days after giving birth. Palin refused to let the results of prenatal genetic testing change her decision to have the baby. “I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection,” Palin said. “Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

Details of Palin’s personal life have contributed to her political image. She hunts, eats moose hamburger, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles, and owns a float plane. Palin holds a lifetime membership with the National Rifle Association. She admits that she used marijuana when it was legal in Alaska, but says that she did not like it. In December 2007, Palin posed for a photo spread in the fashion magazine Vogue.

Mystery Science DNC 2008

Mystery Science DNC 2008

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

We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple over what the plaintiff is referring to as the “Defective iPhone 3G,” which she hopes will become a class-action complaint. Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith filed the complaint yesterday against the iPhone maker, alleging that the new iPhone’s 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, despite the claims made by Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign. Considering that a true fix has yet to be issued for users’ 3G problems, this could just be the tip of the iPhone lawsuit iceberg. More >>

But now, this woman wants to file a class action lawsuit against Apple due to 3G not living up to her expectations.  Even though the Infineon 3G chipset may be a bit flawed, it’s still not completely Apple’s fault.  AT&T is the provider and that can cause the dropcalls, coverage (or lack of) issues and so on.

I live in Kentucky and don’t even have 3G where I live, so I cannot really vouche for the quality, but I did get a chance to travel to Lexington KY this past week and had NO problems whatsoever… Actually my 3G was much faster on my phone that one of my friend’s tethered BlackBerry.  I brought up pages much faster on my phone than he did on his laptop.

Some people just don’t have anything better to do… Just ask for a refund and get a different phone… geesh.

The reasons I didn’t like it was that the control panel was clunky and it was hard to find addons and stuff you wanted to install, such as an additional sub-domain.

After going to the site and choosing cancel, it stated I had to call an 800 number to cancel only during business hours (9-5). This was a little hard and I had to use up part of my lunch break at work. The number didn’t even ring through to a person, it just gave me a recorded message and hung up. I tried again, same thing.

I called the main customer support line and waited for 15 minutes to get through to a customer service rep, once connected, they said they’d forward me to cancellations, 5 more minutes and the line disconnected. I went ahead and put in a ticket and after a little while got back a cancellation notice.

I checked my credit card just to see how much I was originally billed (95.40) and figured I’d ask how long it would take to credit back to me.

Thank you for contacting Globat.com.

Please be advised that your refund has already been scheduled on the second half of November.

The 2nd half of November!? WTF!

They decide that they are going to hold my refund for 3 months! I searched through the cancellation policy and Terms of Service and found nothing saying that they would hold my money for 3 MONTHS!

I’m getting frustrated, so I called customer service and ask to be connected to a billing representative. No go… The rep, whom could barely understand through his THICK Indian accent, either couldn’t or refused to put me through. He kept asking for specific information, but never told me exactly what he wanted… I hung up.

I tried again… Got another Indian, with not as bad of an accent, and he told me that billing doesn’t have direct lines. Great… So I get into chat, and they said they’d forward my “expedited refund request” onto the billing managers…

That’s where I am as of now.

I will NEVER, EVER use Globat again, Their support sucks and they LOVE your money, so much so that they shack up with it for 3 MONTHS after you cancel your service.

Unacceptable!

Other links to complaints:

1. http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/213/RipOff0213086.htm
2. http://www.planetfeedback.com/globat+llc/billing/payment/credit+card+fraud–multiple+cases/attempts/299623
3. http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/2008/02/11/from-globat-with-love-automatic-upgrade/

Well, so far with Slicehost, I’m now up to 3 Slices.  The 512mb one for the websites, a 256mb for development which will turn into another webserver once the 512 is “full”, and now a new 256mb one as a mail server.  I found a good tutorial on how to setup Postfix, Courier, MySQL & Squirrelmail with Spam Assassin and ClamAV in a multi-domain virtualized setup. (LINK)

This took a few hours to get working as intended, there were a few minor details missing, but I was able to track them down and get it working.  Most of it was just copying and pasting commands and changing a few details to my configuration.

The only part I really changed during this installation is NOT to use Spam Assassin and ClamAV, at least for the near term.  Both of these programs take up large amounts of RAM even with the base setup.  With the 256mb Slice, it was going into the swap memory as soon as I booted up and accessed anything.  Without these programs and with a bit of Apache tweaking, I got the memory down to around 116mb while idle.

Also, instead of SquirrelMail, which is “ugly” compared to modern web interfaces, I chose Roundcube, which has really gotten better over the last year.  It is still simplistic, but is very nice and functional.  With my setup, any email user just logs into the Roundcube interface with their email address and password.

Since all the usernames/passwords for this mail server are stored in the database, I was able to quickly write up a little PHP web interface to add/remove/modify email accounts and domains.  Once it is more stable to functional, I will release it here on this blog for others who have a similar setup.

As a test, I’ve been forwarding all my email on my primary account to a test account on this new server and every email has been received properly.  No problems whatsoever.

I plan on moving a few of my friends and family onto this to see how it works for them, if good, then all my customers will be migrated.

Finally, I got to the desk and the girl went back and got it for me and started chatting up a storm about it… I told her I already had the 2G and already knew everything about it, if I don’t, I’ll read the manual.  I also voiced my disappointment with having to pay $10 more for 3G in an area that doesn’t even have 3G service.  Isn’t that “illegal” to charge more for a service that isn’t even offered?   They tried saying, and it must be the official AT&T stance, that the higher price was to be “more competitive with the other data plans”, not because of the faster 3G speeds.  Competitive?  By raising the price higher towards the crackberry plan?  COME ON!  I’ll admit that I knew I would have to pay $10 more a month, so I didn’t make that big of a stink.

THEN, she asked if I wanted SMS messaging…  Prior to ordering, I didn’t realize they stripped out the 200 SMS messages that came with the 2G plan… This is getting silly.  Apple and AT&T are really letting this iPhone thing go to their heads. So I had to pay $5/mo for just 200 SMS messages.

So basically, due to the lack of my area’s 3G coverage, I am paying $15/mo more just to have the same level of service that I had on my 2G.  They better be investing on getting 3G in my area and loosen up on the SMS.  SMS is probably the most efficient use of the network and they charge the MOST for it!  COME ON!

I ended up calling and making a stink about the SMS and got 5 free months of SMS + 1000 extra rollover, which I’ll never use.

They activated it in the store and synced up my contacts with MobileME via WiFi before leaving.  Once I got home, this is where the waiting started…

Syncing with iTunes took about 60 minutes.

It had to:

1. Restore from yesterday’s backup of my 2G. (20 minutes)
2. Backup the new 3G config. (20 minutes)
3. Then it did some iTune maintenance (5 minutes)
4. Then proceeded to sync up my measly 3.5gb of music and apps. (15 minutes)

The backup thing runs like ALL the time now instead of being manual and although I appreciate the backups, I don’t feel like I need it EVERY time I add or change something.  Especially when it takes as long as it does.  The other day, after not syncing for a week or so, it took 30 minutes or so to just do the backup.

THEN, I couldn’t use any of the 3 cradles that I have for my phone due to the physical differences between 2G and 3G… A Dremel tool easily solved this, but again… This is a negative for Apple.  At least they didn’t decide to change the actual connection layout of the plug.

Overall, the audio is much better in the earpiece, the external speaker is louder… Some things seem a bit zippier and the keyboard seems a bit “tappier” and faster to type on.  Maybe it’s the more comfortable feel, I dunno.

I am going to do my best to get this “$15/mo more for nothing” thing remedied, but most likely, I’ll just have to eat it.

I’m actually what you could consider a recent Apple “fanboy” but I am starting to feel the euphoria I felt about Apple for the last few years starting to fade.  If they get any worse, they are going to lose me and my evangelism about Apple and surely, I am not alone in these feelings.

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.

Well, last night, my Western Digital MyBook 500gb drive went kablooey right in the middle of watching a movie off of it.  This drive was hooked to my Mac file storage machine and was idle most of the time, so I was curious as to why it would die all of a sudden.  I felt the drive and it was quite warm to the touch, and my office is quite warm to boot, so I am going to attribute this problem to heat. It was also on the bottom of the stack of 2 other WD MyBook 500gb drives.

Everytime I tried restarting the bad drive, it reported itself as a 1.6TB partition and was not able to be read.  I tried a few misc utilities on it, but none could read or recover anything.  This drive ONCE was a part of a three drive RAID-0 (stripped) and I think somehow it went back to thinking it was since the partition name was “disk3″. Weird…

I ran across one called Nucleus Kernel Macintosh for HFS & HFS+ (Mac) formats, and thought I’d give it a try.  It was able to immediately and quickly scan the drive and I could see all the files that were “lost”… I called up a buddy of mine who is a BIG mac guru and he happened to have a full copy of it, so he brought it over and it is recovering now.  (The demo version cannot recover much)

It should be finished sometime tomorrow and I’ll be sure to make duplicates in the future.  I should have learned my lesson by now.

I may end up getting a true RAID SAN/NAS device that has total failover in case of single drive failure.  There’s no feeling worse than thinking you lost years of work due to a stupid hard drive crapping out on you.