After spending an entire day migrating and configuring my blogs to my new VPS hosting account, the unthinkable happened. My laptop’s original hard drive crashed. Well, the Windows Vista installation on it anyways. I suspect it was a trojan or some other malware because in my attempt to fix things from Windows in Safe Mode, the malicious file “pc-off.bat” was found in the root directory of C:/

My attempts in removing the damn file were unsuccessful. Something else, another malware was re-creating the file right before the system restarts. So, I’ve decided to reformat the hard drive and start with a clean install of Windows Vista. The one thing that stopped me was that all my files stored in the drive weren’t sycnhed with the backups I have stored on an old IDE drive housed in an enclosure. And since I have no other means of accessing a SATA drive at home, a trip to the mall was scheduled yesterday to enlist the assistance of computer technicians in recovering my personal files and reformatting the drive.

Then the idea of getting a new and bigger capacity hard drive popped into mind. The one that crashed is nearly 3 yrs old and had been in regular use more than 18 hours every day. After visiting each computer store in SM Dasmarinas, I settled with a Seagate 320GB SATA drive from TCA for Php2,950. For another Php350 they installed the new hard drive in my laptop, that’s the price of losing the set of small screw drivers we had at home. Then they offered to install my licensed copy of Windows Vista but for a Php1,400 fee, I refused after saying ‘You want me to pay your technicians that much for a task I could easily do myself? Up yours!’ at the back of my mind. My next stop was at CD-R King where I bought an enclosure for the old Samsung 120GB SATA drive for Php250.

Vista + Ubuntu Linux in Dual-boot

The bigger hard drive was not only meant to provide more storage but to enable me to have my laptop running on dual-boot setup of Vista and Ubuntu Linux 10.04. I’ve always wanted to return to this setup because of Ubuntu’s appeal and the liberating experience I get whenever I use it. Ubuntu could also be used to recover my files on the Vista partition should it crash again. It may not be foolproof, but it gives me a better chance of recovering my data and to keep on working even if Vista has shot itself in the head.

My Ubuntu 10.04 desktop (Click to zoom)

I worked on Ubuntu first because I used it to download all the Vista drivers for my laptop along with the basic set of programs that will be installed like utilities, security and other apps that are good to start a fresh install of Vista with. It meant that the Vista partition didn’t need to go online ‘naked’ and exposing it to various threats from the internet just to download all those drivers and programs. It also gave me enough time to reacquaint my self with Ubuntu and its latest version Lucid Lynx which by far is impressive as my Compaq Presario c765TU and all of its components are working well with it. The audio, mic and headset jacks, the wireless adapter, even the hot keys are working. If only Photoshop CS4, Lightroom 2 and Microsoft Office could be installed on Ubuntu 10.04 natively, I’d dump Vista altogether.

I’m not going to skin Ubuntu to look like Mac OS X because I feel that it does Ubuntu a great disservice especially with how 10.04 has become more feature-rich, more compatible with a lot of hardware and besides, the current theme looks nice on its own. For now, I’ll be using Ubuntu whenever I would blog, blog-hop and just surf the internet. Video, audio and heavy image editing will done on Vista. More stories to come from this new dual-boot setup of mine, as I’ve already taken much of your time. Thanks for reading this far and hope to see you on the next post.

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You may have noticed that this blog has been down and acting a lot weirder for the past 5 hours or so. Reason is, I have just moved The Four-eyed Journal, along with two other blogs to my very first VPS web hosting account.

I signed up for ServInt’s Essential VPS for $49.00 USD a month. Thanks to a coupon code, I got a 50% off discount for three months of managed VPS hosting. This allowed me to throw in cPanel/WHM option as this is the control panel I am most familar of using when it comes to managing the back end of my web hosting accounts.

The basic features of the package I got are:

• 50 GB Storage UPGRADED
• 30 GB Storage
• 1 TB Monthly Transfer
• 768 MB Guaranteed (1.5 GB Burst RAM)
• Hardware RAID 10
• CentOS 5 Operating System
• 4 IP Addresses
• Unlimited Domains and User Accounts
• FREE cPanel, Plesk, or Parallels SBP
• FREE Virtuozzo Power Panel
• FREE Daily Off-Server Backups

Fantastic ServInt support

The migration started at around last midnight, but most of the hard work were done by ServInt’s awesome support team. They moved all three blogs that I wanted to host on the VPS account from the shared hosting accounts I currently use.

Jaypee and other ServInt customers were right, their customer support were available 24/7, very knowledgeable and felt like they were buddies of mine. Being a completely newbie to virtual private server hosting, they made the migration and transition an experience well worth the money.

I’m not saying it was easy, for I had a few problems with this blog in particular. After the ServInt support team completed the migration, it was just supposed to be a simple matter of pointing my .com.ph domain to my VPS’s custom name servers and wait for the DNS propagation to complete.

I screwed up WordPress

Lo and behold, the front page loaded fine but the permalinks were broken and some of the plugins had permission problems with the server. It was mainly my fault because the WordPress installed via Fantastico was version 3.0 while the database from old hosting account was exported out of WP 3.0.1 and I forgot to upgrade the default installation before restoring the database and plugins which broke the site.

I started from scratch, uninstalling and re-installing WordPress via Fantastico again but had another problem with the auto-upgrade feature. It turned out that I needed the suPHP module to be installed on the VPS for it to function seamlessly. Once more, ServInt’s fantastic support came to my rescue and configured everything.

The second start-from-scratch was the last for the upgrade to WP 3.0.1 was problem-free and the restoration of the theme files, plugins and database also went hitch-free.

So now, you’re reading this post from a VPS-powered blog. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the page loads have improved considerably. The next thing to do is to closely monitor the server resources usage to see where I can fine tune and optimize this VPS.

Why I moved

As most of my blogging friends know, I had been to a number of shared web hosting providers before. The strange thing is, or maybe it’s just a bit of bad luck, after an average of six months, I get frustrated because of frequent and lengthy downtimes. It would have been understandable if this blog were among the highly-trafficked sites on the net but no, this is just your average blog. So paying for cheap web hosting is no longer made sense if you get so many headaches and problems from it.

Now don’t get me wrong, WPWebHost is a respectable host. It’s just that their support sucks and last month’s frequent down times just pushed me to the edge.

A VPS hosting account would give me much more peace of mind and the capabilities to focus on growing my blogs instead of worrying about downtimes. I’m sure some of you are all too familiar with this story. So if ever you’ve decided to move to a VPS hosting, give ServInt a try. They offer pretty decent specs for a reasonable price. But their awesome 24/7 customer support is definitely worth every penny.

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If you can’t beat them, ‘sync’ or connect with them. Former king of social networking sites have practically surrendered to Facebook as it has announced a new feature, ‘Sync with Facebook‘

The terms of surrender, err the new feature has been described on a recent blog post:

Today, we’re introducing Sync with Facebook, which allows MySpace users, musicians, and celebrities around the world to sync their status updates with their Facebook profile or Page, while also offering them the ability to share content such as music, videos, links and photos with their friends on Facebook.

Sync with Facebook allows users to keep their friends on Facebook up to date on everything, including: sharing songs, latest photos, fun game apps, and more.

The opportunities to experience and share this type of entertainment content are endless. This is particularly exciting for artists who can now use this tool as a complement to their MySpace Music presence and share their vast library of content, including full album catalogs, to people who’ve liked their Facebook Page.

Or it could be described as more of a ‘tactical retreat’ rather than a complete surrender because MySpace has not yet folded up. Despite being yester-year’s number one social networking site, MySpace still has a dedicated user base mainly of musicians, indie artists, their fans and followers.

MySpace users can easily sync their accounts with their Facebook account in four easy steps:

1. Click on the settings box in the update module on your Home page
2. Check the box next to Facebook or Twitter (or both!)
3. Follow the steps prompted to sync your accounts
4. Done! Your updates will now automatically sync. Or, check or uncheck which networks to share with each time you updated

Besides, syncing with Facebook will also give MySpace a dab at the traffic the former gets every month. Now that MySpace has capitulated, Google’s prospects of breaking into the social networking scene with its upcoming Google Me service, it’s going to be an epic battle against Facebook.

On a personal note though, too late MySpace. I’ve just deleted my account a few days ago. So, will you sync your MySpace with your Facebook account?

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While testing this blog’s new page load times to see how using Amazon S3 + Cloudfront has improved it, I’ve noticed a significant lag was caused by the tracking script from 103bees.com.

It’s one of the most popular analytics sites/services a few years ago when the blog-o-sphere was still obsessed with SEO and making money of the ‘the long tail’ of search.

I signed up to keep track of this blog and the results were quite interesting, providing me information that formed the basis of some of the great posts in the Archives.

Some of the last funny queries on 103bees.com

So when the tracking script was causing some lag, I thought 103bees.com have made some updates so I decided to log in to my account.

Lo and behold, the homepage won’t load. Checking the site using downformeoreveryone.com, it says that the site is indeed down. A Google search gave the same results, each link to 103bees.com would lead to a dead end. They have closed shop.

A snapshot of their blog is available on Google cache, taken August 5, 2010 04:11:21 GMT. It shows that the last blog post was made last February of 2009!

Strange that 103bees.com closed down without even an announcement or being reported in the tech news. Then again, little was heard of from the site or the team behind it, they simply faded into the background and silently went under.

I had my share of those funny queries and it really left me scratching my head, not before leaving me almost laughing my head off. Ade also had a pretty amazing collection of this, I believe. So long 103bees.com, it was fun while it lasted.

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What used to be posters of Che Guevara, Gundam Wing and John Lennon on my bed room wall, now hangs a poster of numbers and some primary and secondary colors.

Julia enjoys looking at them, even cooing as if saying the numbers out loud

They are for Julia who is about to turn three months old this September. She has progressed so much this past few months, doubling her birth weight and growing by as much as three times her original size!

Most friends who get to see her, mistake her for a baby who’s already four months or older. She’s started to smile, laugh, coo and make noises more often than before. Julia especially enjoys being talked to by almost everyone in the house. She may not speak yet, but Julia responds with giggles, sighs, coos, laughter and the occasional screams. It’s as if she’s enjoying the conversation.

When no one else is around to talk or play with her, I carry her up close to the two posters on the wall. Her personal favorite I think is the Numbers poster because of the many bright colors and shapes that accompany each number. Just get her close to the poster and she’d belt out an excited giggle.

She quites down and pays attention as I use her tiny and cute hands to point and count each number 1 to 20. It’s perfect to stimulate her developing brain and growing curiosity. Hopefully too, this will imbue her with a more profound interest in Math which we her parents apparently lack.

The other poster shows the primary and some secondary colors with an accompanying picture. Being a girl, her favorite on this one is the pink dress. Just watching her giggle and reach out for the posters is positive sign that she is progressing quite well.

She has started to lift her head and chest up, getting annoyed in just lying down. Julia definitely wants to start exploring the world on her own. Well, in a few more months I guess. But I can’t wait to see her crawling around and eventually, take her very first steps.

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