We’re now 95% live with the new hosting arrangement. Everything is sat on a not-so-shiny IBM x330 which is a dual 1.3GHz P3, 1GB of ECC RAM, 400GB of mirrored storage, and FreeBSD 6. I’ve migrated across pretty much all of the e-mail setup, some people’s websites, and of course my own personal stuff - which includes me using lighttpd instead of Apache httpd within my jail, and it’s a hell of a lot faster. The bandwidth and dedicated server performance helps matters as well though :)

Moving forward I’ll probably set up a mailing list so that people hosted on this new box can be easily notified of any work / outages, and I’ve been threatening to resurrect the old freebsd.cx website as I know you can import old PHPNuke sites into WordPress…

Here’s a worthwhile read while you’re avoiding work this morning. It’s a thread started by Steve Albini on a gambling site’s message board - he’s known for being a pretty hardcore poker player - covering all aspects of his music ‘career’, including working with Nirvana, Pixies, The Jesus Lizard, and so on.

I have traveled in the music scene as a musician and recording engineer for better than 25 years. I have worked on a couple thousand records, some of them with famous rockstars, though most of them you’re probably never heard of. I know a lot about making records, recording technology, touring, being in a rock band and the like. I own Electrical Audio, a 2-studio recording complex in Chicago, Illinois, where I make records every day.

It’s classic Albini - there’s some extremely insightful posts buried in there covering everything from what it’s like engineering records for various bands to commentary on downloading and how the distribution of music is changing, and of course the usual caustic responses to stupid questions such as ‘vinyl or digital’:

Neither. I go straight for the vagina. You find them on women.

There’s even a few posts on poker playing.

Speaking of The Jesus Lizard, I’m half-deaf (and tired as fuck) this morning after seeing David Yow’s new band ‘Qui’ last night. I shot a few photos, I’ll upload tonight if I manage to stay awake long enough.

* Update - here’s a couple of my favourite pics from that show:

So the glue for most of the domains that I host (freebsd.cx and dischord.org mainly) has come unstuck (lolz) thanks to the IP addresses for both the primary and secondary authoritive nameservers for these domains being wrong. The IP for the primary changed on Sunday and while the secondary should have been be fine, the address that netdns.cx hold for ns2 is incorrect (don’t ask). Hence, no DNS.

I’ve got something working now - for dischord.org at least, freebsd.cx will be shagged for a while longer - so it should settle down a bit. I need to update the addresses for ns.freebsd.cx and ns2.freebsd.cx only netdns.cx have changed their website again, and my login details don’t work. It tries to mail a new password to my nick(at)freebsd.cx account but as there’s no DNS for that domain it’s something of a chicken and egg situation. Of course, netdns’s helpdesk service is shit and might take up to a week to respond :(

* UPDATE

I ended up calling netdns.cx (out in Christmas Island) at 3am on Thursday morning and asking if they could sort this out. They did, and so freebsd.cx now has authoritive nameservers again.

I’ll keep this short - ATP was fucking ace. Butlin’s was a real surprise (in a good way) and the lineup was unreal. I’m up for going to the next one but I’ll be amazed if the bands playing are half as decent…

Highlights were definitely seeing Shellac play twice (three days if you count me seeing them on Thursday in London), Trans Am’s set which was extraodinary thanks to Phil Manley’s skills in the absence of any working keyboards, and the drinking binge that kicked Friday night off and then destroyed most of Saturday for some.

We also experienced by far and away the worst kebabs ever, got poisoned by Burger King (what do you expect at 2am in the morning), and Boothy made friends with some ducks. Speaking of the Booth, he also managed to fulfill his lifelong ambition of making out with a rock star.

Can’t wait for the next one.

The new Santa Rosa equipped Apple laptops can’t come quick enough for me really (click for big):

I’m hoping that it’s a one-off, but as that’s the first time I’ve seen that happen in the 18 months I’ve owned the laptop it’s probably a sign of impending doom. Time to take advantage of my Applecare warranty….

Pelican (and These Arms Are Snakes) last night were pretty good, although I missed the first half of TAAS’ set - thanks to walking miles in the wrong direction - but as I’ve seen them before I wasn’t too bothered. Pelican sounded awesome live, they played a good set which I enjoyed whilst throwing pints of Grolsch down my neck.

What wasn’t much fun was finding out that Bank was in fact shut just as we cruised through it on the tube. In my inebriated state I missed the next stop and so had to trek halfway across London via two other stations whilst busting for a piss. Fletch will probably say that’s my own fault though for living out in t’sticks…

10:08 <fletch> Acton!!!
10:08 <fletch> get that!
10:09 <fletch> Zone 78
10:09 <fletch> takes a week to get there by mule

This is something I’ve been meaning to ‘document’ somewhere for my own benefit as much as anything else. Every time I start up a freshly installed instance of Firefox I end up trying to remember what these various add-ons are called, so here they are in one handy list:

1. Download Statusbar: The built-in download manager sucks, mainly because of how intrusive it is. This little addon means that your downloads sit in an area just above the statusbar, with simple stats to show you how far along the transfer is and what kind of speeds you’re getting.
2. CustomizeGoogle: This allows you to customize the various Google-related sites, including Google Mail. You can remove adverts, filter spam websites from results, and so on. Worth the install if for nothing else than be able to remove the ’sponsored links’ from with Gmail.
3. IE Tab: This add-on gives you an option to open a site within a new tab in Firefox that’s actually an embedded instance of Internet Explorer. Saves you having to fire up IE if you need to view a ‘problematic’ site.
4. Foxpose: Modelled after Apple’s ‘Expose‘ feature in OS X, this lets you view all your current tabs inside one window.
5. del.icio.us: The default plugin for del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service.
6. Web Developer: This is one that I don’t always install, but it’s certainly handy to have around - especially at work. It adds a ton of web development related tools rolled up into one extra toolbar. There’s far more functionality than I can be arsed explaining here, so check out the link for yourself.
7. LiveHTTPHeaders: Again, this usually only gets installed on work machines. It’s handy to have around if you’re trying to diagnose problems with websites as it lets you view all HTTP headers in realtime and capture them for review.

And that’s your lot. Firefox is bloated enough as it is without weighing it down with more crappy extras (such as news tickers and so on), but these I’ve found to be genuinely worthwhile.