tensixtyone

Finally, i’ve got round to moving the /misc folder off onto Amazon S3. I’ve decided to do this due to my upcoming hosting move, not having to worry about several hundred megabytes of static data will ease the strain of moving. So, how have I done it?

First of all I created a bucket on S3 with the name assets.nikdoof.net, from there I setup a CNAME in BIND for assets.nikdoof.net pointing to s3.amazonaws.com to allow direct referencing to the files within the bucket.

assets.nikdoof.net.     IN      CNAME   s3.amazonaws.com.

Then for the relocation of the misc folder, setup a simple Apache mod_rewrite rule to transfer all requests for the misc folder to S3.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/misc/(.*)$ http://assets.nikdoof.net/$1 [R,L]

So now it’s all up and working, and to give it a try yourself, here is a fetching wallpaper of Rachel Stevens.

Ever since I got my N95 I’ve been doing some small mapping for the Open Street Map project. I’ll have to say, it has been fun. As strange as it sound it’s fun walking the streets of the local area.

In Widnes, theres alot of unmapped area, what has been done has been done by Chris, but only around Appleton has been done. In 3-4 days i’ve managed to do a few of my major routes. I’d highly recommend anyone with a GPS to get out there and help the project.

Some of you may know I used to host my own sites a while ago, After about 3 years I got sick with the extra administration work and moved over to TextDrive. I’ve now become unhappy with the lack of options I have on this host and have now moved back to my own hosting.

Oh how things have progressed since i’ve been gone. First time round I used VHCS which is a open source PHP server control panel, nice to use but bloated from its days as a closed source solution. Now i’ve come across using Virtualmin and I’m amazed at how easy it actually is. I’ve deicded to use it as i’m now used to the platform as TextDrive use it. I switch on the webmin service when I need to make a change then shut it down when done.

So here’s to another 3 year experiment with DIY hosting.

I’ve been running my MythTV box for a few weeks now and its slowly getting bogged down with numerous recordings that I want to keep, Non auto-expiring recordings are taking over the majority of my hard drive and I need to setup a system of getting them off the box and onto DVD.

MythArchive, i hear you scream, unfortunatly i’ve not got a DVD-R drive in the Myth box. So which method to use? MythTranscode or Nuvexport? My previous experiments with Nuvexport have outputted low quality rubbish no matter what settings i’ve been using, I must be doing something wrong. MythTranscode on the other hand seems to convert my DVB Mpeg2 recordings to Nuv format with little size difference.

I’ve hunted around previously for settings and processes but got nowhere, can anyone advise me on their setup or point me the in the right direction? All my recordings are from pure DVB sources so i’m working with MPEG2 files.

Over the last two weeks i’ve been consumed with the need to setup a MythTV box, PVR and TiVo-esq features bundled with the power and verciticy of Linux, yes I know that reads like some marketing document but I don’t care. Jo was totally bemused as to what I was doing, all she could see what the several hundreds of pounds of hardware purchasing.

My old mobile sold, as did a few pieces of idle electronics from the house, and from nowhere I’d managed to drum together £200 for the inital parts. CPU, Motherboard, 1.5Gb RAM for £70 from eBay, Nvidia FX 5200 for £14, 200GB HDD for £22, also eBay. Chieftec Case from my local Freecycle and various other parts from my electronics “stash”, Throw in a DVB-T, DVB-C and analogue tuner and i’ve got a MythTV box ready to go.

So, was it worth it all? I’d say so. While I only have one tuner its still a very flexible platform. Myth’s recording logic is very good, especially when combined with reliable listings such as Radio Times, the box can detect programs for the next 14 days and schedule in times to record the program you’ve selected, avoiding conflicts wherever possible. This small feature alone is enough to use MythTV, while other software probably supports it as well this is the first PVR/DVR system i’ve used.

As for the PAF, Jo has said its around 7 at the moment, which is good for a system which has its little quirks and crashes every so often when recording programs, mostly due to corrupt feeds.

More will come with experience.

I’ve used Textpattern for the last few years, its been a steady and reliable system that has seen alot of improvement in the last year or so, but unfortunatly its not heading down the route I need. Textpattern is a amazing generic CMS system, adaptable to various styles of site but for blogging it lacks a few key features, plugins make up for a few minor issues but out-of-the-box its not really geared towards a blog engine.

Enter Mephisto, a Rails based blog engine with a hint of CMS, just the right amount to have a primary blog and a few article style pages.

The move from Textpattern wasn’t the smoothest as the conversion process was designed for their old system. After a few hours and using the Wordpress plugin as a basis I had a very simple import tool. The articles and comments are migrated over and its a excellent starting point. I’ll hopefully submit this to the Mephisto developers within the next few days, as a minor “svn switch” incident overwrote a few files…

So, yes, the site will be lacking in information for the next few days while I have to add the categories and tags, but i’ll get there sooner or later.