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bangsar.net now on Amazon

Due to the inability of the Synology 411j NAS to host this wordpress site, we’ve finally moved to Amazon’s EC2 service. This is Amazon’s cloud service with its micro instance starting at USD15 a month if you run it 24/7.

Yes, USD15 is a little pricey for just a private wordpress blog, but Amazon allows new users to try it for free for a year. And since they have a data centre in Singapore, I thought why not?

The migration was simple enough. First step was to set up the EC2 instance, so we used one free preconfigured image by BitNami. Picked it up on the AWS Marketplace, then it’s up and running in no time.

Second step was migrating the entries over from the old blog. WordPress has a built in Import & Export feature so all the posts, including attachments, were migrated over effortlessly. Though I just realized we’re missing the posts from our guest bloggers; not sure when this happened, but it’s the same as the old site so it must’ve gotten deleted or transferred to another user during previous migrations.

Next was to point the site address from the old site to the new. The DNS server will continue running on the NAS, so it was just a matter of changing the CNAME entry from our current dynamic DNS to the Amazon one. There was a mention somewhere online that the Amazon hostname will change if the instance is restarted, so we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

After that, WordPress was running off the /wordpress subdirectory, so we needed to SSH into the instance and setup redirection from the root directory. A quick uncomment in /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/httpd.conf and it happens, but permalinks are still pointing to the /wordpress subdirectory so I’m going to have to figure out how to work that with redirection.

As you may be able to tell, the server is running zippy as ever. Will just need to keep a reminder to move the blog again to a paid local web host before the AWS Free Tier expires. 😛

blog updates

whee updates~!

upgraded wordpress to 2.3.1, upgraded wpg2 to 3.0.2, upgraded K2 to RC3.

changed from a 2-column layout to 3-column layout cuz there was just too much info for a single column. the rightmost column (i tweaked K2’s CSS a bit cuz I didn’t like the extra column being on the left) will now contain stuff i wanna look at on a daily basis; external links basically. the rest will remain on the original column.

the new layout looks good on Firefox, but I don’t have IE7 to test on. do let me know if it looks borked.

wordpress has tag clouds now. not sure how to use them along with categories. :

macam-macam ada…

Server was constantly hanging this morning, right after I restarted my torrents after clearing some space on the drives. Further checks revealed that it hangs during an fsck check on one of the 250GB drives, so I might actually have some bad sectors on it. Sigh, guess I’ll have to get another drive and move stuff over before it dies completely.

Gold Coast post is finally up. See previous post. ^_^ The pictures are supposed to be thumbnails, but somehow WPG2 decided to show the mid size versions instead. They’ve been scrunched in to fit the theme, but oh well, just click on em to see how it’s supposed to look like. Can’t add captions either, cuz G2’s edit photo options aren’t working somehow.

The visual editor for WordPress seems to be working fine again. Co-authors, feel free to enable it again in your profile to give it a go.

I now have a second monitor plugged in, so that I can chat on MSN and WoW at the same time. WoW now runs in maximised windowed mode, so that my mouse can actually leave the WoW area onto the 2nd display. I lose some FPS, but hey, it’s worth it. ^_^

Saturday night, Fai-chan and I, Shogun!
Yippie yay whoopie! Food for you and me!
Sashimi, tenpura, konyaku~ Kimochi datta yoo~
Sono ato de, karaoke! Minna ooki koe de!
Tanoshikatta yo~ Mou ichido, let’s go!

fucked

Yes, I know it’s fasting month, but I’m so seriously pissed off.

Initially I thought my PSU was fucked, so I bought a new one to see if that helps. It didn’t. Using the process of elimination, I then extended the process to the less probably components, and that led me to my RAM.

Two pieces of 1GB Crucial Ballistix RAM, will no longer allow the computer to boot. Okay, no worries. I’ll just send them all the way back to the US for replacements. In the meantime, I’ll just borrow half of Mario’s RAM, which was 2x 512MB KVRs.

So usually when a computer dies, it’s usually one component that’s the problem. With that in mind, I plugged everything back into the original PSU and wallah, everything was fine and dandy.

But my success was shortlived, after sending my computer back onto S3 standby mode. After a few times, it too won’t boot up. Another fucking round of elimination showed that now I have another 2 bad pieces of RAM. Even worse, my hard drive can’t be detected either.

So all in all, i have lost 2 pieces of performance RAM, 2 pieces of value RAM, 1 power supply and possibly 1 hard drive. Add one more power supply that i replaced earlier, and you have a whole lot of fucking failed pieces of equipment. And I still don’t know what’s causing it! Of course, all the signs point back to the PSU, cuz how else can components be instantly corrupted besides static and power fluctuations? But after this episode, I’m just not so sure of myself anymore… I might even come to hate computers… >_<

kaki gembira~

just watched Happy Feet while eating KFC. ah, such a feel good movie. XD the baby penguins are soo cute~!

looked for the School Rumble manga but it’s all gone! licensed! 🙁

i can’t wait for season 4 of BSG! it’s gonna be interesting!

7 episodes of Lost to watch! last episode of Rome to watch! and House!

but instead, i WoW. XD

broken visual editor

i was having trouble editing today’s youtube post. seems that wordpress likes to put nonsense in between OBJECT tags. so i went out in search for a plugin that’ll let me embed youtube videos easily, and while i found a few, they don’t seem to work well with the visual editor.

as a matter of fact, none of the plugins that affect the visual editor works. 🙁

but i still want my videos! so i’ve decided to just disable the damned visual editor until the wordpress or tinymce developers can figure out what’s wrong.

so to all co-authors, please disable the visual editor for yourself under “My Profile”.

refresh problem fixed

yay, blog is now a-ok. did an upgrade of suphp to version 0.6.2 and the php executable doesn’t hang anymore. was also looking at installing fastcgi for the heck of it, but that didn’t work out. too complicated for such a simple problem.

in any case, what helped me was this firefox addon called firebug.  helps you debug your websites, and i believe even lets you change code on the fly to see how it’s like. if you’re a website owner, you’ll love this! it actually helped me isolate which php script was taking long to load. 🙂 and of course, it’s free!

blog

i’ve dumped my 3-columned 3K2Redux theme for a standard K2 one. reason being K2 being more of an active development project compared to 3K2 which is just a static package.

that, and i was also trying to fix the visual editor on my wordpress installation by totally reinstalling in a new directory. which didn’t work. funny thing is when i helped with fazhira’s blog, the visual editor didn’t even appear. weird weird.

won’t be working on the aesthetics anytime yet. gotta figure out how to put back all the customisations i previously made to this theme without touching its core. it’s going to be a real pain, especially for the author pics.

anyways, my blog will be offline from the time i sleep (around 12am) till the time i get home from work (around 6pm). see next post for reason. 😛 within that period, you can view all posted entries at myuubie.livejournal.com.