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23 Jan 2013

Still connected.

By Rudy
When you want something done, you gotta do it yourself.

When you still want to build a website over your holiday.

Greetings from Phuket! Tis officially the first day of our vacation here and we’re totally taking it easy by lazing around the pool/beach. While last year we spent most of the time reading and sleeping, this time I have my laptop along for the possible office emergency (hope they don’t call *crosses fingers*).

So here I am, as long as I can stand the screen glare, updating my WordPress JetPack settings (we have Publicize now!), and building an event registration site for our upcoming musical.

Yes, we’re in a musical. Don’t ask me how, but it’s been an enjoyable experience getting ready for the show. If you’re free on the 2nd or 3rd of March, 2013, please come and support us! Link to the Facebook event here. We’re doing RENT in Concert. RENT is a rock musical set in NY city about a group of poor artists trying to get by under the weight of HIV/AIDS. It’s pretty awesome for a musical. We’ve got profanity, homeless people, gay people, lesbians (one of which is played by my wife), drug dealers. I think the younger group would love it. 🙂

Going back to the event registration site, I’m now looking at possible plugins that allow payment via PayPal (that seems to be the only option readily available). The two that I’ve found, Event Planner and Event Registration, both have free integration to PayPal but Planner doesn’t seem to have MYR listed as a currency, so we’re left with Registration. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll have to temporarily shut this site down and run Magento or Spree which should have everything we need. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, it’s getting a little hot. Time for a dip in the pool.

14 Oct 2012

bangsar.net now on Amazon

By Rudy

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. 😛

28 Jan 2008

post post post

By Rudy

need to post more. the lolcat post below is the culprit, making my layout botched in IE. mmm, guess i’ll do Ash’s meme:

Meme Rules:
Link to the person who tagged you
Post the rules on your blog
Share six non-important things / habits / quirks about yourself
Tag at least 3 people at the end of your blog and link to their blogs
Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving comments in their blog

It’s green and pink cuz I copied it from Ash’s site 😛

Check my blogroll for Ash’s link.

habit 1 – i like to sleep in lectures/training sessions. i dunno, the voices of the instructors always put me to sleep. whether monotonous, loud, or with thick indian accent, all are like lullabies. but no, i will not accept bedtime stories in indian accent, thanks.

habit 2 – i tend to swear my socks off at malaysian drivers when i’m driving alone. altho the swears are starting to come out  even with company. can’t be helped, our driving etiquette is terrible.

non-important thing 3 –  i keep all my ties readily tied up so i can quickly put them on in the morning. fai-chan says tis not good for the ties’ well being tho, but i won’t be able to worry about that soon enough. ^_^

habit 4 – for better or for worse, i try to see the positive side of everything. even when terrible things happen, or kena marah, or someone tells me something i don’t like, i’d get moody a bit, but then just continue to rationalise the situation for anything good. not sure if it’s better than blowing my top, but.. yeah.

non-important thing 5 – i like comfy high thread-count cotton bedding. 😛 saw really affordable 1000-count sheets in Brisbane, but i was out of money.

non-important thing 6 – i am hooked on the Fighter’s Club app on Facebook. surprising really. before this i was on Warbook, but gameplay wasn’t very well balanced, and i kept getting kicked down by people at the top. oh well, FC will be fine for me, at least till someone picks fights with me.
i tag: H-san, ichaya (get well soon, dear), Azuan (i know you’re reading this :P)

rant: there is a high possibility i will be leaving my company for greener pastures come november 19th this year. there’s just not enough income to support my lifestyle in this city. no point hanging around for medical benefits either, cuz there won’t be any more once we retire. and even if we stay on, say 20 years, we only get like 50x our last drawn salary. take into consideration the country’s inflation rate and our weak purchasing power, it’s really just peanuts.

03 Mar 2003

My First Weblog Entry

By Rudy

Well, well. I now have my very own weblog. Would I be cooler now? More approachable? Doubt it.

The idea of creating a blog had been in my mind for such a long time. But I always wondered what the heck was I supposed to talk about, so the thought never materialised. This particular website was more of an experiment to see if my server could handle MT-like web programs. (It works! Blatant ad: Subscribe with virtualmystic for all your MT needs!)

Well, now that I do have a blog, I might as well start looking for stuff to put here. Nothing utterly interesting, I’m afraid, so don’t expect much. No introduction about myself, either :P. And yes, I allow you to not visit this website every other day, and I won’t be depressed by it. Nope, not at all.

To end this entry, I give you a list of manga I’ve read, books I’ve read, and movies I’ve watched in recent days. Told you not to expect anything. 🙂

Manga read:
Streamyx sux. Couldn’t download much lately.

Books read:
Firesong by William Nicholson (hope I spelled that right). 3rd and final installation of the Wind Singer trilogy. Great read, I tell ya.

Movies watched:
Ringu 0, Ringu, Ringu 2, The Ring, and Dark Water. The good stuff. 🙂