I’d like to announce something quite exciting – I’m migrating my personal site and the blog over to a new server. It’s not just any old hosting solution though. I’m moving to self-hosting – using my own computer to actually deliver the site to you.

Why? Have I gone completely insane?

Well, no, I haven’t gone insane, I was anyway. 😛 But seriously, here are some of the reasons:

• Control. With my own server, I control everything. I am root. Getting this privilege with a paid-for hosting package usually needs a lot of money every month.
• No limits. With no-one to tell me how much disk space, databases, <insert commodity here> I’m allowed, I can do whatever I want. Apart from bandwidth, of course. I still have to be within the ISP’s terms (which I will be).
• Learning. The best way to learn how to do system administration, is to do system administration. I’m hoping that administering a real-life site will help me learn lots. I like learning.
• Hosting your own site is just plain cool.

There are, of course, disadvantages. There may be more downtime. If I have a powercut, my ISP goes down or I mess up some configuration, then the site will go down. Thankfully, it’s only my site, so it’s not vital to keep it online 100% of the time.

Still, you can’t learn without screwing things up occasionally.

I’m pretty excited about this move as it marks a new era for my personal site and blog. In fact, the domain name will also be changing as well, for technical and other reasons. I’ll keep the new domain name a secret until the move is completed, so I can check everything’s working properly first!

By the time you read this post, I will have frozen the database so I can move it over. Until the move is complete, I’m disabling all comments (otherwise things will get out of sync and that will not be fun).

Watch my Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible for up-to-the minute updates on the move.

GPLv3:

When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technical measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work’s users, your or third parties’ legal rights to forbid circumvention of technical measures.

Translation: down with the DMCA and similar.

The GPLv3 also will hopefully prevent future MS-Novell deals (and hopefully give Novell some problems too). No-one, and I mean no-one, should be able to extort FOSS users like MS and Novell are collectively doing. No I will not use Ballmer-blessed Linux.

Haven’t read the latest draft in detail, but I think I’ll be happy to offer my GPLed stuff under the new revision when it is finalised.

No disrespect to non-free software, by the way. I’m not anti-proprietary (which RMS won’t be happy to hear). I’m just against people and companies exploiting people who do choose to release Free stuff. That’s why I’m feeling pretty pro-GPLv3 right now. 🙂

Once again, I’ve managed to let my post frequency here drop really sharply, which sucks. Sorry.

I just noticed that I have an alarming number of feed subscriptions in my Google Reader. Being the curious person that I am, I want to know how this compares to other people’s number of subscriptions.

So I have 189 sites that deliver me content as it happens. If you use a feed reader, how many subscriptions do you have? Compared to you, do I subscribe to loads, a few, or what?

You probably don’t know me very well if you don’t know that I like tweaking and playing around with stuff. After having quite a while of a green-themed Linux desktop, I got bored of it and decided I wanted blue back. This time, though, I picked a different window decorator engine so my desktop feels different. Still like my window controls on the left, though. 🙂

Desktop24042007 Hosted on Zooomr

Sorry about the lack of posting here, I’ve been mighty busy here working on other blogs I contribute too and plently of other stuff too.

Today I want to share a random bit of Mac trivia that I noticed. Be warned, it is really quite random, but it’s also pretty cool.

It’s a few ways to tell whether a Mac application is a Cocoa application or not, by looking at very subtle differences in how they work.

First of all, this is a nice easy way to discover whether something’s a Cocoa app. It works in all applications that use Cmd-M as the keyboard shortcut to minimise a window. Focus a window of your target application and press Cmd-M.

Watch the amber traffic light carefully as it minimises. If you can see the little minus sign in the traffic light as it minimises, then it is a Cocoa app. You must press Cmd-M, not just click the button, otherwise it won’t work.

Let’s take a look. In Safari, a Cocoa app, you can see the minus sign as it minimises:

But in Firefox, not a Cocoa app, nothing is visible:

You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to get those screenshots in mid-minimise by the way. 😉

Anyway, that is basically it. From that you can tell whether or not an app is built with Cocoa. As far as I know, it’s pretty accurate, but let me know if it’s wrong at all.

There’s also another one. If your target application has a show/hide toolbar toggle button, click it. If the animation is smooth, it’s Cocoa. If there is no animation and it just switches, it’s likely to not be Cocoa.

Just thought I’d share that with everybody. Because I notice strange subtle details like that.

A couple of days ago, CentOS 5 came out. On my server machine (I say server, but it doesn’t do a lot at the moment, it’s not even on all the time!), I was running CentOS 4.4, and I was eager to get upgrading.

After about half a day of trying to get the DVD ISO off BitTorrent, and getting 30% of the way through, I gave up and downloaded it off an FTP mirror in a few hours. Why is it I rarely ever have good experiences with BitTorrent?

So yesterday I spent a bit of the day upgrading and migrating all the stuff on there over. First of all, though, there was a 10-year-old hard drive still in that machine, which was basically sitting there and doing nothing. I decided I would unplug it, as all it was doing was killing itself slowly and heating up the box a bit more.

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Due to popular demand, here is a quick demonstration video of SleekTabs and how to add a new tab. It’s just under three minutes long and it shows you how to modify the example file (index.php that comes with the download) to add a third tab.

It’s only available at YouTube quality at the moment, but I’m working on getting a download to a higher resolution version up shortly.

UPDATE: full 640×480 quality in H.264/QuickTime is available here. 6.3 MB.

Also, if you want to see SleekTabs in action for yourself, check out this page which is the example file I modified during the screencast. There’s not much to see, but it was asked for.

Hope this helps those people who wanted to take a look before committing themselves to a download!

Rather quicker than I expected, SleekTabs has been accepted into the PHP Classes site.

The project page for it on PHP Classes is http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/3824.html.

I’ll add this link to the page on my site tomorrow. Also, I’ll have a play around and try and make a screencast explaining how to work with it, as per Benjamin’s suggestion.

It’s late and I’m tired!

Hello again everyone!

After a nice few days enjoying a family Easter get-together in Cheshire sans internet, I’m now back at home here in Hampshire.

I’ve actually been back for some time, but I wanted to catch up on email and feeds without disturbance, so I hid for a few hours! I’m now fully up-to-date with the world (wow – a Debian release!).

I have to say, it’s really great to actually get away from the world. So much stuff happens all the time, and I’m constantly in contact with everyone, constantly being bombarded with information. Not bothering with all of that for a few days is just so refreshing, even if there is a massive torrent of stuff to read, deal with and sort out at the end of it!

The only thing I don’t like is travelling. Especially by car. We actually did pretty well (partly thanks to the M6 Toll on the way in), but I still just hate long journeys. This isn’t the route we took, but to give you an idea distance-wise, here’s a Google directions map.

Anyway, enough travel moaning. I’ll be following up all the things I’ve got in email and blog comments tomorrow, so if you’re one of the people who’s asked something of me, I’ll deal with those things tomorrow morning.

Just to let everyone know who I haven’t already told, I’ll be away from tomorrow to Tuesday. I doubt I’ll get internet access at all, so don’t expect me to be available!

Thanks to the magic of WordPress scheduled entries, I’ll still be keeping up daily posts on FOSSwire, but since I’ve already done all the hard work of actually writing the posts, I do get a sort of break from blogging!

See you all again either late on Tuesday or on Wednesday.

I’m the proud owner of a Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard. It’s a great keyboard, and it has loads of extra buttons that come in really handy. Well they do, if you can install the driver software that controls them under Linux.

Clean Keyboard Hosted on Zooomr

I have a CD that came with the keyboard which includes a Fedora Core 4 RPM, a SUSE RPM and a .deb I think. Back when this machine was running FC5, the Fedora Core 4 RPM would load fine into the system and that way I could use the cool extra keys.

However, when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the FC4 RPM would no longer install (and it went into just a little bit of RPM hell).

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the source code for the key utility is actually GPL’ed and is available for download from the Cherry site (found on this page).

This basically solves the problem, as once you’ve got the source code, you can build it yourself and not depend on some dodgy semi-incompatible binary package.

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