Valorin's Thoughts
Less sense than many, but more than most.
Site updates - Valnet v6
For those who are perceptive, you may notice the subtle changes in the site. I decided it was time to "remove" some of the junk and clean up the style a little bit... so... I changed the menu :)
After much playing around, the horizontal menu stood out as useful. It does allow for the photo gallery to expand wider and in general wider content. The white kinda works, and stands out against the images at the top.
I'll be doing some content updates soon...... sometime :)
Enjoy!
~Valorin
Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:01:07 +1000
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Currently Reading: Servant of the Empire
Currently Reading: "Servant of the Empire" by Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts.
Last week I read "Daughter of the Empire", which is book one of the Empire series by Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts. It is set in Feist's world which started with "Magician" and has grown in a lot of books. It's funny, I've had that book for a while and kept putting off reading it... and now I wonder why! It is a really good book.
I finished it last Sunday, and had to wait until today for the next one to arrive.
"Servant of the Empire" is book two of the series, and carries off mostly where the previos book left Lady Mara is off to buy some Slaves, to help her maintain her status and family name. Well, thats as far as I have read so far.
I really enjoyed the first book, so I am expecing good things from this book... we'll see if it delivers on its promise.
On a completely different note, are you ready for 2038?
Namarie,
~Valorin
Thu, 22 May 2008 22:27:03 +1000
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Disabling L1 & L2 Cache
I am at a friends place, and we have discovered the funniest 'Help Text' within the BIOS, for the 'Disable Processor Cache' option...
==== Help ====
Disable the Processor L1 & L2 Caches in case the system is too fast for an Application.
NOTE: The system will run extremely slow.
Why anyone would want to disable the L1 & L2 cache is a mystery to me (if you know a valid reason, let me know!). But it is good to see the guys who wrote this BIOS had a sense of humour.
Keep up the good work guys :)
~Valorin
Sat, 03 May 2008 20:40:04 +1000
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An Epic Conflict is raging in our backyard...
There is an epic conflict which is raging right in our backyard. Some people are completely oblivious to it, and others have chosen their sides. I've chosen mine.
But what is this conflict?
.
.
.
"Plesk or cPanel? Which is the best hosting control panel?"
I work for a webhost who offers both Plesk shared hosting and cPanel shared hosting. So when I was a Customer Service Representative (Support tech), I had to deal with both for most of my shifts. From an "I have to use this thing every day" point of view, I know which one I wish I could eradicate from our servers!
Here are a few reasons why I don't like cPanel (&WHM):
Total lack of any design sense!
Everything in cPanel is in the SAME level, all the options are mashed together onto one massive page which makes it hard to find things. Sure, there are groupings, but some of them aren't logical! It just looks really messy and is hard to use.
Lack of continuity between the sections
Each option/section has its own unique design, it feels like someone has taken a pile of independent scripts and mashed them together.
Lack of useful features through customer end
The big one with this is DNS management, the cPanel user has no option for this. Why not??! It'd save a lot of staff time if it could be enabled and left to the customer.
All its configuration is done direct to file
We have lost count of the number of times cPanel has stuffed up a line in the httpd.conf file, or rejected mail because it failed to add it to the localaliases file.
and finally...
The automatic updates always break something!
Every time cPanel push out an update, something breaks without fail. Oh, and they keep changing the WHM DNS manager, each time we get an update, this interface changes to something with even more bad AJAX, which takes longer to load and is harder to use. Seriously, when you have a customer on the phone wanting a simple IP change in their DNS, you do NOT want to wait 10 minutes for your browser to finish crashing from some bad AJAX!
There are plently of things I don't like about cPanel, the above list features a few of them.
Here are a few things I don't like about Plesk:
Everything is hidden in its own folder, and not found in a common location.
This makes doing a restoration from a file-system backup very painful and time-staking!
The Backups are in their own format
For a novice user, it makes the backups useless. There are some programs to extract the data, so if you know what you are doing it is not too much of an issue.
Migrations often have issues with appvault installed scripts
Plesk comes with Application Vault which is their effort to fight Fantastico (cPanel's version). The problem is, it isn't updated as frequently and sometimes the scripts installed through it will break during a migration. When migrating an entire server fleet, this causes many problems!
Jumping around between different sections within Plesk is a little clunky
The interface is very 'Application based' where you are on a single screen. Opening multiple tabs isn't something Plesk is designed for.
There are some other small annoyances, but yeah. That is all I can think of.
The verdict... I completely despise working with and in cPanel. Give me Plesk on each server, and I'll be happy.
I know all the cPanel lovers out there will start crying foul (or just start crying for real), but I challenge you to use both Plesk and cPanel daily for a year, and then tell me which you prefer.
That is all, thank you for wading through my semi-rant :)
~Valorin
Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:48:25 +1000
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Running Windows Apps under Linux
I'm not usually one for posting short posts linking directly to other posts online, but I've made the exception for this one.
I'm someone who would love to use Linux full-time, but there are a few applications which I simply cannot find decent alternatives for in Linux. The primary one is Photoshop. Sorry GIMP fans, but, it just doesn't do it for me.
I have finally found a solution which works, and works really well. I've got Photoshop CS3 running on my Laptop, under Ubuntu 7.10. Cool eh?
How did I do it? There is an easy to follow guide over at Lifehacker called "Run Windows Apps Seamlessly Inside Linux" which allows you to do exactly as the title says. I've Photoshop CS3 and IE8 beta running to prove it!
If you use Linux and want to run Windows programs, go check it out.
On a side note, I've had a play with IE8. I've heard a few people complaining that anything which isn't done via old-style Table-layouts looks terrible. Funny thing is, this site looks 100% identical to Firefox in IE8 (and IE7). Check my source, this is all DIV tags and CSS.
Long live coding within the standards :)
And finally, Samuel, a friend who I work with has had a go at me for my Proof that Weston Creek is the Centre of Canberra. It's good to see people don't take me seriously :)
(If they did, I'd be worried!)
Have a great Easter weekend!
~Valorin
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:56:01 +1100
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