I just moved my weblog from a shared-hosting provider because it was getting laggy into my private Xen VPS at Linode (shame-less referral link is included ). I decided to move away from Apache due to its heavy memory usage, and use Nginx instead. nginx (pronounced “engine X”) is a lightweight, high-performance Web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy, licensed under a BSD-like license. Its memory footprint is much less than Apache and the performance is much better as well.

I’ve setup nginx & PHP running as fast-cgi following this guide from the Linode community documentation (an excellent resource I might say).

In order to get it working with the WordPress, I needed to translate mod rewrite rules to work with nginx, so my fancy permalinks would work. I used the following config for that:

location / {
root /home/websites/andreas.louca.org/public_html;
index index.html index.htm index.php;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}

The try_files directive will check if the file exists first. If it exists (like an image file) it will serve that directly. If it doesn’t, it will pass that as an argument to WordPress’ index.php. As simple as it gets!

Hope this helps someone!

Being a geek, I always wanted to keep my data safe, because I went through equipment failure quite a few times. I used to backup everything to CDs and then later to DVDs, but that isn’t practical anymore with the amount of data we generate nowadays. So I moved to external hard-drives, weekly backing up the “important stuff”.

When Apple introduced Time-Machine, things got a lot easier. Just plug an external hard-drive, and Time Machine takes care of the rest. However, the way time-machine works, it saves multiple versions of the same file (that’s good, in case you need an older version) but it takes much more space than a regular backup. Therefore, I was forced to migrate to two external hard-drives: one for my time-machine backups, and one other hard-disk for keeping the rest of the data that did not fit (or I didn’t want to keep) in my machine’s disk.

My configuration so far was an 750GB hard-disk (via USB2) for Time-machine backups , and one 1TB hard-disk (via Firewire 800) for large media files. 750GB for my documents/data backup was sufficient — it kept my data for 6 months. I also backup important stuff (coursework, source code, etc.) on Dropbox, so I always have those synced on the web and on multiple machines around the globe (US, UK and in 2 locations in Cyprus).

However, I am unable to backup twice photos and videos I took, because of the size. My iPhoto library weights approximately 40GB, as it contains hi-def videos and RAW picture files from my DSLR. Finally, backup up my laptop was inconvenient, since the time-machine volume was physically connected to my iMac, therefore I barely backed it up.

So I decided to move to a NAS solution to keep my data safe, have the ability to access it from the network. I looked at a few solutions, from building my own little machine to multiple NAS offerings. Finally, I settled with a Drobo FS from Data Robotics. While the initial price-tag was quite high, approx. £500, the overall functionality well worths its money.

It offers 5 SATA bays, where you can install any brand/size SATA sard-disk you want. Mix & match. Then, the Drobo using the so-called “BeyondRAID” technology manages the storage. It aggregates the hard-disks together offering a bigger volume, with some space reserved to withstand 1 HD failure, or two with the optional setting. Its dead simple: just put the hard-disks in. Setting this thing up took me 10 minutes. Drobo provides visual indicators on its chassis regarding the current disk health (Green for OK, Red for bad next to each slot) and how full the NAS appliance is.

It is connected to my home network via Gigabit ethernet, and the user can manage it via the Drobo Dashboard. The application automatically detects any drobo connected in the same network, no fuss no settings to configure. You can create volumes, shares and adjust user/group permissions using the Dashboard application as well as manage more advanced settings such as notifications if something goes wrong. Excellent!

Regarding performance: to be absolutely honest I was expecting this thing to perform a little bit better. I am getting approx. 25-30 MB/sec write speed and 30-35MB/sec read speeds. Given that thing uses something similar to the RAID technology and a modern hard-disk can spit up to 100MB/sec of throughput I was expecting that this thing can saturate a Gigabit link (approx. 128MB/sec without calculating TCP/IP overhead) or worst case scenario half of it.

Finally, the thing I liked the most: DroboApps. Drobo gives you access on the machine via SSH, and you have the option to install applications on the NAS device. This comes really handy: Torrent application, Firefly (Firefly serves digital music residing on the Drobo FS to the Roku Soundbridge and iTunes), FUPPES (FUPPES is a free, multiplatform UPnP A/V Media Server with DLNA support. — serves media to my PS3). I also cross-compiled PHP CLI interpreter for it so I could run some home-automation scripts on it. Neat.

This gadget perhaps its one the best appliances that are not Apple-made, given its beautiful design and ease of configuration. I am glad I finally got it — it saved me from a huge stack of external hard-disk drives.

I’ve been meaning to write this post sometime now, but I didn’t find the time to do it. Apple is a remarkable company — it went from oblivion to surpassing Microsoft’s market capitalisation, mostly due to the guidance of its CEO, Steve Jobs. However, what makes Apple significant is not their cash flow, nor its stock price (although this is an important factor when it comes to other things). What makes Apple significant its their ability to innovate and deliver amazing, polished products to the market.

First, take a look at the contraction quality of their computer hardware. The MacBooks have been remarkable machines, right from the beginning. My first Mac was a 1st-gen Macbook Pro, the first Intel machines that came out from Apple. When I held that laptop in my hands, and felt the sturdiness of the hardware, the great feeling of the aluminium I thought to myself “Wow, what the hell I was using before?”. You can’t even compare Macbooks with Dell/HP and others when it comes to build quality and beauty.

Then comes the OS. The remarkable Mac OS X. All of my life I grew up cursing Windows and their bluescreens. At some point, I also switched to Linux, but the hardware integration was so terrible, that it was even worse than the bluescreens. The difference between Apple and Microsoft when delivering new versions of the Operating System is that Apple introduces new features in the OS, like spotlight, Expose and so on, whereas Microsoft, most of the times, they just change the icons (see Windows 98 to ME, or 2000 to XP). People isn’t just looking at the icons, as it seems, they also care whats going on beyond that. Their OS is so well integrated with the hardware, that when you think about Windows it feels like a nightmare (n.b. I do not know if the situation with Windows 7 improved this area). You don’t get that with any other vendor.

With Apple’s entrance into the mobile market, lots of people came to criticise the company and how it handled the delivery of new features, both in hardware and in the OS. To me, the iPhone was the best phone I ever had. The huge gallery of applications, the multitouch, the best mobile browser and the excellent integration of other sensors in the interface (accelerometers etc.) is simply amazing. Let me ask you this: how do you browse the internet with your Blackberry phone? Still on WAP-alike pages eh? How about applications? Thought so. Sometimes I hear stupid arguments about competitor’s features like: well, my Nokia had multitasking 4 years ago. Well, how slow your phone was when you had 2 applications running? Now I think of it, what kind of applications you used to run back then? Or they compare Blackberry’s battery life with the iPhone’s. The only thing that your blackberry does through out your day is receive emails in a crappy mail client, you can’t do anything more on that thing. You can’t even browse the web on that thing (future browsers they may release will be considered when they release them). Let alone the smaller touch-less screen.

Having multi-tasking on small, embedded devices is a really hard thing to do. Hard, not because of the technology to multitask applications, but how to do implement it in a way that won’t suck up memory and make everything slower. Android and iOS 4 does this correctly. The rest implementations are just lazy and bad. I won’t go on and comment on their new brilliant display, neither the inclusion of a bunch of new sensors in the phone. And yes, I also know about the 3G video calling feature that many phones had from 4-5 years ago. But, have you ever tried video calling? *IF* it works, the quality is simply terrible. The video is continuously breaking and its low-res. Of course, iPhone 4 quality remains to be seen, but if it is the same as the one they showed in the presentation its going to be amazing. Nothing compared to what we ever seen before in a commercial phone.

Finally, the best thing about Apple, is when they deliver a new feature, it is actually working, the way it was supposed to be. It might not be as advanced as we would like (see the camera app, it just gained digital zoom in the latest iteration of the OS), but at least it works properly. To me, working according to specs is more important than breaking occasionaly and delivering “some more” advanced features.

Apple makes mistakes as well, everybody does. But that doesn’t stop their products from being awesome.

After almost 3 years from first publishing this version of my blog, I decided it needed a slight refresh. While the design hasn’t changed considerably, I made some big changes in the layout and the way I am organising the content. Most notably:

• Ditched the sidebar: I found that it wasn’t serving any cause, other than obstructing the content. This was more obvious when I got the iPad, because of the smaller screen.

• Upgraded photo space: Instead of cramming the photos on the sidebar, I moved them into a more prominent space, just below the header. For the integration and presentation I used a slightly modified version of FlickrAPI to fetch my photostream from Flickr and JQuery/Lightbox for the nifty popup. I also got rid of the FAlbum, nobody used those sections of the blog; better to redirect everyone to flickr instead.
• More elaborate categorisation: On the older version I used just three categories: life, work and university. While I thought that they would be sufficient, I found them quite restrictive, however, I do like the simplicity. So instead I changed the titles to me, us and extras, keeping the 3 main category simplicity, but introducing subcategories. More information about categories can be found here.
• Stronger integration with Social Networks: Since everyone uses them nowadays (well almost everyone), I moved my LastFM and Twitter streams into a bigger space, just below the blog post. Since my Twitter/LastFM are more often updated than this blog, they deserve the extra space. Additionally, I make use of the new Facebook API to introduce the “Like” button just below every blog-post. I am still kinda skeptical about that, we’ll see how it goes.
• Typography: I switch the blog font to Georgia, it simply looks better!

Hope you like it!