Last month I decided to invest in a VPS from VPSLink. I had been considering this for a while, especially after my experience using an Ubuntu VPS with Infurious and after 2 power failures within as many weeks due to building work nearby to my home, my hand was forced. No more hosting on a Linux box on the end of a DSL connection for me! I opted for a XEN based VPS running Debian Etch.

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For nearly a week now I have been exclusively using an Eee PC. I promised an action shot and here it is: Using this device I have went about all my regular activities, even a bit of web development. The biggest hindrance I’ve found has been using a screen resolution lower than what I’m accustomed to and I’m not too keen on the button strip below the trackpad but I have gotten used to the keyboard to an extent though would certainly benefit from smaller hands ;)

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I’m currently visiting my family in sunny Fermanagh and typing this from the ASUS Eee PC handed to me by Matt as I left the office yesterday. One word sums up my opinion of this little device: “amazement.” I’m amazed that something of this size and at a price of £220 can run a full Linux distribution, has built-in WiFi and can therefore allow me to perform all my day-to-day tasks.

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Just a quick update on what I’ve been working on for Infurious recently. Since finishing up on configuring Jabber I’ve been developing our website with the specific aim of allowing customers to download our products and purchase licenses for them. For this I’ve returned to CakePHP and been tinkering with the PHP portion of the AquaticPrime framework which Aidan has implemented in our upcoming application, Rickshaw. Other highlights have been working with the PayPal Sandbox and writing a component which generates “Buy Now” buttons for our apps and then handles the Instant Payment Notification and Payment Data Transfer callbacks once the transaction has been completed.

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After a lot of frustration, reading of documentation and even giving up completely on certain paths of action I finally got Jabber up and running. The “Jabber burnout” as Adian called it was terrible and only now do I feel de-stressed enough to write about it. I initially setup an installation of jabberd2 as I have had previous experience with it and was comfortable with it’s administration. I got it working without difficulty and could connect to it via a standalone client but ended up abandoning it when I tried to get a web interface working with it.

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I couldn’t resist…

I’m writing this on the shiny iMac Matt dropped off the other night. As it stood, I was the only guy in Infurious not on the Mac platform, which is a pretty fundamental prerequisite for working in a Mac shop, don’t you think? I’m having to get re-used to the keyboard again and the mouse is giving me some difficulty which might just be due to the mouse itself, but all-in-all it’s been a not-unpleasant experience so far!

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As I previously mentioned, my current task as Infurious system admin is providing the team with a bug/task tracking system, namely Trac. My initial thought was: “our server runs Ubuntu, this should be easy…” I could get Trac running via tracd and I could see that mod_python was working via mod_python.testhandler but the two didn’t seem to want to play together. Last night, after much frustration, I just gave up and configured Trac to run as a CGI application.

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It’s been a busy week. The lads and myself have been quite industrious, making plans and Getting Things Done. I’ve taken on responsibility of taking care of the Linux side of things and last night finished setting up an SSL enhanced, WebDAV accessible Subversion repository, for which Aidan has written an introductory guide. My current task is getting Trac installed and I’m quite enjoying being up to my elbows in command line goodness.

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I got speaking to Matt this morning when I arrived in the office and he demonstrated to me the wealth of information provided by Google Analytics. It was really interesting stuff and I could see why he was so excited about it. I recently upgraded to Apache 2.2 on my development machine, substance, to “easily" get TLS working so I could use AjaxTerm and I haven’t had the time yet to play about getting awstats up and running again.

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