Semergence

My little Shuttle PC, acting as the server for this blog, is acting strange and just hanging up. A reboot fixes the problem, but a day or two later and *poof* it’s gone off the network.

Instead of tinkering around with the hardware to find out what’s wrong, I just moved to SliceHost. They offer Linux VPS servers at very reasonable prices. I couldn’t find a cheaper host that offered the same specs for the same price.

A bonus of moving to SliceHost is that I’ll get a lot more bandwidth.

Thanks to my buddy at Pau Spam, I’m now hosting this blog on my own dedicated box.  I had an old Shuttle PC, so I loaded it up with plenty of Hard Drive space, put Ubuntu Server (Ubuntu optimized for servers) on it, and now I feel free as a nerdy bird.

I want to give a shout out to Pau Spam.  They are a local Hawaiian company offering spam filtering as a service, among other services.  If you need to stop spam from ever seeing your inbox, contact Pau Spam.  Plus, they are really nice guys.

As I was moving my server over from my previous VPS, I realized how many little services or plugins I use.  Setup was a bit slower than I had anticipated, but in the end, fairly quick and easy.

So, a quick list of some of the services that I use:

• EditDNS - for hosting my DNS.  I could do this myself, but they have a good interface and run multiple DNS servers.  And it’s free.
• PacNames - DNS name registration.  I don’t know why I use them, I just always have.
• Ubuntu Server - Ubuntu.  Server.  Easy.
• Wordpress - Blog software
• Feedburner - for tracking feed subscriptions.  Easy, free, and fun to watch the stats.
• Feedburner Feedsmith plugin for Wordpress - links wordpress feeds to feedburner

OK, back to work!

Hong Zhang’s Blog mentions that java.net is now hosting J2EE applications for free through LocalWeb. Here’s the quote that scares me:

> The actual deployment of an application is done by a small team of engineers from Sun.

Yikes. Even with all the deployment descriptors, it takes “a small team” to host and deploy a single J2EE application. There’s something wrong with that.

I’ve always said that deploying Java applications is Java’s Achilles Heel. The LAMP community mocks Java not necessarily because the language is more verbose, but because it’s so dang hard to deploy the applications. Compare with PHP, which is as easy as editing the file and then hitting reload in your browser. That’s nearly impossible with a full J2EE application. So many libraries have memory leaks that play havoc with classloaders that a full application server restart is required.

In any case, this is one of the main reasons I’ve been moving to Rails. I can deploy an application in no time (especially when using SwitchTower).