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Author Archives: Dorian
A New Voice on the Blogosphere
One of my friends from my professional writing class, Marika took up blogging. Yay! It is nice to see another familiar face on the blogosphere. Anyways, check out her blog. I have always found her writing style as fun, thoughts provoking and aesthetically pleasing And yes, her philosophical posts beat out mine in the cohesive, interesting and well-thought out sections. Also her audience responds in her comment section more often than mine does. *nudge* *nudge*
Marika’s It’s On My Desk blog can be found at: http://itsonmydesk.blogspot.com/.
Of Clouds and Computing
Cloud computing is one of Silicon Valley’s current obsessions. So is defining what Web 2.0 and how number of eyeballs magically translate into number of dollars. The promise of cloud computing seems to be always available web applications. Applications that automatically scale inside the cloud depending on load and need. The cloud being a vast network of servers, massively redundant in number and by geographic distribution. The theory being that if you run an application on the cloud, you will also be able to use this application and get to your data anywhere at anytime. And you can do so regardless of how many users use the same cloud or application, even if part of your cloud gets clobbered when a small asteroid annihilating the city where part of your datacentre was in.
At the moment, only Amazon offers its servers’ capabilities as a true cloud computing platform. Also you can build your own, if you have the financial clout to do so. Various vendors offer various tools for monitoring, deploying to and even developing all inside a “cloud”. But for the most part, cloud computing is a buzzword that brings together wide-eyed engineers and ambitious businessmen.
Still we are a long way from the dreams proposed by Charles Stross in his book Accelerando. We still need to build out a global multi-vendor cloud that spans the globe. And thankfully we do not have to fear the cloud turning into a physical nano-engineering solar system consuming matroska brain filled with aggressive hyperintelligent posthuman AIs. Fear not the cloud computer. Yet.
Moving Forward Again
The plugin seems to have stemmed the tide of spam. I’m quite happy in not receiving tons of e-mails daily dealing with spam comments. I’d love to get more comments from real life users. But I guess I need to write something rant worthy or brilliant. Either way, no spam is good.
I’m still catching up with all the work I left undone due to my illness. For one I need to setup a few sites for my new project in gestation. Also I need to do quite a bit of bookkeeping. Not a huge fan of keeping records. Much like anything else, I should do bookkeeping as it happens. And I try. However unlike task management, I have not found a nice, neat system that works well with me. In addition to all these housekeeping work, I need to get moving on larger projects like: getting a car and learning to drive. I should of done this last year honestly. Oh well things are moving forward. But so much needs to get done, and I have so little time.
Anyways, the next few days look busy. So expect short blog posts and my being offline. I just need to get things done.
Sick and Spammed
Excuse the interruption in my regular updates for the blog. I was sick most of last week, and could not write anything past: Ugh, not feeling so well. 🙁
Today I am back, ready for whatever the week can throw at me. And I plan on throwing a bunch of well-thought out and edited articles back at it!… Err… blog entries… and maybe not completely well-thought out and with a quick edit. Come on folks, if I did writing as my job I’d crank out fine articles on gaming, free software, technology and life stuff on a regular basis.
Anyways, where was I? Ah yes! I plan on throwing a batch of blogs back at life. Two things I wish life would not throw at me: more sickness as I already have a decent collection of cold bugs. Let someone else get the free virus/bacteria starter kits, and KEEP THEM AWAY FROM ME! Also I could use less spam. Two articles in particular receive a ridicilous amount of incoming comment spam. And my poor blog notifies me by e-mail when someone tries to post a comment. My IT (internet tablet) likes to make loud proclamations whenever I get an e-mail. Nothing is worse than walking up to a dingy noise and flashy blue light, to moderate spam. Nothing worse except that being sick and receiving over 10 of these suckers over the course of a weekend. PLEASE STOP IT YOU EVIL SPAMMERS! I am sure none of my readers are interested in a life time supply of viagra. Nor is Google happy with your attempts at google bombing. Just go away. Please.
Anyways I wish everyone else a good and happy week!
A Change of Pace and Style
In the past I wrote almost exclusively about technology and gaming. The occasional happy accident in time management and organization popped up. In the past few weeks, I decided that such a scope of articles is limiting.
There is only so much one can write on such subjects, before one feels tempted to use other people’s ideas as one’s own. Also one feels tempted to speak on subjects that can get one in a lot of trouble. I’ve resisted such temptations. However I realized that I could not both resist these temptations and blog on a regular basis. At least not without expanding the scope of articles.
So nowadays, I plan on blogging all things that interest me. I’ll avoid the political, the personal and the confidential for all the obvious reasons. Everything else is fair game. This means some of my more technical readers will see a larger span between articles on computing. I apologize for that. But my life does not revolve around technology alone. Everyone else, please enjoy my inane commentaries, crazy thoughts and more artistic stories. 🙂
Defrosting from Montreal
This weekend was a fun one. I got to see most of the tourist attractions in Montreal: the Olympic Stadium, Biodome, the Old Port, two of the larger churches and most of the museums. I chose the wrong weather for sightseeing. After a lot of walking in the rainy and then icy cold weather, basically I was cold for the entire weekend. Still I have to thank Anna and Robert for letting me stay at their place and for showing me around. It was a lot of fun and I plan to return to Montreal. Only this time the weather will be warmer, and I’ll learn French.
Morning in Montreal
I should be awake now. But I can’t help feeling laid back and lazy. After all is not a vacation a good excuse to relax.
Outside the window, grey daylight streams in filtered by light curtains. Inside I sit and write. Outside the wind blows. The dark silohuette of a tree rocks its branches to and fro in the wind. Inside I sit and write this and other things.
Later on I will go out and do some sightseeing and shopping. Later it will rain. But at least it won’t snow as the earlier meterological reports forecasted. My tea has gone cold. I must finish my writing now.
Writing on a Train
I neglected to post a blog entry today in the morning. I felt too tired and uninspired to write anything of substance. Also I could not relax until I knew I had left Toronto.
Now it is evening. And I’m on a train, again going the farthest east on land I’ve been in Canada. I’m going to Montreal again. Slowly the English Breakfast tea is starting to kick in. The air feels heavy and tired. And I can write in peace.
It is amazing how quiet the train is. Most of the time I only hear the clatter of metal wheels on metal rail. The swaying of the car is both comforting and awakening. In Europe the trains don’t sway as much. I guess the sway is one of the beauties of the Canadian track. Everyone else used concrete ties and high-tech rails. Not us Canadians, good old turn of the century-the 19th century that age of steam, iron and men driving nails with sledgehammers-wooden ties with metal piles. But this doesn’t bother train, as I hurtle towards my destination.
Now the inspiration comes, slowly. I will begin on my craft now. So will be born my book, on board a Canadian VIA train bound for Montreal.
A Quest for Easy Multiblog Setup
One of the downside of sporting the ‘Y’ chromosone, is the tendency to setup new kit without reading instructions. In my case a similar thing happened with my sites. I bought a domain and hosting. Then I installed Drupal hearing all the wonderful things I heard about Drupal. What I didn’t do was research to find out installing Drupal on GoDaddy could be problematic. And that Drupal is complicated to setup exactly how you want to. Also it turns out that Drupal is a pain to maintain. At least for me it seems that way.
Maybe the problem is because I am writer. As a writer I tend to view in the lens of literature. World history becomes a story, the Internet looks awfully like a multimedia capable library and all my websites morph into glorified blogs. I just can’t wrap my head around on WHY I actually need a CMS. I fought around with Drupal to get to look not half arsed. And then I installed WordPress for my blog and everything… just… worked! Out of the box. No questions asked. No fiddling around with .htaccess files. No monkeying around for modules just to do something useful.
Now I plan on transitioning my stealth project sites to WordPress. However I don’t want to handle multiple installations. A separate installation for my own personal blog is fine. But not for a separate installation for each project. Especially since all of my self-hosted projects will actually stem from one central project/system. I looked at WordPress MU but it looks too complicated to setup and maintain. I’m trying to avoid hacks if possible. But the WP Hive module/plugin looks promising. I’ll keep you updated on how things progress.
Notes: Excuse if some of my thoughts seem cryptic. Those in the know will understand why I can’t speak plainly about my upcoming projects. Those who don’t know will find out later, once I’m ready to announce my ideas to the rest of the world. And dear GoDaddy admins, fear not. I am not going to start a massive blog network on this hosted space. I just need a single tidy installation to run a few very related websites with different domains. So please don’t swing Thor’s ban hammer at my account. 🙂