S.G. Vulcan » Useful tools

Good VPS hosting

silviu — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:44:59 +0000

Like I said some time ago I had to move my websites from a shared host (bluehost) to a dedicated sollution. Well, the websites I host (for clients, friends and myself) don’t account for the need of a dedicated server so I searched for a virtual sollution.

I finally came to the conclusion that unmanaged is the way for me. I’m working on the old premise “give me a machine, an IP, a net pipe and some power” and I’ll manage from there.

Finally after some research I was left with two: Slicehost and Linode. From the features listed and user testimonials I found on various forums they are equally good. Simply when I needed to sign up Linode offered more space and RAM for the same amount of money, so the choice was easy.

What I like:

recently awarded more RAM as a 7 year Linode anniversary.
broad choice of operating systems
root access including console (if you borke your ssh daemon you can still login)
disk image tools
custom warnings on cpu, memory and bandwith increasing over certain limits you get to define(not that you are penalised but it simply means you probabbly have something hanging)
you can choose the datacenter and move your machine from one to another
you can easily buy more resources (ram, disk, bandwith)
It was never down for me
DNS manager
Statistics and everything

What I don’t like:

no symbian application or mobile admin website (only iphone and maybe android) – not a big deal, I still have an ssh client on my phone and the regular website works decent on my nokia’s browser

So, if you’re in the market for a virtual host I can recommend Linode from all my heart.

Is a site really down?

silviu — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:11:31 +0000

Sometimes I have to know if one of my websites or one of a client is down or not. More than once I’ve been tricked by the ISP’s troubles that a site is down. I use my smartphone to doublecheck but I’ve found an even better sollution:

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

You just enter your problem site and they will tell you if your site is really down or is just your ISP fooling around.

List of ISP DNS servers

silviu — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:26:12 +0000

This is a growing list of DNS servers. I consul it from time to time maybe you’ll find it usefull too.

I also maintain a growing list of free dns servers.

RDS Sibiu, Romania: 213.154.124.1 and 193.231.252.1

Romtelecom – ClickNet, Romania: 193.231.100.130 and 193.231.100.134

List of open dns servers

silviu — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:24:47 +0000

This is a growing list of Open DNS servers available around the world.

I also maintain a list of ip address of various isp providers.

Google DNS: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

OpenDNS: 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222. Open DNS also makes available a third and fourth dns server with identical service to the first two 208.67.220.222 and 208.67.222.220

ScrubIT: 67.138.54.100 and 207.225.209.66

VLC media player 1.0.0 – Goldeneye is out !

silviu — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:27:43 +0000

In the good tradition of Open Source projects VideoLAN has been at a version < 1.0 for ages. Traditionally 1.0 would be a complete, stable release. Well VideoLAN is there. Actually has been there for some time, I use it constantly and besides an uglier than usual interface has been stable and useful for me.

For those of you who don’t know VideoLAN is a full featured Media Player for Windows, Linux, OSX and many more operating systems. VLC 1.0.0 has support for live recording, new HD codecs (including Blu-ray and AES3), new formats, new encoders, and many other new features.

From it’s website:

Free, Open Source and cross-platform
Independant of systems codecs to support most video types
Live recording
Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support
Finer speed controls
New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, …)
New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, …) and major improvements in many formats…
New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
Video scaling in fullscreen

RTSP Trickplay support
Zipped file playback
Customizable toolbars
Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
Better integration in Gtk environments
MTP devices on linux
AirTunes streaming
New skin for the skins2 interface

What are you waiting? Grab yours here.

The cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac …) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols. See the full features list.
It can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on networks.

Open office to the rescue

silviu — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:48:47 +0000

Last Thursday I was happily walking to the bus station to start a prolonged weekend when a friend and client ranged. Microsoft Excel was giving her trouble: she was working on some inventory files with lots of records and pretty complex. To add to the problem the data was copied and pasted from an online list inside the browser. I suspect that some junk from the web inventory list tagged along.

Not being able to see the problem first hand I made the only recommendation that I could do over the phone: give open office a try.

To make a long story short it worked. The performance she got from OpenOffice Calc was way better.

So if you are having performance and speed issues with Microsoft Excel give Open Office a spin. It might be a lot of help.

You can find it here.

Graph paper tools

silviu — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:31:05 +0000

Although I do most of my work on a computer, I need from time to time to draw schematics, plans and so on. And for that I like to use millimeter graph paper. And I also like to print my own. So I made for myself a couple of PDF files with a graph paper template and I decided to share them with you.

Note: when printing make sure that you set Page scaling to none, otherwise the paper will come out wrong.

There are no markings, credits or links on the pages, just plain millimetric graph paper.

Although these files are free from marks I still want credit for them, so if you want them on your site please link to this post.

DIN A4 millimetric graph paper

DIN A3 millimetric graph paper