June 25, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was having certain problems with the VPS luis123456 gave me… and after some personal conflicts with him related to the VPS he gave me (not this one, the other from Hostrail (HR)), I decided to swap it by a different one distributed by freevps.us. This decision was higly promoted by the fact that the other VPS got reloaded again yesterday.
The other, HostRail VPS I’m talking about was the one that hosted s.cz.cc and idoupload.cz.cc, so these services will be unavailable for a while (editor’s note: they won’t be available, for ever). As I got a up-to-date backup of the HR VPS, it will be easier to bring everything back to life.
Specifications for this new VPS:
- 512MB RAM (1GB Burst/Swap) (higher than the HR one, which was 256MB guaranteed/512MB swap)
- 20GB disk space (lower than the previous one, which was 30GB)
- 1TB of Bandwidth (1000GB and not 1024, not that makes much difference), which is much more than the HR one, with just 300GB of BW.
- SolusVM control panel (the same as the VPs that is hosting this website)
- Provided by 123systems.net and located in Dallas, TX, USA – So, now I have a UK European VPS and another one located in USA.
I must thank 123systems.net for providing this VPS to freevps.us. In fact, a VPS with half of this specs costs $3.00/month according to their website, so my VPS is worth $6.00/month or more.
Hopefully, soon I’ll have s.cz.cc (URL shortener) and idoupload.cz.cc (image hosting) back to life soon (Editor’s note: not anymore), on another and hopefully more reliable server. Not that Hostrail is bad: it’s just that my VPs was inside luis123456′s VPS, and he rebuilt and shutdown my VPS as he wanted. Now things will be different, I hope.
June 22, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Some time ago, I wrote on my other blog, written in Portuguese, that Facebook was wanting all users to provide their full name as the profile name – a position understandable in certain ways, but these people that keep on telling us the risks of the Internet tell us “don’t. providing your full name on the web is dangerous”. So, what should we do? Stop participating on the Internet’s biggest social network (as of 22/06/2011 DD/MM/YYYY), which by the way, I don’t like (hate), but it’s where all our “friends” and family are “connected”. Stop participating on many other websites of interest? Bah… better provide your full name and sacrifice the “security” the “web experts” say you have by not providing it.
(Noticed the quotes on the word “connected”?)
[Image not available anymore due to data loss that happened when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
Oh, and by the way, that thing of ”Alternate name” doesn’t allow me to put gbl08ma, it says it contains invalid characters (!).
Apart from Facebook, the web’s (and real life) giant Google now also wants us to provide our full name on their mini-social-network +1, where you can recommend pages to other users. When I tried to provide my webname “gbl08ma” as my profile public name, that will be visible to everyone, see below:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss that happened when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
Independently from being dangerous or not, providing our full name is not always necessary, so why should we? If we don’t, however, we aren’t exactly following the terms of Facebook, Google’s +1, and all those sites on the Internet (it’s not only Google and Facebook; I’m presenting those as an example because there are some of the biggest websites) that ask for your full name to be publicly visible – one thing is when your data is not going to be visible to nobody other than the site’s administrators and people of the same or more permissions as the admins, other is when it is asked to be part of your public profile that’s visible to everybody.
At least, on twitter I’m still able to put gbl08ma or just Gabriel as my screen name 🙂
June 16, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Nowadays, people who visit my (this) website will find that it is being marked as malware by no feasible reason, again – see the first chapter here.
I repeat, this website has no malware or other harmful content. Feel free to scan it as you can, with all the bots you can, I can even give you a read-only SFTP account for you to see there’s no malware in here. Only Ubuntu Server with Apache, PHP, MySQL, with this blog running on WordPress and some free (as in speech and as in beer) licensed fonts in Rockbox format for download.
I have just request Google another site review. This time, instead of writing a long letter explaining everything on the comments box, I sum up everything on a single sentence with the most important data in capital letters (not that I like using capital letters all the time, but having to way to format, I had to do it this way):
It’s the second time Google marks my website as malware, although I HAVE NO MALWARE ON THE SITE AND THERE NEVER HAVE BEEN any malware or harmful content there. Please make sure this DOESN’T HAPPEN AGAIN or I’ll start to think that there are enough reasons to blame Google with its malware advisor tools that mark a site as malware just because it uses a .CZ.CC DOMAIN!
Yes, because I still believe these malware traces Google bots find are due to malware found on other .cz.cc sites and servers. Please, but please, don’t make me switch to a uni.cc domain. I have no money to pay for a formal top level domain name (.com, .net, .org, etc.), even more if the site in quesion is this personal blog which has no (z-e-r-o) revenue.
Here’s a proof screenshot of Google’s classification of my site and review request:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss, when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
And the confirmation from Google:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss, when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
What do you think? Has this ever happened to you? Do you know of a solution, or at least something that can minimize the problem? Have your say on the comments!
EDIT (right after posting): Google also marked another site I have on another server as malware. This one is also a .cz.cc domain, s.cz.cc. I’ts my new URL shortener. I have a message for Google (and a rhetoric question):
Google, STOP! You are killing lots of .CZ.CC websites, many of them have NO malware! This is censuring inoffensive parts of the web! Or… is that your goal?
EDIT 17/6/2011: I’m not the only one suffering from this issue. Lots of people are too. Acoording to stats, this blog post is getting lots of hits from people searching for “cz cc malware”, “cz cc malware banned” and similar. There are people on “Google Help Center” forums complaining about this. How many hours, days, weeks, will it take for the issue to be solved?
EDIT 2 17/6/2011: Good news, at least for this domain, as “said” by Google Webmaster tools on this website:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss, when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
“A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean. The badware warnings from web search are being removed.” 🙂
June 9, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
OK, not really. But I thought it’d be a great title for this post.
This is a personal opinion/story post and won’t help you much if you came here from a search result page, while looking for a solution for a problem on your Ubuntu installation. If that’s your case, don’t waste more time reading this post, as probably it won’t help you (but you might find your situation similar).
For those who don’t know, I use Ubuntu on my main desktop as the main OS. Yes, I know how to work with Microsoft Windows, but I don’t use it much at home.
The problem in my case, I think, comes in part from having a lot of packages installed due to the fact that I have both Gnome and KDE installed, although I never use KDE nor its apps. Sometimes, some conflicts with the package updates appear, specially because I have packages from PPAs and other unofficial repositories.
Since the release of Ubuntu 11.04, which I won’t update my PC to too soon, Ubuntu updates manager keeps bothering me about a “partial update”, that basically would just update my Ubuntu 10.10 install to a semi 11.04, something I don’t want. I hate these package updates. I know it won’t install Unity and set it as default Desktop Environment, but still, I don’t want to have a half-10.10-half-10.04 Ubuntu specially when such updates will delete for sure certain “mods” I did to my install like the custom bootsplash, the mintmenu (yes, it was on the list of packages to remove with the partial update), and the custom repositories and PPAs (now you know why I put “mods” between quotes, it’s because these really aren’t mods).
Well, I ended up doing the “partial update”. I lost the Linux Mint menu, obviously, but not the bootsplash. Now you ask, if I was so bothered about updating, why did I proceed? Because I eventually know I’ll switch to another Linux distro soon.
Fedora was a possibility, but since I saw the new version, it’s out of the list. Reason: it brings Gnome 3 and it’s basically a copy of Unity, so now I’m hating both of them: Unity for being a copy of Gnome 2 with flashy effects, a dock, and other MS-Windows-7-style “innovations” that would make sense in a tablet or mobile phone, or even an interactive coffee table, but that I hate having on my desktop – it’s just not productive; and Gnome 3 for being a copy of Unity – or is Unity a copy of Gnome 3? Doesn’t matter: I find either of them unproductive and too eyecandy, to not say that I need two or more clicks to perform an action that on Gnome 2 I do with one click: for example, switching from one window to another (fortunately, they have kept Alt+Tab!).
Seeing as I’m very exigent with the Desktop Environment of the distro I use, perhaps I’ll just stick with this Ubuntu and its malfunctioning updates… well, if I weren’t lazy, I have the knowledge to fix it, but it’s simply too much work, I repeat, I’m lazy…
June 8, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
One of the important things I’m confirming with this blog is that the more content you produce, and the more variated that content is, and the more variated that content is, the most visits you get. Seems obvious, but yeah, like you’re saying, I’m retarded so this is news for me.
Furthermore, this website is not Search Engine Optimized and I only have 12 blog posts (13 with this one), but yet I get around 12 visits per day.
Now it seems the way is to continue writing great and relevant posts and I’ll see the stats growing 🙂
June 8, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Apache is a long well-known web server software, the most used in web servers around the internet. I met nginx when I started looking into getting free low-end VPS for my websites and scripts.
Basically, what I have learned is that most scripts won’t work well even if you convert the .htaccess’es into nginx config files. In my opinion, it’s simply not worth to get a VPS with less than 256MB of dedicated RAM, because on fewer RAM you won’t be able to run Apache properly (most of the times, Apache will just fill up the RAM leaving you locked out of your VPS because you can’t SSH as Linux doesn’t have enough free RAM to start a new shell session.
On servers with few RAM (512MB, for example) you can still run Apache and have some RAM free. If you have MySQL installed, the trick to reduce RAM consists on disabling inno-db and other database engines you don’t need. Apache can also be configured to waste less RAM on low traffic websites – you can reduce the number of max clients and connections, but this can make the site unresponsive (slow) if you get many hits at a time.
In conclusion, if you’re sure you can setup your script with nginx and cgi-php (or other lightweight webserver, e.g. lighthttpd), go for it. I have nothing against nginx, I only wish developers supported nginx (and lighthttpd and etc.) more instead of the already much explored (and at times exploited) Apache.
June 5, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was reading this thread on the FreeVPS forum and replied with my opinion about the websites that use the kind of scripts presented in that thread. For those who don’t bother about checking the thread, it is about a script (copied&pasted from some javascripts site) that warns people when they first right-click on the website the script is put on, and when people right-click again they will get hung.
I can’t tell you how much I hate the websites that use that kind of scripts. Most of the time I’m right-clicking to open a link in a new tab or to see the correction suggestions for an error on the text I’m writing at the page. When the right-click is simply disabled and doesn’t appear, it’s boring but not very bad when compared to those pages where you click and it tells you not to click… or better yet, not to copy and plagiarize content when all I’m trying to do is opening a link in another tab.
Worse: sometimes these scripts will just render the page black even if you just accidentally clicked the right button for the second or third time. I never come back to these sites, most of the times I quit once I see a stupid message saying I can’t right-click, even if the content is right what I’m looking for.
This is just a very small part of the websites I hate… others include the traditional websites with popups and lots of ads, the websites that will send a lot of javascript window.alert() when you try to go away from the page, those that no matter how much times you click on the Back button, they won’t you exit out to where you came from (e.g. Google search results). I’ll write about these later.
To finish, I’d like to present you with a new funny right I just remembered of:
Right-clicking webpages is a right of any website visitor, not respecting this right will get your website banned from your website visitor’s “Websites to visit” list and added to the “Websites to hate and stay away” list. 🙂
June 3, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Just a quick post to inform the (few) readers of this blog that I got the first spam comment. It was on the Lua Scripts for Rockbox page, and the “Spam” link right below the comment on the “Recent Comments” widget on my WordPress Dashboard fit just perfectly in this case 🙂
Now lets hope this doesn’t continue or I’ll have to go about more agressive antispam measures, and starting to fill the list of banned IPs of the server.
EDIT: I got another Spam post, but this one looked more like some stupid guy trying to be funny typing random characters into the comment box. And it contained a random URL which I didn’t care about checking where it lead. I’ll try to keep this post updated with more news of Spam on this blog… while it’s humanly possible.
EDIT2: I enabled Akismet after getting another trash comment 🙂 Let’s see how it goes.