October 7, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was really fed up with Apache on this server. It would use huge amounts of RAM, even after all the visitors left the website. Having done all tweaks to the memory usage of Apache and PHP, the amount of RAM used would never get below 450MB (out of the 512MB this VPS has). Hell, Apache was consuming even more memory than MySQL!
For those who don’t know, nginx is an alternative, lightweight webserver which is generally used (by many popular websites) as a load balancer. However, it can also act as the single web server on a system, like what Apache and Lighttpd do. I had worked with nginx before on some small websites on low-resource servers, and I was quite satisfied with it. As I explained with an earlier blog post, nginx is great as long as the website you want to serve with it does work with nginx – that is, doesn’t heavily depend on Apache rules or some Apache-specific thing. Sure, those rules can be converted to nginx config options, but I never succeeded on making eyeOS 1.x work fully with nginx.
WordPress is one of the scripts that works best with nginx. Since this website is mainly powered by nginx (although I have some custom scripts laying around, mainly the scripts providing alternative WiiMC internet media), I made my mind and decided I would go through the hassle of switching from Apache to nginx. It wasn’t a big hassle after all: apart from having to restart the server at some point due to a RAM outage, the website wasn’t offline much time, and there was no data loss.
After putting Apache off-use and starting nginx, the server was still using 300MB of RAM. I though nginx couldn’t be using so much RAM, and there was another problem laying around. Turns out to be a problem in MySQL config: I don’t need InnoDB functionality, so usually I add a “skip-innodb” line to my.cnf. The problem was, this line needs to be added under the [mysqld] section and in my case, it was somewhere else. So I moved skip-innodb to the right place, restarted MySQLd, and that’s it:
The server is now using 240MB of RAM, which still fits inside the dedicated RAM (256MB), so I’m not taking any of the burst RAM, which resides in the server swap space. The RAM usage is still high, because I have other things running such as dovecot for mail delivery.
It also looks faster to load pages, but probably someone with a faster connection than me will notice a bigger difference.
October 6, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
So the last times have been strange again. A lot of events which somehow hit me harder, for the good or for the bad, have happened recently. Some are more personal than others, anyway. Here are the ones I can remember and talk about in public, ordered in chronological order:
- My cat is really sick 🙁
- dmmcintyre3 got me a .com domain – I wasn’t expecting that in any way, thanks a lot! 🙂
- Steve Jobs had his last kernel panic (must I explain?). Let him rest in peace.
- It’s hot like hell in Portugal, hotter than in the Summer, and it’s already 6th October
- Last night (during the Steve Jobs thing, perhaps) I got a bunch of twitter followers. Funnier: most of these users have their following and follower counts on the hundreds, but never posted a single tweet. One word: spam bots.
- And some more things I can’t remember! (I forgot about them while I was writing this, and now I can’t remember. Seriously!)
October 5, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Following the latest changes in this website domain, it looks like it will have to edit the URL for this website in wordpress settings again, in no more than a week.
But this time, unlike last time, I’m incredibly happy. No, my birthday is only on 8th October, but the owner of http://freevps.us, dmmcintyre3 has registered for me the domain “myself on .com”, that is,http://gbl08ma.com . Yeah! That’s myself on a .com domain – in case you haven’t understood.
Goodbye malware-false-markings due to the use of crappy free domains! Now I only have to make sure my real TLD is not marked as malware itself.
Now I can freely post URLs for posts in my blog without fear for supposedly containing malware! This is an huge step!
Remember, the Bitcoin donations thing is still valid; at the end, I want to renew this domain next year 🙂
An huge thank you to dmmcintyre3! And to Namecheap for providing cheap domain names.
October 2, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
For those who may not know, ReactOS is an operating system that “aims to follow the Windows-NT® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level”. By other words, the idea is to provide Windows XP-level compatibility with software and hardware.
Looks like a neat idea? Yes, indeed. An “open source Windows” system would has lots of applications, for example, in situations where demand for using open source software and common standards, instead of proprietary solutions, exists (like what happens, in theory, on some country governments).
Why it doesn’t work right? Well, nobody can say the project has been abandoned. It’s progressing, but very slow. I can’t blame the developers for the slowness: the task they’re doing is hard, and there aren’t many developers devoted to the project.
The latest version was released on March 2011, and it was just a tiny improvement over all that’s still missing. My only concern is, when they get a Windows XP compatibility that is good enough, won’t be XP as obsolete as Windows 95 is now? At the end, Windows XP is already more than 10 years old, and even some of the most recent software by its creator, Microsoft, doesn’t work on XP (e.g. IE 9 or the latest Live Messenger).
And another thing: if ReactOS gets noticed enough, won’t Microsoft try to squash them and send some juridical flames regarding e.g. stupid patents? Or even reverse engineering, although I don’t think they can be legitimately accused of doing it? Note that these questions may also apply for WINE and similar software, but up to now, it looks like they have been safe from Microsoft’s hammer.
September 29, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
First of all, sorry for posting nothing on this blog for more than a month. The truth is, school has started, I’ve got to study, after studying I have lots of other things to do, and, in general, posting on this blog has been the last of the priorities. It’s also true that during this month I didn’t come with something worth a blog post. However, in the last days some online events made me direct some attention to this blog and the server it is hosted in.
Some days ago, Pingdom started reporting that gbl08ma.cz.cc was down… and down… and down… not only gbl08ma.cz.cc, but also all the cz.cc domains were down for more than 48 hours – and continue to be, and will never come back up – I explain later. After more than 48 hours of consecutive downtime (and an email inbox full of Pingdom alters), I decided it was time to “wake up” and take some action.
So, I went searching. I knew that everything cz.cc was down, that was a fact. After no more than 30 seconds of Googling, I see the expressions “takes offline”, “cz.cc domains”, “Microsoft” and “Kelihos Botnet” on the same headline.
Before we continue, let me explain: I knew Microsoft and its “secure internet” partners had taken the Kelihos botnet down some days ago, I just didn’t know how that was related to cz.cc subdomains. So don’t take me for as so uninformed as you might think.
…turns out that Microsoft and its partners took the cz.cc domain service down along with the Kelihos botnet. OK, I had assumed this would happen anytime soon, the point is that it just happened before I thought it would be, and it happened before my eyes. So, cz.cc was taken down, after being considered as being a Kelihos partner and containing other multiple issues (we all know the lots of spam and scams operated from cz.cc domains, right?).
Well. Yesterday I was a bit angry with Microsoft, but now I think it was a great thing after all: they shut a bad thing off the internet, while forcing me not to use that horrible domain service anymore. For me, the biggest hassle is updating the URL of this blog on all places I left it. The ideal solution to this free domain problem was to buy a real top-level domain and get off with gbl08ma.com or gbl08ma.net, but as I don’t have enough money to buy a TLD yet, I just moved to the very-reliable and reputable freedns.afraid.org (unlike cz.cc, it isn’t associated with badware or spam).
Plus, afraid.org has some great points compared to cz.cc: since Google banned them from search results, this blog could not be listed on Google; now with afraid.org, I’m still not listed on Google by default, but I can bother Joshua Anderson, the FreeDNS admin, to whitelist this website and allow Google to index it, like he did with my 4.l.to URL shortener. (to Joshua Anderson: if you’re reading this, smile 🙂 ).
There’s even another great thing, apart from not being associated with the “dark side” of the ‘net. The FreeDNS domain I chose is even shorter than the previous one!
Conclusion: The URL for this blog is now http://gbl08ma.l.to. (not anymore, read last update)
I’m progressively updating all references to gbl08ma.cz.cc on the internet to gbl08ma.l.to, as long as it’s under my control; if you ever linked to this website, please update your links; remember to update your bookmarks too, if you had any. Starting now, forget gbl08ma.cz.cc and update your mind to use gbl08ma.l.to. I thank you for not associating this little blog with Kelihos, since it was never associated and never will.
See you!
Gabriel
EDIT: I was trying to configure WP to Twitter plugin to work with the new URL, and at the Twitter developers center, I just discovered that Twitter thinks that l.to domains are malware, too. Damn! What free domains aren’t considered as malware?! I need a TLD… please… oh damn, I can’t pay.
EDIT2: As you should be noticing, the blog is now on a .com domain. So the accurate URL is http://gbl08ma.com
August 18, 2011 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment
Letting anyone who might read this know that I’m accepting Bitcoin donations of any amount at the Bitcoin wallet:
1Kw1ACWYy7YdoNsSKH6jig5Bqi1J9Y9F8f
Any amount you donate, even if very, very small, is appreciated 🙂
August 11, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Today I was going to add one of my new websites, http://webshuff.uni.cc , to Google webmaster tools and for my surprise, right after I verified the ownership of the website, it showed this message at the top of the dashboard:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
Well, this exact same message is shown for this website gbl08ma.cz.cc I added some months ago. The message started appearing two or three weeks ago.
I thought immediately it was due to the fact that this website has a .cz.cc domain. I submitted a reconsideration request, after making sure this website was following all Google Webmaster guidelines, and some days ago Google said it had been processed, but so far this website, which previously appeared on Google search results, doesn’t appear anymore. Click for proof.
I didn’t bother much. nic.cz.cc started to give problems some time ago, when the first episodes of Google marking all the cz.cc domain and subdomains as containing malicious software or content. I thought: easy, just switch to another domain name like uni.cc. And I decided to myself: from on now, I will use uni.cc for new websites I create – even because uni.cc seems much stable and less abused than cz.cc.
So, for one of my new websites, Webshuff, I chose uni.cc network for my free domain service. From the part uni.cc is responsible for, I have no complaints… however, I only realized Google was also hiding uni.cc websites from Google searches when today I saw this warning on Webmaster Tools. I’m not even going for submitting a reconsideration request: all the uni.cc and cz.cc websites are being hidden from Google’s search results, and most likely any reconsideration request is being suppressed, because all these websites are just cz.cc or uni.cc subdomains and the rules not for showing these websites apply to all subdomains, and Google doesn’t seem to open exceptions.
Summing up, what’s the current state then?
- cz.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- uni.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
Sure, there are many more free domain and DNS services. We have, for example, the old and very abused co.cc. But… Google is blocking co.cc since long ago (by long I mean, perhaps since the start of July this year). co.cc I perfectly understand because: a) when I used it for the first an last time, it sucked so hard… their website made it look like it all was a scam, not to talk about some of the websites the subdomains pointed to. From phishing websites to all the kinds of online scams and spams, they had of everything bad in great amounts, at that time… “at that time” was like two years ago. Things didn’t get better since that time (instead, the opposite happened), and Google kicked out co.cc of search results because 90% of the subdomains pointed to dangerous and not worthy websites.
Summing up again…
- cz.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- uni.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- co.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
By other words, all free domain services are not listed by Google except two… dot.tk and co.nr. Click for proof. If Google lists any more, they don’t have enough PageRank to appear on the first page. So, let’s analyse dot.tk cz.cc and co.nr in greater detail…
dot.tk
I used them with the first websites I created. My experience with them was great until to turned horrible the day one of my domains got lots of hits – turns out Google had just indexed it, and as I offered unlimited cloud space on a online desktop powered by eyeOS, lots of people visited the website. The day that could be a change in the way of my webservice and of my online reputation (not that I spend all my life thinking about online reputation, but whatever) turned out to be the day dot.tk pointed the domain goonawebtop.tk to SedoParking (yep, that horrible website where dead domains are parked to). Following goonawebtop.tk, all my dot.tk domains were pointed to SedoParking in a few hours.
Although the domains were pointed to SedoParking, they were listed on my dot.tk account as being pointed to the correct IP. I’m sure I followed dot.tk TOS/AUP. I tried deleting my domains to add them again, but when I tried to add them, they weren’t available anymore.
Other people have reported this behavior on high-traffic domains by dot.tk.
Conclusion: dot.tk points domains with a great amount of traffic to SedoParking in order to make money out of them, and doesn’t allow people to point them back. cz.cc has also pointed my domains to SedoParking-like websites for multiple times, although the IP in the A record was explicitly changed and I could change it back (and the admin of .cz.cc also promised me multiple times it wouldn’t happen again).
I’m not going for dot.tk after my first experience with them. And personal experiences apart, I’m not going for a domain service that drives traffic away from my website once I get many visitors. Would you? If yes, sure, go with them, you might be lucky and they might not point your domain anywhere (like what happened with freevps.tk). But if they do… don’t say you were not warned.
nic.cz.cc
I started using them when dot.tk failed. They have even more features than dot.tk, and they also have a way to pay for premium accounts and additions to domains internally, paying with “My Balance”. People could earn balance without spending money by doing paid2surf on cz.cc websites. I made more than “$30″ (with quotes) using this method, and bought myself a cz.cc VIP account.
cz.cc was great for some time, like four or five months, but after that, Google started marking all the subdomains as containing malicious content, without exceptions. Problem was solved some days later, and it was good for a month. But, in mid-June, Google was marking all websites as containing dangerous content – again. And more recently, cz.cc was kicked out of Google search results like what had happened with co.cc before.
co.nr
I never used them, and I don’t think it’s worth a try now that Google is motivated kicking free subdomains out of search results. I think we only need to wait some time until more spammers/phishers/abusers start using it more, and it will also be kicked out of search results like what happened with co.cc, cz.cc and uni.cc. Note that I don’t think this last one, uni.cc, is very abused, but anyways, Google doesn’t think, it computes. And thinking is completely different from computing.
So what?
Google seem to want us to buy a former TLD (top level domain). The question is, where in Google do I fill a form applying to get a free domain? Yep, because not everybody has the money to pay for a TLD, or sometimes we have the money but no way to get it online. Or else, people younger than 16 or 18 years old are denied from publishing their content on the web on an independent website, on a independent server, using a free domain service.
But are you so sure nothing will save us? [people cry]
Well, there’s the free DNS service by freedns.afraid.org. Yay! But wait, weren’t these blocking Google bots? Yes. In this case, Google doesn’t block them but they block Google. No chance your afraid.org-created subdomains will ever appear on Google except… if you contact the owner of afraid.org, Joshua Anderson, with a working website that isn’t likely to get abused.
I contacted the admin of freedns.afraid.org using the email at the bottom of their page (yep, that one for reporting abuses) asking him if he could move my subdomain 4.l.to to the separate DNS set that allows Google access. After some email exchange, and after I made sure my new URL shortener (which is what is at 4.l.to) wouldn’t get abused and would stay around for some time, and also after explaining I couldn’t pay for a TLD (like I explained to so many people on the web…), I finally got that nice blue “G” near the 4.l.to domain on my list of subdomains!
But, this doesn’t mean you are so lucky. You might not get Google access to your afraid.org subdomains. Anyways, afraid.org still seems better than those abused co.cc and cz.cc.
Summing up for one last time…
- cz.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- uni.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- co.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- co.nr is listed on Google, but I’m not sure it will be listed for much time until Google decides to kick them out too.
- dot.tk is listed on Google, but a) I’m not sure for how much time that will remain that way; b) I have had a bad experience with them and c) they point some of the high-traffic domains to pages with sponsored links in order to make money from the visitors you gathered – not nice.
- freedns.afraid.org is free, stable and has not much abusers (if any), but they block Google access and you must ask the admin personally to let Google go your website’s way.
I hope you have liked this giant blog post! Hopefully it will be of some use to those looking for free domain services. Now the only problem will be getting people to this blog post, because this website is (like all the other .cz.cc websites) kicked out of Google’s search results. (Editor’s note: not anymore since I got myself a .com domain)
August 2, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I enjoy reading xkcd in these times I’m bored without anything to do, but at the same time, not willing to shutdown the computer. So basically, I get to xkcd, and go hit the Random button until it is so late that it’s mandatory to go to bed (in order to wake up soon early to still catch users from “distant” time zones online). I tend not to read the comic very often so the “Random” button still delivers me some unseen comics (hey, I haven’t seen all 900+ comics yet!).
Today the “Random” button delivered me a comic from Spring 2007. Its number is 256 (heh! the amount of MB the VPS that runs this blog has of guaranteed RAM). Here it is, click to see bigger:
Look at how much has changed to nowadays. To make this map more actual, I think Facebook and MySpace should swap positions. Orkut would need to be smaller (unless you’re considering only the accesses by Brazilian people, and even that is decreasing). We would need another fairly small island for Google+, and a bigger one for Twitter. Second Life would disintegrate. Sourceforge island would get smaller and an island slightly to the left of it would accommodate GitHub along with smaller islands for all the recently-born git-hosting websites.
Other interesting point is, The Icy North would get smaller (global warming? 🙂 ) and the Mountains of Web 1.0 would be renamed to Mountains of copy-cat Web “2.0″. And let’s not forget, the IRC isles would certainly keep the same size or even be bigger, but they would be much more idle and abandoned (IMHO a island for dead/98% idle IRC channels and users should be created, and another one for malfunctioning IRC bots).
And as I am really jealous, I’d also like a small island for this blog on the Blogipelago. 🙂
The “Gulf of Youtube” would get an island on the middle divided between Next New Networks, sorry, I meant YouTube Next Lab and Audience Development Group[¹] and VEVO (size based on watch count). And etc. This is just my view of the actual www vs. 2007′s www. You certainly disagree with me in some points. But, there’s something you must agree: in four years, the web has changed so much, and we only notice when we look back with wide open eyes and mind.
Now go read xkcd. Or go outside getting some Vitamin D (not really possible at the moment of writing of this post, as it’s midnight here).
[¹] I could write an entire, long blog post with my critic, perhaps skeptic, thoughts on the acquisition of Next New Networks by YouTube. Instead, let’s abbreviate and simply say that before, they were a successful independent project, now, they’re Google.
July 27, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I have a small (512MB!) SD card for extra storage on my HTC Universal (running Windows Mobile 6.1). Most of that is full with applications and photos. Conclusion: I have no place to put my music collection, which wouldn’t fit in 512MB whatsoever. So, I started to think about streaming music to the phone… the best streaming service I know, that works on my country, is Grooveshark, but simultaneously I knew there was no free, official Grooveshark client for Windows Mobile.
Some Google searches after… I found GrooveFish. GrooveFish was supposed to be a free Grooveshark client for Windows Mobile, the problem was that is it discontinued and really outdated; I downloaded the installer CAB file and installed. But what could one expect, it didn’t work, just hanged when searching for songs.
After another Googling session and some link following, I discover GrooveMobile. GrooveMobile appears to be very similar to GrooveFish, and in fact it is, but the difference is, it occupies some more KBytes of space, and it actually works. By “actually works” I mean:
- It can successfully search for songs without any hang (provided that your connection is stable and fast)
- You press a song to the list to add it to the internal playlist of the program
- It follows the playlist and… ladies and gentlemen, we have sound 🙂
- Now lets do a quick test that might ruin all this: lets set the Universal to close position (screen facing keyboard) and see if the sound keeps playing…
- …and yes, it keeps playing with the phone closed! It keeps following playlist and everything. Sweet!
Now you might be wondering, did anyone ask/pay me to write this review? Absolutely not; I found the software, it works well, and I decided to share it with my readers which might have a Windows Mobile phone. Note that the app requires Compact .NET framework 3.5, but unlike many .Net framework apps developed for Windows Mobile, this actually works and doesn’t suck – at least on my device, of course. “Use at your own risk” is another statement that applies in this case 🙂 .
I haven’t tested all the functions of the app, but will do progressively. I’ll keep this post updated. Oh, and don’t forget that this is an application that streams files from the internet, so it consumes a lot of traffic, and we all know 3G data connections aren’t cheap everywhere for everyone 🙂 . Personally, I only use GrooveMobile over WiFi.
July 22, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Why do I have the impression that it is starting to be kind of a website-promoting website for the web 2.0?
You see, a bare web service that wouldn’t get otherwise very well known, not very rarely gets hundreds of users once it publishes an app for that service on the Chrome Web Store. Even if the app is nothing more than a link to the website of the web service, it doesn’t matter: as long is the web service is of good quality, it’ll get popular amongst Google Chrome users in a way it would never be as a normal website showing up on Google results.
If these guys doing website optimizations to get more visits aren’t still using the Chrome Web Store as a way to promote websites, they should. At the end, nowadays calling “app” to a website acts as an huge upgrade to that website.
