Shortwords – eh?

If like me you’ve been using LTS 8.04 for a while in work, at home or for play you may have been doing so for stability reasons.

This morning I got into the office and I was annoyed at some of the things that 8.04 was falling short on so I decided to dist-upgrade.

The main breakage post upgrade was tweetdeck, it kept saying that my ELS was corrupt and I’d need to re-enter my details. However then it would say that “A small number of people have problems with tweetdeck, we’re working on this”. I was stumped.

Easy fix was to remove Adobe Air, remove the .appdata/ folder in my users home directory and do:

# sudo dpkg -r tweetdeckfast.f9107117265db7542c1a806c8db837742ce14c21.1

This will remove tweetdeck from your system.

Now re-install Adobe Air and Tweetdeck and you should be back in business.

The background behind this post is important I guess. I went on holidays with Tara and her family earlier this year (for her sisters wedding) to the USA. We booked various hotels in different areas for the 15 days or so that we were going for. Tara is my girlfriend whom I’m going out with now for over a year.

While in the US we visited some of her relatives and we spent quite a bit of time in her aunt Tereasa’ house. Now Taz had given her fair warning that I’m fairly picky when it comes to food (those of you that know me well, know how bad I am!!) so she was all set for meat and chips. However while there she made this absolutely stunning dish called “Chicken Marsala” and I had seriously never tasted chicken as good before.

So when we came back I kept thinking about this great meal I had while I was away (I had many other great meals in her house, but this one sticks out the most) so I had to go about trying to make it.

First off, my only issue was really finding Marsala Wine. Thankfully O’Briens in Carlow had it stocked, a bottle cost me 12.99 which to me was a bit steep. But I got it and off I went.

I’ve tried it 4 times now and I hadn’t been able to successfully “make it the right way”, that was until today. I’ve got the correct measures down (be they a bit unaccurate for sharing) and I had the most beautiful chicken marsala again tonight. Tara concurs that it was excellent (not just said so, she ate the lot!).

The following receipe was what makes an excellent chicken Marsala (for 2 or 3, depending on what you serve with it)

1. 3-4 chicken breasts, thinly sliced.
2. real butter (10gramms) and olive oil (smallest amount will do)
3. flour
4. mushrooms
5. chicken stock cubes, knorr seem good
6. half a cup of Marsala Wine *
7. 1 cup of chicken stock *
8. A wide deep frying pan (*) or skillet

The process:

• Put 1.5 chicken stock cubes into a cup, fill with boiling water and stir, this is now your chicken stock.
• Cover a baking tray with flour, add salt and pepper and then cover all the pieces of chicken in flour. Heat the pan, after putting some of the butter and olive oil in, to the point just before the butter starts smoking (this is crucial) and then put the chicken on to it for approx 2-3 mins either side
• Take the chicken off and take the pan off of the heat for a minute. Put the chicken somewhere to keep it warm and where you can gather the juices from for later.
• Put the pan back on the heat and place the mushrooms onto it (obviously you can chop them what ever way you prefer) and cook them for 5-6 minutes or until their own moisture/juice starts to show.
• Immediately after the mushrooms own juices starting to show add the chicken stock. You’ll now cook the mushrooms for around 5 minutes on a medium heat in the stock.
• After 5 or so minutes have elapsed turn the heat down and now put the chicken back in, let the whole lot simmer for around 2-3 minutes and then add in the half a cup of marsala wine.
• Let this now simmer for 10 minutes on a low heat

* the measurements for the stock and wine I’ve used are because my frying pan is wide but the sides are not very high and it can’t support a lot of sauce/juices. Ideally use a pan with high sides and double up on these measurements so that you end up with quite a bit of the juices to place over your veg, potatoes or rice.

You can now serve the dinner to 2-3 people.

Enjoy this, I’d like to welcome comments on this post if anyone tries it out

Blacknight are going to launch their new shared hosting platform tomorrow August 7th 2008. We’ve been waiting to do this for close to 10 months now when we put development into overdrive.

What to expect?

1. More of everything
2. The basic package has 120 databases (30 Mysql4, 30 Mysql5, 30 Ms SQL 2005 and 30 Postgresql)
3. You can use MS SQL 2005 on linux now, wow?
4. The system is partially virtualised, we don’t need to install servers anymore. We simply tell our provisioning system to create a new VE (virtual environment) and apply a set of templates to it that match the shared hosting system.
5. PHP 4 and PHP 5 are available on both linux and windows
6. Complete DNS control, complete control over your domain and it’s name server settings
7. Manage your own spam and antivirus settings
8. Blacknight application vault with loads of apps you all have looked for
9. Single login gets you access to everything. i.e. once your in, you can manage your plesk vps, your shared hosting account, register domains, manage your payments, add a new credit card etc.
10. You get access to our new site builder that comes with over 250 templates and 100s of new features.
11. You can see the system defined mime types, you can also setup your own, awesome eh?
12. CGI sub section of the control panel tells you the paths to perl, python and sendmail and also what permissions to set on your files.
13. Theres a log manager where you can login and view your logs via ftp
14. Manage multiple ftp users without issue
15. @Mail webmail system
16. Advanced backup system that lets the user manage their backups.

It’s a complete suite of tools that anyone who has used any other control panel will fall in love with immediately.Where is this new system, well to get a look at it you’ll need to head over to http://dev.blacknight.ie and purchase a domain or a hosting package.

Our entry level plan has 10GB of disk space and 100GB of bandwidth, thats more than our existing plans put together almost!

last but not last a bit of information on the technology. We’ve deployed clustered Qmail + LDAP for e-mail. In front of this we’ve got load balancers that’ll send you to the least busy mail server when you use pop or smtp. We’re fully support pops, smtps and imaps. Behind the mail servers we’re using Solaris nfs servers attached directly to an EMC Clarion CX300 SAN unit providing us with the ultimate in enterprise storage and performance. Each linux web server will be a VPS. The benifit of this is ease of deployment, we can move VPS servers to less busy hardware nodes seemlessly and with minimal downtime (soon with no downtime!!). The back end provisioning system is comprised of two Parallels products, one is POA and the other is PBA, Parallels Operations Automation and Parallels Business Automation. Thats a split 40/60 for provisioning and billing. The billing end manages domain provisioning and a few other things.

Right this was a bit of a doozy.

1. sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin
2. cd .mozilla/plugins/
3. ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.06/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
4. restart firefox

It still doesn’t work? Ok. Type the following into your address bar about:plugins – if you see anything in relation to icedtea, remove it:

1. apt-get remove icedtea-gcjwebplugin
2. restart firefox

You should now have a functional JRE installed in Firefox3. This has been bugging me for a while as I’ve a few apps that use a JRE that I’ve not been able to use for a while.

I’ve been using ICQ for near enough 10 years. Yesterday it looks as if ICQ pushed out a network update that changed versions around. This broke ICQ for me on ubuntu hardy. I’ve been waiting since last night for a patched install but alas it hasn’t come and because time is money in business I needed ICQ working so I can liase with our Russian friends.

I’ve built a patched version which is available here: http://weird.ie/files/

Just download the 2 files and do:

sudo dpkg -i pidgin_2.4.1-1ubuntu3_i386.deb libpurple0_2.4.1-1ubuntu3_i386.deb

Restart pidgin and all will be well.

So we’ve been talking about stuff on the company blog, with friends, with customers etc for months. Today we’re doing a soft, low key, launch. It’s a new range of VPS plans based on Parallels Virtuozzo. It’s tacked onto our brand new billing and provisioning systems. It’s all part of the project we’ve been working on behind the scenes to automate more and more and also provide the next generation in hosting to our existing customer base and to the rest of Europe.

So here it is http://www.blacknightvps.com our new virtualisation product launch. It’s a cost effective, scalable, high performance platform that allows us to deliver services on Linux and Windows x64 Virtual Environments.

Some of the cool features include:

• Live migration
• CentOS 5.x and Windows 2003 x64 VPS
• Instant activation
• Virtuozzo Power Panel
• Advanced blacknight PEM billing control panel
• Ability to migrate a VPS to a dedicated server
• Ability to migrate a dedicated server to a VPS

And I guess lots more. We’ve thrown quite a bit of hardware at this new system and I’ve personally spent 100s of hours testing, configuring, breaking and fixing it over the past few months.

Any feedback, error reports etc are welcome.

We’re setting out to hiring a few people that’ll have to be located beside each of the data centres we use in Dublin so we can have staff on-site primarily during business hours. Later we’ll expand on that.

One reason Blacknight never had offices in Dublin is due to cost. Now lots of business are based in Dublin, that’s fine. However for the price of an office in Dublin we can hire 2-3 competent engineering staff. This is fact.

So in investigating our options I came across the following co-working site. After having a look around I see that they have 2 locations now that you rent office space in. It’s really simple, you get a desk, chair, internet, phone and secretarial services all for a fixed relatively low monthly fee. There are other ancillary services that you can pay additionally. It really is a good idea.

This is most probably the route we’ll go down for our “Data Centre Technican” positions that we have going. Hopefully this particular company might get more office space in west Dublin that’ll be closer to our kit.

As the title suggest I’ve thought about it long and hard over the past while and I’ve decided to go and buy a house. I had been living in a rented house for 7 years. I moved out in Oct. 2007 and moved into a house not far away with Tara. Amy and Niall. While living with a few people is good and all, the house we’re in isn’t great and it’s difficult to keep clean.

I’ve gone and made an offer on the old house and this has been accepted. It’s pretty new territory for me as I’d no idea how many forms that would be required or about the amount of paper work I had to get.

So I’m getting a 92% mortgage from Permanent TSB via a broker. It’s going to work out around 250 euro a month more than it would cost to rent a house on my own. So it’s not too bad. Also I’m getting all the furniture and fixtures so it’s a pretty sweet deal.

The mortgage is a “discounted tracker mortgage” which basically means it’s at a lower rate for the first year 4.7% AER and then it’ll move to around 5.2% in year two. Lots of people don’t know what a tracker mortgage is so I’ll try and explain it in simple terms. Basically the ECB (european central bank) sets a recommended rate in Europe that banks are supposed to follow. Now in the last 30 odd years (before tracker mortgages) you could be waiting a year before you bank gives you any discount on your loan rate after a drop. Now a tracker mortgage is linked to the ECB rate and is usually 0.25% and 1% in the difference of the ECB rate. Mine is going to be 0.75%. That means that if the ECB sets a rate of say 5.125% my rate could be either 5.2% AER or 5.05% AER. It’s up to the bank to decide. The main benifit of this is that when the rate changes my bank automatically adjust it for me. They can’t decide “We’re not going to give people the benifit of the ECB dropping their rates”, they have to give me the break. It also means that they have to put it up when it goes up.

Not that it was broke or anything. However they have removed the drop down box on the pin number screen. About bloody time too, it was pretty shoddy when it came to security.

I also note that they are giving 10% (EAR) Interest on current account balances upto 1500 euro. That’s pretty good.

It’s official. Well unofficially official. Myself and Michele went to Vodafone and got us some Nokia N95’s. I’d been fairly happy with my N91, but me having thick thumbs… I found the keypad a bit of a chore to use. Also the N91 was sooo fricken heavy, mostly because of its 4GB microdrive but the N95 weighs in at 120gramms.

Good things about the N95:

a) Web browser rocks, it’s a version of Safari apparently and it renders our site, crazy DHTML menus and all, very well. I used it a fair bit over the weekend and I like it. Most sites look as one would expect.

b) 5Mega Pixel camera, wow. That’s about all I can say. This small little device that weighs a lot less and is physically smaller than the N91 has one of the best cameras in the phone market. Not only does it have a good resolution, it is also designed so that it can be used as a normal camera. The up/down volume bottons are for zooming, then there’s a gallery button and the all important photo snap button and you can do this while the phone is on it’s side which allows you to make use of the large 2.6″ (240 x 320) screen.

c) Other misc features: Wifi which works very well, Bluetooth which seems quite compatibable with tonnes of devices including heaps of car kits etc, infra red which now is mostly not used, but hey it has it, 3G support which works very nicely, MMS and txt message support etc.
d) Digital music player – supports MP3/AAC/AAC+/eAAC+/WMA/M4A with playlists and equalizer.

e) It’s mighty pretty, I like it a lot.

f) It takes those new mini-SD cards that are super small

g) GPS, which works well. Friend mentioned getting route 66 software for it which I’m going to look into this evening.

Faults:

a) Battery life

b) Battery life

c) Battery life

Yes, overall this is a fantastic phone. The battery life is pretty poor. Just incase anyone asks, I’ve 3G off most of the time along with bluetooth, wifi scanning etc. About 1 day of use is all I’m getting. This makes me not want it. But all the other cool features save it for me.

It’s a deadly phone, get one.