News and stuff..

After finding out that my free Joyent Facebook accelerator was going to expire in a week, i started acting fast.. I had to move Halo 3 Players from Joyent to my SliceHost slice (that also hosts this blog). Being a man strapped for cash, I really couldn’t afford the ‘upgrade’ offer that Joyent was offering. For a 512MB server, they wanted me to pay a $75 setup fee (to setup a server I’ve been using for a year now?) and then $75 a month on top of that. They had annual deals and even a ‘buy 1 year and get a 2nd for free’ deal for christmas, but again.. I’m broke. So I’m sticking with SliceHost and I think I’ll stick with them for all of my ‘cheap’ hosting needs. I’ve had a 512MB Slice on SliceHost for almost 2 years (?) now and it works fantastically.. And it’s about half as much as Joyent’s! Anyone who needs affordable hosting that’s awesome, check out SliceHost!

So the server move went well. Better than I thought it would. I actually rebuilt my Slice from scratch just so I could make sure it was clean and ready to serve up Halo 3 Players. It only took me most of a night to get all my web stuff back up and running and now I can just spend some spare time tweaking things.

What else is new? I’ve diving in, head first, into iPhone development. I’ve never really done anything with C, C++, Objective-C, Cocoa.. or anything really besides Ruby. So I’ve been cramming my brain with lots of new information and I think I’m doing quite well. I’d love to start developing games but I’m having a hard time finding a good ‘getting started’ book. I really need something that teaches the basic concepts behind efficient game programming, so if anyone knows of a good place for me to start, leave a comment or something. That would be great!

That’s all I got for now. I’m thinking of doing a nice blog post when I have some very general understanding of game programming to help anyone else who’s just starting out. Until then.. Have a great holiday and I’ll write more whenever I have something to write about! x=)

Getting Started on SliceHost: Part 1 (Ruby on Rails)

I’ve only been a member of SliceHost (the server that is currently serving this article to you) for a week now but I have to say that I’m very impressed and very pleased with the service thus far. They have a real-ness about them. They have an IRC channel where you can actually find members of the staff. They don’t limit what you can do on your VPS. They’re inexpensive. I could go on about why I think they’re service is great, but I’ll stop myself there. I want to string together some articles that will basically go over how I set up certain parts of my server for those of you who are either new to SliceHost or new to setting up a server.

Since most of my work and most of this blog will be about Ruby on Rails, I thought it only fit that the first article be about getting a Ruby on Rails system up and running. My slice has Gentoo installed on it, so the instructions will be using commands specific to Gentoo, but if your using a different system, you should be able to follow along and replace ‘emerge’ with your package manager. Let’s get started, shall we?

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New Home

I’ve been busy for the last 4 days learning myself some system administration. I purchased a ‘slice’ from SliceHost and have to say that I’m very pleased with it. They’re prices are fantastic and you have basically no restrictions as to what you can do with your server (keep it legal, is all they say on their site). Obviously, your limited by the amount of memory that happens to come in the slice that you purchase and the disk space and the bandwidth, but those are all understandable limits. Other than that, I have root access to my ‘own’ server that I can setup and customize just the way I like it. Very recommended for anyone looking to get their feet wet with system setup.

So this will be my new home. I’ll be updating on projects I’m working on, random thoughts, and whatever else I can think of. Mostly, it will probably be about Ruby on Rails and web development. I’m also planning (in the next few days) on writing a few articles detailing the steps I took to set up various aspects of my new slice so people who are new to setting up their own server can hopefully learn something. In addition to those tutorials, I will be be releasing 2 of my plugins (has_many_friends and open_id_authentication_mock if you wish to help test them a little bit) for Rails that I’ve written to use in my own project. So, I’ll be quite busy and I hope to keep this place updated. I hope I find some time to do some customizations to this theme too.

And with that.. I sleep.