We’ve been to the marvellous Spain. Three weeks was enough time to completely forget my “ordinary” life and all the incomplete things fighting for my attention. While in Spain I’ve deliberately chosen to stay away from computers and then when we returned I still kept away from computers for a while driven by the inertia. I mean Internet connected PCs – you can’t easily avoid computers cause they are everywhere these days – in the camera, in the GPS, in the car, in the phone…

We travelled around Andalusia and some of Madrid and Valencia regions. We’ve been to Valencia, Mojacar, Granada, Tarifa, Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, Segovia, Avila, Toledo to name few. Overall we traveled about 4000 kilometres. It sounds like great distance but that’s only 10% of the Earth’s circumference. And still it’s quite a lot for three weeks

Spain is a big and diverse country. It meant lots of broken stereotypes for me. It’s organized into several autonomous communities and some of them even have their own local languages. For example at the Valencia’s airport there were signs in English, Castellano and Valenciano. Different landscapes, different cultures… We’ve seen wild flamingos, deer, wild boars, great sand dunes, countless beautiful beaches, white villages, castles, the big and modern Madrid. And I can’t find words to describe how delicious the food was.

From the local news – the 6th annual OpenFest conference – was held on 1st and 2nd of November. I liked only three of the lectures: “Wordpress.com – 40 million pages a day” by Nikolay Bachiyski, “28 Months Scalability” by Slavi Nikolov and “Free Hardware” by Radoslav Kolev. In my opinion the main problem was the weak presentational skills of the other lecturers. I know it’s easy to sit aside and criticise, so I’d be better take part and make a presentation for the next year’s OpenFest.

We used the opportunity to exchange PGP keys on the key signing party kindly organised by Peter Pentchev. There was a pleasant “unofficial after-party” as well, so overall I’d call this OpenFest a success.

At work I’m currently having fun with things like DRBD, Hearbeat, OpenVZ… My impressions from DRBD so far are that it’s a very complete product. Decent documentation, predictable behaviour. I wonder whether it has something to do with it’s commercial backing? OpenVZ looks quite complete as well.

I started to use my Facebook account a little bit more because some of my friends use it and it’s rather convenient way to show your pictures And Niki invited people to his birthday party via Facebook. Niiice party

I spend some time learning the Kohana framework + jquery + CSS. I don’t use it for something specific at the moment – just trying to figure out what is it like to create websites with modern tools like these. Most of the time I’m quite busy with system administration and I started to feel too far behind the web technologies So far it looks very powerful – nothing to do with the way things were done 5-6 years ago. I’ve tried to make a collapsed tree (ul/li) in which branches are dynamically populated on expansion by ajax – it fit in less than 10 lines of Kohana/Jquery. And it work’s on each browser I’ve tried so far. Impressive!

И те така те.

Maybe I’ll write in more details on the aforementioned topics. Or maybe won’t – only time will tell . If you happen to know Bulgarian you can read more about our journey through Spain at Antonia’s blog:

• Испания, началото
• Испания, край морето
• ‘спански снимки
• Испания, дни 3 и 4, дивите плажове

By the way I’m looking for a book called Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management by Edwin Bliss but I’m left with the impression that this book is out of print. Any ideas where to find it? Especially if there’s PDF or other open format version because I hate to wait for the dead-tree books to arrive. Moreover they are bulky and inconvenient to carry around.

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The fact that I have 10 years of experience working as a (unix) systems and network administrator is very handy when it comes to installing, configuring and troubleshooting the software I use on my VPS. Unfortunately it doesn’t help that much with the selections process so I had to sit down and filter the myriad of VPS providers out there.

I dug through blogs & forums, asked friends. Web Hosting Talk forums were particularly useful. Finally I have chosen Future Hosting. It turned out to be a good choice indeed. I’m with them for almost a year already and there weren’t any major issues. I asked for PTR RRs (that’s reverse resolving from IP to hostname) and their support staff quickly added these for me.

However good a hosting provider is you must keep a backup of your own. I was rather passively looking for second VPS provider for some time. One day I saw (can’t remember where) a Comfy Host’s ad. It looked suspiciously cheap at $10/mo to me and I haven’t heard anything about them before. But this was supposed to be a backup VPS so I decided to give it a try. I placed my order with Comfy Host using my PayPal account and started waiting for a welcome email. One day later I received an email saying that due to the surplus of orders my VPS setup will be delayed a little bit. Ok it happens. Few days later I had to submit a support ticket to ask what’s going on with my account. After some more back and forth support tickets I got my VPS up and running.

I used it for three months and it was pretty stable. I used it only for my automated daily backup and monitored it with nagios. Then one day suddenly the monitoring lost connection with the VPS. Since it is a backup server and I was busy with other things I let it stay this way for a week. Finally I logged into the control panel and guess what… I was paying on a monthly basis after receiving an invoice from Comfy Host. Last month I didn’t receive an invoice. And I couldn’t pay either because according to the control panel I didn’t owe money despite being late with the payment. Hm… I submitted a ticket to ask why is that. I had to wait several days for a reply that read:

“Sorry about the late reply. The ticket seems to have been overlooked without a response. We received no payment and therefore your VPS was shut off.”

Enough. I went looking for another backup VPS. I remembered that Leo from Zen Habits once said he is satisfied with his current provider – namely slicehost.com. So I’m with slicehost.com as my backup VPS for about a month now. So far so good.

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1. TLS SNI – almost there… or not?

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1. hello, world

I don’t know what were my readers actually looking for, because the aforementioned expressions may relate to many different things. Nevertheless I looked on teh interwebs to check what’s out there on the subject and that’s what I found:

There is a mathematical game called Game of Life, Life patterns or sometimes simply Life. It’s one of the best known examples of a cellular automaton. The game was devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. Learn more and try it here.

Then there is this very interesting Life Patterning Exercise by Results in No Time. It looks like a good way to mind map your life in order to create a more clear picture of who and where you are at the moment.

According to Monte Zweben there is marketing practice called Life Pattern Marketing. “Life Pattern Marketing is the practice of placing companies’ brand messages on digital screens and billboards that are located where busy people really are. Digital screens are popping up in great places to reach people, carrying short, punchy brand messages that reach potential customers while they pump gasoline in the morning, while they shop for groceries in the afternoon and while they withdraw money from an ATM in the evening. The key is context.”

On the music front I’m aware of two works that have related titles. One is Life is a Pattern by System of a Down and the other one is the Pattern Life by Despair. I liked the description of Despair from this page: “The heaviest thing in Buffalo, New York, next to the snowfall”.

There is also a book (xpensive!) called The Pattern of Life. According to Wikipedia its author Alfred Adler was an Austrian psychologist and was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement.

So there are plenty of things to be found while searching for “life pattern”

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I’ve been in two minds about going blogging for a couple of years. I didn’t want one more thing to waste time with, especially having in mind that I’m writing challenged (actually communication challenged). Being an introvert type I’m expending great deal of mental energy trying to express myself.

Anyway, I hope communication is skill and can be improved by practicing it, so in the long run it may turn out to be the reason to blog rather than not to.

Another thing is that like most people I forget. Few days ago I stumbled upon a linux related mailing list archive and it was really funny to reread my own posts from like 8-9 years ago. Likewise now when I and Antonia wonder about when something has happened we just go to her blog and check it out. I hope I will have the patience and persistence to update this blog regularly so it would become a valuable database with memories.

And last but not least: I’ll be preparing for IELTS certification soon so blogging in English is one more way to exercise.

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Originally I wanted to write about many more things in this post but I don’t want to become boring. So here I stop and as Vetinari would have said: “And now, please, I’m sure you all are very busy, don’t let me detain you”!

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