Life is grand

Norton AntiVirus 2005 is a good anti-virus application. However it does have at least one annoying design feature: You cannot move the Norton AntiVirus Start Menu location. If you do you will get the following error everytime Norton AntiVirus 2005 starts:

Norton AntiVirus 2005 does not support the repair feature. Please uninstall and reinstall.

Firstly, that is a very unhelpful error message. So unhelpful that I followed its advice, to reinstall, with no change to the problem. Only then did I got onto the internet to find out what the error message really meant.

Secondly, I like to keep a clean Start Menu. I have everything arranged just as I like it and never keep the default locations of Start Menu items. So now to accomodate Norton AntiVirus 2005’s strange setup I have to sully my beautiful Start Menu with its shortcuts and folders.

Not terribly serious I concede but an annoying feature all the same.

And now Colib.com is on the horizon too.

flailing a ragged paw at reasoned thinking like a fat, rancid cat that just won’t die.

from JK’s failed to work her magic on me by Brian Henningan.

Little lies
Originally uploaded by av_producer.

Waiting
Originally uploaded by slight clutter.

Two items of clothing I recently bought highlight an interesting design difference.

The one, a pair of shorts, came with the spare button in a nice little plastic bag separate to the shorts themselves. I promptly lost it.

The other, a wonderful shirt Carine bought me, came with the spare button sewn into the label attached to the shirt. I can hardly lose it.

User: Hey, I can’t log into our company ADD.
SysAdmin: Try and concentrate for longer than 5 seconds, OK?

The joke only works if you are a techy and know that Microsoft has something called Active Directory.

(n) interpator
1. Someone who interprets from one patois to another

A Southern friend of mine was explaining some Cajun slash Southern slash Louisanna differences to me and spelt interpreter as interpator. At first I thought what terrible spelling. Then I looked at it again and had to laugh as while it was still horribly wrong it was a pretty good word for what we were talking about.

beluga
Originally uploaded by tamura.

Well everything seems to be sorted now. PaulMWatson.com, check. Colib.com, check. WebTwoZero.com, check. Email for all, check. DNS and MX records all pointing at TextDrive, check.

I have migrated over to TextDrive for all my hosting and email. Hostway did a decent job but it was costing me more than I wanted (every alias cost me an extra wad of cash for instance) and didn’t support Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Also the control and configuration options were thin on the ground. I had heard that TextDrive was good, had Ruby on Rails setup as well as MySQL and a bunch more.

To say TextDrive is for geeks is putting it mildly. CGI, FCGI, SSH, SFTP, Apache, VirtualMin, LightPD and more *nix acronyms than I have seen in one place. Now I am a geek but I am a Windows geek so all this *nix data is a bit overwhelming. It took me quite a few frustrating hours just to get a simple Rails app working. I thought I had tried everything including the common Rails errors on TextDrive but it turns out I had Windows line-endings in my dispatch.cgi.

Come again?

So yes, definitely for geeks and nerds.

But the power is awesome. I now have three separate websites complete with email and FTP running off TextDrive. The TextDrive interface is a whole bunch of rough text HTML pages which is offputting at first but after a few hours you realise it lets you do pretty much anything to Apache or email or whatever service, process etc. you need on the server. You can even run CRON jobs. Now I just have to find out what a CRON job is.

Also 50% of my TextDrive fees go towards supporting Ruby on Rails. You can chooes your project to contribute too when you sign up.

The guys over at TextDrive are a wired bunch too. Nerds, hackers and geeks the lot of them. One server is named Gilford, that made me laugh. I am on the Davie server. They are very open about their hosting too. The status blog details all server problems and what they are doing to fix them. No dry corporate guff from Jan, Justin and the others.

So if you want decent hosting with a lot of power then try out TextDrive.

This marks another step away from Windows for me. First Ruby on Rails, now Linux hosting and someday a nice Apple Mac running OSX (which is Unix).