2005 - Page 2 of 7 - Michael Bianco

Dreamhost Review

Ok, so heres my mini review of Dreamhost. Dreamhost is definitely not as easy to use as my previous host, alot of features that were provided automatically with hostm.com have to ‘manually’ configured. For instance, hostm.com had a 1-click install feature for blogs and forums. Now dreamhost claims to have a one click install, but it really isn’t one click, dreamhost simply sets up the mySQL database and automatically fills out the database config file, Hostm did everything for you. However, dreamhost provides alot of power with their hosting. Since you have SSH access to the server you can compile custom versions of PHP, or any other command line application you need. I compiled CSS Optimizer on dreamhost without any problems…

Woops: Software Versions

I accidentally uploaded older versions of all the software on this site over to the new server. If you downloaded any of the software on this site within the last few days, you probably downloaded an outdated version. Just wanted to give everyone the heads up 🙂

Switched!

Everything has been successfully switched over to the new Dreamhost server! So far so good, the only gotcha I came across was that Dreamhost has disabled allow_url_fopen for security reasons, so including files in this fashion would not work, all paths had to be relative: [code lang=”php”][/code] I ended up adding the root server directory to include_path to allow me to reffer to files with an absolute filepath without using the http://blabla.com. Other than that everything went pretty well, Dreamhost has a very extensive k-base and wiki which helped me very quikly resolve other small issues that I came across…

Downtime Tommorow

I’ll be switching this site, along with my freelancer site, over to my new dreamhost server tomorrow. Expect a few hours of downtime. I have few new things that I will be announcing once I get the site successfully transfered over.

AS3

Wow, those engineers at Macromedia must really be coding hard. Less than 2 months after Flash 8 was released we now have Flash Player 8.5 and AS3. I cant keep up with all these new technologies. 😛 I looked through the AS3 FAQ and all the new features are very exciting. AS is really moving towards being a full featured language like Java or C. We now have types such as int, uint and variable identifiers such as const- sweet. Flash 8.5 (finally!) has a regular expression class, why did it take them so long to add this? Lots of additional classes have been added, AS3 is looking more like a framework like Cocoa; very cool…

Sed Messed Up on OS X?

While trying to further my knowledge in unix/shell programming I’ve found that the unix command sed is messed up in os x. I think the problem is that the GNU/linux versions of some commands are different that the Darwin/BSD versions, this might be obvious to you linux/unix gurus out there but to me this is new news. I always assumed that the functionality in the commands on os x and most linux variants were the same.In any case, I downloaded the GNU sed source code and compiled a nice fixed sed command for myself (After I compiled it I found out you could of just easily gotten GNU sed through fink-commander. :P). Walla, the newline problem I was having with the mac os x version of sed was fixed.

Remove All Files Without Certain Extensions

I needed to remove all files in a hierarchy of folders that didn’t have certain extensions. I searched the net for a quick & dirty bash script to do this, but all the scripts I found only removed files in the current directory, I needed to remove files in the current directory and child directories. Heres the bash script I came up with. Assuming ~/Desktop/targetDir is the root directory you want to remove files from, and you don’t want files ending in .css, .html, or .htm. NOTE: if your file paths contain spaces this command will probably fail/mess something up. I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your computer because of this script. Hopefully somebody might find this useful.

Switching To Dreamhost

Well, I think I finally have given in. Over the next 2 months I will be transferring all my sites over to Dreamhost from Hostm which have been an ‘ok’ host. Dreamhost however currently is having an amazing deal- 80% off of their hosting. Thats just incredible, considering their price is already low at $10/month. A few other things that I like about Dreamhost: SSH access, I used this on a clients Dreamhost account and its pretty sweet. Always improving their services, every few months they add or enhance their service. I like their Kbase, its very nicely set up with ability to post/read comments to articles Their referral program is awesome I have 97 days to test it out to see if I like it or not…

OS X Hex Value Color-Picker Plug-In

Recently I was throwing around an idea about making a plug-in for the standard color-picker panel for OS X. All I really wanted it to do was give me the hex value of the selected color. I did a fair amount of research and eventually found that someone had already done it. I’ve never seen that advertised, or shown anywhere; but so far I’ve found the plug-in proves useful. Now if only the author would make the source available so a good example of how to make a color-picker plug-in would be available…

Expr Crippled on OS X

Lately, I’ve been trying to dig into shell scripting. While reading through a Bash Scripting Guide and testing out the expr command line utility I found that the OS X version of expr is very limited compared to the linux/standard version. All of the nice string related commands outlined on the Man Page for expr don’t work on the OS X version of the utility. This is severly limiting especially because (as far as I know) there is no way to find the index of a substring in Bash scripting except through expr. In any case, I’ve filed a bug-report (rdar://4269034) about this problem. On a side-note, thank-you everyone who responded to my previous post on ‘What is Missing?’. I will be making one of the suggested projects.

Year: 2005