Ontic Oren

I’m fairly obsessed with Amazon EC2. Some of the coolest stuff I’ve seen people doing:

• Elastic Rails – Ruby, Capistrano, EC2. Cool, cool, cool.
• Rightscale. Make sure to check out the features page. MySQL manager and Website manager are both smart.
• Cloudscale. Nothing on the website to mention, but they hint good stuff on their blog

I eagerly downloaded build 70 of SXCE last night. I’ve been curious to try out the new installer I’ve been hearing about for some time.

Good news: the install was as easy as I could have hoped. It’s pretty, not ugly motif, seems to work well, didn’t ask me inane questions.

Bad news: first, it was slow. 1+ hour. Second, I installed this into VMWare fusion with a 20gb disk and 1gb ram allocated. Install went fine, but now I can’t actually boot the thing! I get the GRUB screen, then nothing – just a blank console with a blinking cursor. Bummer.

Edit: Rumor here is that there’s a bug in SXDE, I’ll post as soon as I find out if it’s fixed.

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That can’t be good. I’m not evil…

For years, I’ve been running my own server where I host my personal site. It’s migrated from a Cobalt Raq 3 to a ServInt VPS today, with many iterations in between. And I’m finally done. The hassels of self-administration now outweigh the benfit in my mind. The final straw occured last week when I ran out of space, and email started bouncing. And queing. Including bounce error messages. When I figured out what was finally going on, I had thousands and thousands of error emails. So now I’m on the outsourcing hunt. I’ve already moved my pictures to Smugmug. Next up, email.

I was expecting this to be the easiest part. I’d just use gmail. After 20 min, I realized one big problem! The POP interface for the iPhone is BAD. First, it doesn’t sync deletes. Worse, it gives you ALL your messages, even if they are auto-taged and archived. I’m on a few high volume aliases, and DO NOT want to recieve every one of those messages on the phone with no bulk delete tools.

Yahoo’s spam filtering was worthless. I’m getting so much spam I can’t find my real email.

.Mac has added server side spam filtering, but it’s worse than yahoo. And they have no server-side filter rules for mailing lists. Tons of spam AND all my alias traffic!

I could sign up for a webhoster, but that still keeps me in the business of some adminstration. Anyone out there have any good ideas?