Vane parole…

Recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles^1,2 and, remembering my experience with EC2, I discovered that utility computing was not what I was searching for: I was searching for something that helped me without adding complexity, but I was not happy with simple web hosting offers, I wanted also complete control over my infrastructure to have the technical freedom that I could need and because, when I think about my customers’ data, I trust no one.

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Only a small note to let you know that Virtualmin (from version 3.54) can be used for serious work when importing websites from Plesk backups: I tried the previous version with some web sites but it was too buggy, so I decided to help authors in debugging and testing it; I think that now Virtualmin can import the backups in a rather complete way.

BTW, Plesk is a good product, full of features, but I prefer Webmin/Virtualmin because they let me have full control of the server, instead of the way of Plesk that is too automatic in my opinion and offers less choices, impositions that I feel too strong (one for all: Plesk comes and works only with QMail).

Updated with Pidgin 2.4.0. You can find it here.

Note that some time ago Windows in no more my main operating system, so I do not use Pidgin Portable every day: please let me know if you have any problem.

I’ve made a quick but extensive research for a webmail software to put on my server(s) whose the most important feature should have been simplicity of maintenance and use over completeness and number of features.

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The most expensive phase of software construction is coding and this is because it’s the less intuitive: it requires constant attention and reasoning, errors (logical or not) are difficult to spot because they are immersed in text that often is long, separated in more than one file, and not written by us.

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Ok, maybe it’s a period of change for me, so yesterday I’ve added FeedBurner to my blog feed or, to say it better, I’ve added my feed to FeedBurner. I never did it before because I thought that the feed of “my” blog should be served directly and not passing through some unkown entity to depend on exclusively one day (yes, I’m a little paranoid about freedom of speech.)

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As a little divertissement, I’ve added Gravatars or globally recognized avatars to my blog, little images of you that are associated to your comments so… comment more often!
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If you ever wondered if SQL Server Profiler can influence negatively your production database servers that you watch every day with love and attentions, then stop wondering because I have an empirical proof of the fact that it causes no harm.
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Updated with Pidgin 2.3.1 + OTR plugin. You can find it here.

The problem with OTR plugin seems to be fixed in this version of Pidgin.

Updated with Pidgin 2.3.0 + OTR plugin. You can find it here.

BTW, after having installed the new version, it suffered some crashed but I didn’t have the time to discover the cause (probably it’s the OTR plugin; in fact, after disabling it, Pidgin didn’t crash again but I cannot say it for sure.)

UPDATE: I confirm, it’s the OTR plugin that causes the crash. Disable it for now, or use the previous Pidgin version.