I’m posting my first entry for 2010; but it’s going to be a short one. I’ve my new year resolutions in mind, but I won’t carve them in stones just yet. A couple of things are for sure, improving my badminton game, and fitness level will definitely be on the list. I’m also looking to do a bit of part-time postgraduate studies; if University of Canterbury will have me.
Anyway, let me get back to studying badminton.
Another year over. It’s been an awesome year. Thank you for all your support.
I wish you all a Happy New Year!
Yay! We have reached a milestone. A hundred posts and still going strong. I’m actually blogging in catch up mode at the moment, but that’s not the point.
I’m acutely aware that the focus of the blog has drifted significantly in the past few months. I apologise if you’re here for the security content. Security is still very much an interest of mine. Just been lacking the time to write about it properly. Check back next year, once I’ve had the chance to reassess my priorities.
To celebrate the occasion, please treat yourself to a coffee and a slice of cake. I strongly recommend Coffee Culture.
Recently, I was forced to switch my hosting provider. The previous provider, Webstrike Solutions, was great until they were acquired by EasyCGI.
The whole transition process, of moving the site over to the EasyCGI servers, was managed terribly. It started with an email in early March stating that my site will be migrated automatically. At the end of the month, I received another email stating that the automatic process hadn’t been able to migrate my site correctly, and that I should get involved. This annoyed me a little but I started following the manual migration process that they suggested.
When I reviewed the results of their automated test tools, I quickly figured out that they haven’t taken into consideration that applications such as Joomla and WordPress have configurations that need updating. Even worse, the tool constantly reports pages as unreachable when in reality, works perfectly. I proceeded to make the necessary changes and tested that my site works properly on the new platform. After spending a day fixing and testing, I requested that they switch my site across to the new platform.
Instead of switching my site across, they simply canceled my account. No emails or anything. I contacted their support explaining my situation and requested that they provide some assistance with the migration. I received a reply that basically paraphrased what I had sent them. The support staff was unable to provide any additional information and instead cited some errors with the mail system that previously passed their QA test.
Seeing how they’ve handled the situation thus far, I realised that there is no point fighting it. I embarked on a selection process, researching up on numerous hosting providers. I finally found one that I am extremely happy with. No problems yet, so far.
Before I can put everything behind me, there was the issue of the hosting fees. I had paid a year’s worth of hosting fees and it had only been six months since. They didn’t refund me automatically due to some problems with my account. Again, no email or anything. However, they did sort it out fairly efficiently once I contacted their support. With the amount of cancellations they have to process, I can imagine why. I’m sure even monkeys can be trained to do that.
If you ever receive a migration notice from EasyCGI, my advice is to start looking for alternate hosting providers unless your site only uses basic HTML.
This has been a good year in terms of the number of readers visiting this blog. The most popular posts of 2008, in no particular order, are:
Most of these traffic came from Google. Interestingly, the posts that got the most views are the ones that describe the solution to problems that I’ve had. A few posts that I wrote specifically to attract readers didn’t quite have the intended effect. I wonder what went wrong there.
Anyhoo, I wish to thank all you readers for your support. Keep the questions and comments coming. See you in 2009!
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve moved my blog yet again. This time, it is actually just an address change. The new address is blog.unauthorised.org.nz.
I expected it to be a straight-forward switch but it turned out to be a bit trickier than I anticipated.
The first thing I had to do was to update the WordPress address and Blog address in the Options tab. If you haven’t made this change, you’ll notice it right away as you will be redirected to an incorrect address. I’m not exactly sure what WordPress is doing under the hood but it kept redirecting me to the home page. I had a bit of trouble figuring this out at first as I thought it was a problem with my subdomain setup.
Once the WordPress addresses are updated, everything works nicely for blog.unauthorised.org.nz. But what about all the existing links pointing to www.unauthorised.org.nz/blog? It breaks of course. Although the files are actually still sitting under the blog folder, WordPress does some hocus-pocus and kept redirecting the address to blog.unauthorised.org.nz/blog, which of course does not exists.
At first, I was going to give up and wait for Google to recrawl my blog with the new address. Since I’ve completely changed the address, I might as well configure Permalinks to make the addresses look good too. PATHINFO Permalinks are great but that additional index.php in the urls bugs me. So, Pretty Permalinks it is. In the process, I learned about mod_rewrite.
An idea came to me, what if I can redirect all the old addresses of the form www.unauthorised.org.nz/blog to blog.unauthorised.org.nz? After a few unsuccessful attempts and Mozilla complaining about my handiwork not working correctly (as it ended up in an infinite loop of redirections), I finally came up with the solution.
## Redirect Unauthorised Blog addresses
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.unauthorised.org.nz$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^unauthorised.org.nz$
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ http://blog.unauthorised.org.nz/$1
After adding those lines to the .htaccess under www.unauthorised.org.nz, all my old links started working again.
Phew! Been a busy day moving blog posts from my old blog and customising the new blog to my liking.
WordPress, the new blog tool I’m using has been great so far. It’s not as user-friendly as Blogger but I’ll quite happily trade it for the extra flexibility in customising the layout and content. I found this theme, Sodelicious Black 1.0 from themes.wordpress.net, installed it, and voila. My blog has a fresh new look. I don’t agree with the color scheme at the moment as it’s all a bit too dull. The formatting seems a wee bit crowded too but nothing that a little CSS can’t fix.
I also learned that the bookmark icon (or favourite icon) that shows up beside some web pages is called a favicon. You can see them on the browser tabs as well in Mozilla. Well, I’ve always been meaning to add one of those and now I have. It turns out to be pretty simple. I’ll leave the details to another post. If I could be bothered.
So far I’ve moved 7 of the 17 blog posts I have on Blogger. That’s 10 more to go. Hopefully, they’ll all be on the new blog by tomorrow. Time for bed now I reckon.
Welcome to the Unauthorised Blog. I’m currently in the process of moving… my blog that is. Most of what you currently see here ain’t my doing.
In the meantime, my old blog is still accessible at wired4destruction.blogspot.com.
Hey there. Yes, YOU! You’ve arrived here via the Next Blog link, haven’t you? I’ve found myself next-blogging quite a bit lately too.
In case you’re wondering, by next-blogging, I’m referring to blog surfing via the Next Blog link on the navigation bar at the top of the page. I’m still trying to figure out how exactly that link works. Next blog implies that there’s an order to the list of blogs, but that’s not how it works. In reality, it seems to take you to a random blog each time you follow the link. I said it seems because from my brief experience in next-blogging, I’ve managed to hit a number of random blogs more than once. Considering the number of blogs out there, the chances of that happening is impossibly small if the link is completely random.
Regardless, I still like the feature. You never know where it’s gonna take you. It has taken me to some excellent blogs, a number of annoying ones that are full of ads, and a few nasty ones that should never be seen by… anyone really. There are some seriously disturbed bloggers out there.
If you’ve not tried next-blogging before, go on. It’s right there at the top of the page. You know you want to. Just don’t get addicted to it.
In the beginning, I was too lazy. After 26 days of procrastination, I decided that I should really post something. Anything really… just to get this blog started. Fingers crossed, this is not a sign of things to come. So, here is a wee bit about what this blog is all about, the motivations behind it, and where it is headed.
Well, this is a blog about ME! I’ll blog just about anything that pops into my head. Anything from the mundane to the mind-blowing tech stuff. In a way, it’s a place for me to gather my thoughts. With any luck, it will not be all crap and you’ll find some of it useful, or at least interesting.
There are quite a few motivations for getting this blog up and going. Amongst which are:
At the mo, I don’t have a clear picture of where this blog will end up. The idea is to make this an interactive blog where your comments and suggestions will help determine what gets blogged next. So, I would really appreciate any feedbacks you have to offer.
Until next time, safe blogging.