junk food for the brain …
Tech
Find a Cheap VPS Hosting Provider
Jul 16th
With VPS hosting becoming a more popular option among the techies, I’ve been tempted to get one.
Among the reasons you’ve like to get a VPS include:-
- You need root access
- You wish to install a distro of your choice
- Want more capabilities than offered by standard shared hosting
- You have Ruby On Rails or Python Based Web Apps you want to host
- Because you can
This diagram, taken from Google Trends shows VPS Hosting search to be picking up since late 2004. I think is times pefectly with the release of Ruby On Rails to the masses.
VPS Hosting Search Trends Based on Google Trends
Anyway, I found this site with cheap VPS hosting, some going for as low as US$3 a month. The reliability of these providers maybe questionable, and I don’t think they can compare to the big guns.
Here’s the link, do comment on your experiences.
*sigh* Now to prepare for trackbacks from bots tracking the word *VPS* 
VirtualBox 3.0.2 released!
Jul 11th
VirtualBox 3.0.2 has been released. This is a maintenance release, but it solves a lot of problems. For example, 3D accleration works way better now if you have Desktop Effects enabled. A definite recommended upgrade.
How to Get a Cool Manga Avatar as your Gravatar
Jul 8th
A lot of websites now support Gravatars.
What exactly are Gravatars?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?
WordPress has plugins that allow you to insert them into your comments, so you have a common picture across the sites you post.
While looking for a cool avatar, thanks to my friend Danny, I found this site that allows you to customize your own manga like avatar, called Face Your Manga.
Pretty cool. I’ve got mine. How about you? 
How to get your Internet IP Adress and Hostname
Jul 3rd
There are many services available to check your IP Address and hostname. Wing Loon has one, called IPVEE.com
Its main features are the ability to:
Unlike most other sites, its key strengths lie in its visually appealing way of displaying the information. This can come in extremely handy especially when helping the less technically inclined among your friends.
Unlike the other sites, IPVEE.com uses a simple JQuery Slider, with the essential information separated by 3 different links. Check out this screenshot:-
Nice right? Go to IPVEE.com 
VirtualBox 3.0 Released
Jun 30th
VirtualBox
VirtualBox 3.0 has been released!!! Highlights for me are:
- Windows guests: ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications / games (experimental)
- Support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
- USB: Support for high-speed isochronous endpoints has been added. In addition, read-ahead buffering is performed for input endpoints (currently Linux hosts only). This should allow additional devices to work, notably webcams
Looks interesting. Read the full changelog. Go ahead and download.
Create Multiple Firefox Profiles For Different Uses
Feb 22nd
Ever had a problem where your Firefox crashes during development because you were browsing multiple tabs in another window?
Or using the latest Firefox beta always messed up your current extensions / settings?
Use Profile Manager.
This keeps separate instances of firefox running, so one crash won’t affect the other windows.
To access the Profile Manager, first open Firefox as usual, then from the your os command prompt, launch the profile manager by typing the following command:-
firefox -profilemanager -no-remote
As you can see, I have created 3 profiles here, my default profile, a Development profile as well as another beta profile for me to test the latest firefox beta, Minefield (www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/). I set the default profile as my default (duh!), for normal web browsing.
The ‘-no-remote’ option allows you to start a new Firefox process that is invisible to the first process.
The ‘-P’ option allows you to specify which profile to start. Look at your profile manager for the names in case you forgot
I then created some scripts in my ~/bin directory to launch the Development & Beta profiles seperately.
Here’s a sample script, note that I piped all of ‘em ugly error messages to /dev/null and made sure the process ran in the background. This frees up your terminal for more important things.
1 2 3 |
#!/bin/bash echo "Starting devfox ;)" /usr/bin/firefox -P "Development" -no-remote > /dev/null 2>&1 & |
Another tip, getting confused with which profile(s) you have open? Use Themes to differentiate them
For more information, read on the following links:-
Opening Firefox With Another Profile
Firefox Profile Manager
Other uses for this include, your own ‘incognito’ mode for firefox, ala Chrome.
Hope you find this helpful
Creating Partitions with GNU Parted
Feb 2nd
Hi, this is my second screencast. This time I talk about parted, an alternative to fdisk.
There is audio skipping towards the end of the screencast, which I discovered only after uploading this video to youtube. 
I’ll add a link to the full video on rapidshare once I have posted this on Danny’s site.
How To Create Facebook Badges
Jan 23rd
In my first ever screencast, I ‘enlighten’ the uninformed few on facebook badges. I’m not really happy with myself in this screencast, however, it was a good chance for me to learn about screencasting in linux.
You should also check out my friend Danny, who has done quite a few quality screencasts.
For those of you who want a higer quality version, you can download it here
Alternatives to torrenting
Jan 10th
My friend Danny wrote about this new torrent search engine, YouTorrent. With Malaysia’s frustratingly slow internet connections, with the many accusations of throttling or traffic shaping when it comes to torrents, direct downloads maybe be an alternative option.
This is where one-click-hosting sites comes into play. These sites allow you to upload files to their servers, which they then ‘host’. You’ll be given a link to download them, which can then be passed on to all your contacts, making your media accessible all over the world. Rapidshare.com is one the the early pioneers and more popular of the lot. Their multiple mirrors and reliability seem pretty good to me, making it one of my preferred file sharing hosts.
There are quite a number of sites that post ‘files’ on rapidshare.com. The 2 which I frequent the most are:
Rapidshare King primaryly uploads movies, while Leecher’s Lair provides everything else under the sun. I personally know a few users with paid RapidShare accounts, because of how easy it is to download things.
Hope this posts helps you guys in getting another alternative to torrenting.
WordPress themes
Jan 10th
Here’s a list of WordPress themes for those who can’t stand the default theme supplied. Some pretty good themes there, one of which I’m using right now for my blog. Should be good for most people around.
