Jason Airlie’s BlogWhy are you bothering to read this?

Quite a while back I started a site devoted to all the free stuff you could find on the internet. It was a monument to my cheapness. Well, the dotcom bubble burst, the free stuff started drying up, and I lost interest. Slowly I developed a new interest in open source software. It was free, thus appealing to my cheap side. It was open, giving it a chance to have a life beyond that of the interest of any one devloper or company, appealing to my lazy side. I was getting tired of finding replacements for good software that suddenly either cost money or vanished completely.
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I’ve used several different webhosts over the years, and occasionally been frustrated by their useless, or even bizarre naming schemes for log files.

Currently I am using both 1and1.com and HostRocket. Both are fine hosts and I am quite happy with both. Except for how they handle log files.

HostRocket required me to write a script to put a copy of the log in my directory, because HostRocket clears and restarts them every day. Bizzare, but with the script it works out ok. Every so often I fire up FileZilla, download the accumulated log files, then delete them from the server. I’ve even been able to add my own log file naming scheme into the script, so it works out to be almost a positive experience in the end.

1and1 is a little more sensible. They put the log files in my directory, but the names look like this:

access.log.21.gz
access.log.22.gz
access.log.23.gz

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A post on the WordPress Development blog pointed me to a nice potluck blog aggregation for WordPress news and another aggregation for Mozilla.

I’m almost as interested in the aggregation sofware running these sites, Planet . I’m already thinking if I can justify the time to set it up.

Oh, and it’s open source, using the Python License.

Well, after far too many calls to ArisHost, the campdixie.org domain is finally back. It will take a while for the DNS entry to propogate again but that’s ok.

60 days from now however, I’m changing registrars to GoDaddy.

Revision of my thoughts on the perfect cell phone:

• Use open standards wherever possible. I don’t want any device’s life limited by it’s drivers or software.
• Connections: USB, Bluetooth, Wifi
• Charge battery via USB or a traditional charger
• Act like a thumb drive
  • USB Mass Storage. Show up just like a flash thumb drive when the phone is connected to a computer.
  • Ringtones (mp3, ogg, midi, wav), Address books (xml format?), Calendars(ical), all show up as files in standard formats. Sorted into their own directory (/Ringtones, /Addresses, /Calendars, etc.).
  • Extra space can store arbitrary files. If the phone doesn’t understand the file, the phone ignores it.

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