for keeping track of my digital experiments

The setup
Recently I started leasing an OpenVZ VPS (virtual private server) from Shinjiru hosting. Their servers are located in Malaysia in seven different data centers. Mine happens to be located in Kuala Lumpur. The customer support I experienced was very good. The sales reps responded to my emails in less than a business day, with English that was pretty good for not being native speakers. I was even able to negotiate a lower priced VPS plan, since I didn’t need any control panel.

The technical details
The choices for operating systems are a bit old. I was hoping to use Debian 4.1 or CentOS 5, but the best I could get was CentOS 4.4. Their default VPS image install includes SSHd (obviously), Apache 2 with Perl, PHP, PHPMyAdmin, AWstats, Analog, MySQL, sendmail and a POP3 server. Unfortunately YUM was not installed, so I had download the source and compile it. Not that it is extremely difficult, but processing tar.gz files and getting the install configured just right is tedious. After I compiled yum I then had to get the configuration files just right. I learned that certain packages don’t like to be updated or installed in an OpenVZ VPS, such as gcc or any gcc dependencies. Thanks to the RPM Search, I managed to get all the dependencies worked out and installed. My first priority after getting yum to work was killing off ftpd and installing vftpd. After getting things cleaned up, I installed the Webmin minimal version (from source). I didn’t want to use yum on this one, because the full version has all these extra utilities with the package that I don’t need.

The conclusion
Shinjiru offers great offshore hosting. It would be even better if they had newer operating systems. The latency is pretty good as offshore servers go. The latency for my VPS runs around 300 – 330ms when I ping it from my home DSL connection (Qwest DSL in St. Paul, Minnesota). If you want some great offshore hosting (where even warez is ok) then I would say that Shinjiru is going to be your best bet.

I needed to post up a couple of useful links/tools so I could find them again easily. Maybe you, the reader, will find them useful as well.

1. Internet Anagram Server: Perfect for getting new ideas so as to avoid copyright and trademark infringement.
2. Wireless Phone Number – Carrier Search: After receiving a random text from +16126367372 which said, “Gurl do u no where i can buy a cute prom dress”, I wanted to see what kind a person was wasting my cell phones minutes. Yes, I’m on a pay as you go plan.
3. The MINIX 3 Operating System: I am looking into creating my own embedded game server and wireless access point that I could jack into my high-gain antenna I’m working on.
4. PC Tools Malware Research Center: For finding out more information on what is going on in the end-user security sector.
5. PHPList: Possible starting point for mailing list script I’m putting together.
6. CushyCMS: Content managing made easy. Perfect for the busy webmaster.

I just starting working with what the developer community calls AJax about four months ago. Now I’m working on a massive database driven portal with a huge amount AJax calls to backend PHP scripts. I had the PHP down, but I needed to learn AJax fast. How did I do it? It only took about an hour of Javascript brush-up work and another hour of reading and working with the two following tutorials.

My first really helpful encounter with the concept of AJax was the Ajax and XMLHttpRequest Tutorial which includes a step by step source code representation of the process to making the necessary asynchronous Javascript requests. The second tutorial that I suggest is Dynamic Drive’s Basic Ajax Routine (Get & Post), which includes many source code and running examples, plus downloadable fully functioning scripts.

If you have a basic knowledge of Javascript and PHP (or some other server-side scripting language) you are ready to go implement some AJax after reading through these two tutorials.