At the same time I’m now working at BT working on high-end video teleconferencing solutions which has proved to be a really interesting situation for me– the business knowledge needed to work in the domain itself is more challenging than becoming fluent in a new programming language. Coming from a background of working on mostly scalable services meant for website and enterprise consumption, working in a rapidly growing and changing area of telecom has proved to be a welcome new challenge. We have a lot of really cool stuff rolling around, and I can honestly say some of the stuff I’m working on actually changes peoples lives all across the world in a significant way which is a first for me, and a rare experience as a Software Engineer.

That said, I haven’t had many burning topics on my mind in the software space since I’ve had my brain wrapped around learning how telecom and video conferencing works for the past several months. I have a couple of personal pet projects I’m working on in my spare time, and if/as they progress, they will provide some fodder for more technical blog posts.

Anyhow, thanks for reading and keeping me in your RSS feeds– hopefully this will start getting a little more regular again soon.

After having to learn a lot of MySQL DBA magic to repair some very broken databases in my backup, get DNS, Apache, MySQL, and all of that other sort of junk setup again, the site is finally back up with no data loss much to my surprise.

I’ll be working on getting my other sites back online as well as upgrading/updating everything, and hardening this server a bit more, so if you see any blips over the next few days that’s why.

What is MadKast? I guess I would describe it as the FeedBurner of social bookmarking & discovery– it gives your blog readers a way to share your posts, and also supposedly gives you a way to see other sites that your readers are viewing, analytics behind what your readers are sharing with other people, etc. I haven’t yet received any sort of confirmation e-mail about a way to login and view this information, but maybe that happens automagically once they have some data to work with. Until then I don’t have a good idea about the latter parts, but the concept seems cool at least.

Just thinking about how functionality similar to this usually works, I fully expected to have to go download a WordPress plug-in, unzip it and SCP to my server, then enable it in WordPress and have to edit my post templates, etc. I never really looked into it because I just assumed I’d have to go through all of that work and I honestly just don’t have the time or interest currently for that. I’m just spending an hour today to try and get caught-up on personal e-mail and decided to give it a whirl. When I saw that I just needed to include a link to their script, I was still a bit skeptical thinking I would still need to edit my post template to get it to work. Not so– it literally took just a few seconds to get up and running on my blog, so color me impressed.

I’m interested to see what sort of information I can gleam from the analytics portion of MadKast, and hopefully I can start blogging somewhat more frequently soon to make that sort of thing more valuable to me. I do feel like my site is starting to get a bit widget heavy, but it still seems to load quickly for now.

Have you tried MadKast? What do you think about it? Have you seen the analytics portion of it?

I’ll try to update this post a few times later today with news and blog coverage, but here’s what I’ve seen so far:

• Microsoft IE7 Featured Add-On
• Mashable
• Profy
• Download.com (was on front page)
• Tucows
• Spyware Sucks
• Social Enterprise TV

In terms of my contributions to what you see, my primary focus had been working a couple of scalability items on the Java front, but I’m currently working on something new which you’ll be able to see sometime this Fall.

I just added the new Me.dium Widget to my site which you can see below my bio– check it out. In summary, it allows you to see the real-time activity of Me.dium users on my site and related sites.

Not a Me.dium user yet? What are you waiting for?

I feel like I’ve been in my current position for a long time as most of my tenure here was spent in startup mode until our little but quickly growing company (with a quite a number of name changes through it’s history) was eventually acquired by Acxiom last Summer. It’s had its ups and downs over the years as all positions do, but overall it’s been a positive experience. It does feel a little strange to be moving on, but it is for all of the right reasons. I’ve been here for just a bit over 4 years now and have seen, experienced, and learned many things, but it’s time for a new challenge.

On the contrary, I’m very excited to be joining a very smart group of people at Me.dium in beautiful Boulder, CO as a Java Developer. While I’m certainly used to working on and being responsible for applications on big systems with lots of servers at this point, I’m excited to be extending myself into a whole new area of distributed computing which is something I’ve had an academic interest in for awhile. On a side note, I actually already worked in part of the same office space many years ago at company called Tesser when I still lived in Boulder.

While I haven’t had a chance to meet and get to know the whole team yet, it does seem to have all of the right pieces to possibly grow into something very big. I definitely have plenty to learn and I’m eager for the challenge. At the same time I hopefully have plenty to bring to the team as well.

I find that it’s kind of difficult to describe Me.dium in a short summary, but there are several other places where you can read about it and do a much better job than I would to explain it:

• Remember The Name Me.dium
• Me.dium – Social discovery in real time
• Demo of Me.dium.com, follow your friends around Web – Scoble interviews Me.dium CEO, Kimbal Musk

If you’d like to check out the software and see what it’s all about, use this invite link and you’ll automatically be added as my friend when you sign-up and install the software. It’s currently Firefox only (and works on any OS that runs Firefox), but it does sound like there is an IE version coming soon. A good part of the power of the product lies in your friends list, so I’d highly recommend inviting some of your friends to check it out once you’ve signed-up.

While the current version is quite impressive, its only a skeleton of things to come– I’m very excited to join and be part of the team building this product!

PS– After being dugg and also getting ready for DEMO, I think they were overwhelmed with traffic just a little bit earlier than they expected, so you might want to give the service a day or two while they finish rolling in more servers.

Given the new focus of this blog, I’d highly recommend adjusting your feed reader to start picking-up the full feed for this site rather than one of the topic categories such as “ColdFusion”. I don’t plan on writing non-topical content on this blog again anytime soon, and all of the non-geek related categories have been removed.

While I could setup yet another of layer of mod_rewrite rules in Apache to fix the various problems I’ve created with the feed URL’s, I’d like to try and start to work towards a relaunch of this site without being hampered with the various legacy support hacks that I’ve had to put in over the years. In theory the main category changes I’ve made should mostly be done and shouldn’t change again anytime soon, but don’t hold your breath. It will be nice to clear-out all of the existing hacks and start anew.

I appreciate your patience, and hopefully I’ll slowly but surely transition the design and ancillary content of this site into a more focused area.

Surprisingly enough out of over almost 4 years of writing (600+ posts) on this site, about half of them were not software related. So of course that means I’ll have to spend hours going though this site as well to delete non-programming related posts. Good times. Look for some fairly dramatic changes coming to this site as well in the upcoming weeks.

This is my first FastCGI install and configuration, so if you run across any problems with the site, please let me know.

Have I mentioned that I’m a terrible candidate for shared hosting?

I’ve owned other personal domains for quite some time and plan on putting up something a little more personal for friends and so forth looking to keep up with me (using one of said domains). If all goes as planned, look for something new from me on this front before the end of the year.

After many minor problems hosting at home (mostly outages for various networking/power reasons) and not having enough bandwidth to survive being digg’ed or Slashdotted, I recently decided to seek a hosting plan which allowed me to have all of the control that I had by hosting my site at home, but none of the worries of connectivity, electricity, bandwidth, etc. Though I started out looking for a cheap dedicated server, I found that after an exhaustive amount of research I decided I was a better candidate for an unmanaged VPS (virtual private server). The main reasons I chose a VPS over a dedicated server were:

• The servers that VPS’ are hosted on are typically quad CPU, dual core servers with large amounts of RAM, SCSI RAID, etc.
• Given the hardware specs, the performance of a VPS is going to be better as long as they aren’t overloaded vs. a cheap dedicated server up to a certain point/depending on what your hosting requirements are.
• Lower monthly cost than dedicated servers

Server virtualization has really been progressing by huge leaps and bounds within the past year or two, and VPS hosting plans are actually getting fairly ubiquitous at this point. Although VMWare and Windows Virtual Server are popular in the corporate space, it seems that most of the hosting providers use Virtuozzo.

Essentially I was looking for a plan which offered at least 512 MB of RAM, at least 20 GB of space, and had an unthrottled port of at least 100 GB of bandwidth per month which was not on an oversold network. Many hours of research, reading reviews, and looking at the various plans, I made the final decision of getting a plan with Future Hosting. Generally speaking, this was my criteria for finding a VPS provider:

• Connected to a Tier 1 network
• Bandwidth and servers not oversold
• Reasonable pricing. I’m an individual just running a few personal sites and projects, not a company, so I’m a little more price sensitive than “5 9′s” sensitive.
• Good support. I usually only need support for things outside of my control, but when this happens, you definitely want someone who can respond quickly.

So far the service has been rock solid, and the service has been nothing less than fantastic! While I was setting up the machine I regularly saw download speeds greater 900kB, so the bandwidth available is also very impressive. I’ve submitted several tickets during the setup and got literally instant responses if not resolutions. The only complaint I have (which is unrelated to Future Hosting itself) is that I’m stuck using Debian Linux rather than Ubuntu. At this point very few providers offer Ubuntu yet because apparently SWSoft does not yet offer a supported image of Ubuntu for Virtuozzo though it’s in the works. The good news is I’m slated to beta test a Ubuntu VPS soon, and hopefully I can get moved over to one later.

Admittedly it’s a little strange for me to be switching back to Linux from FreeBSD. When I originally started hosting my own sites from home circa 1998, I started off on a DEC Alpha Running RedHat 5.2. I quickly got tired of the dependency hell of Linux and switched to FreeBSD 3.x, and have stuck with it up until now. Now with apt-get (which is very much like the FreeBSD ports system) I no longer worry about the problems I used to have with Linux. My only gripe is that it seems like the packages for Debian are a bit outdated in general. I’ll be interested to see if things such as python 2.5 are already packaged into Ubuntu.

It’s late and I’ve been working on this for the better part of the evening so it’s time to wrap this post up, but I’ll try to get around to posting more about this if anyone is interested. I do still have a few things to move and/or configure, so hopefully there aren’t any major show stoppers happening at the moment.