Month: January 2007

Hostmonster Tips

I have been using hostmonster for about a month. This web hosting is not perfect, but I think it has a good price/features. Some of the things that I have learned from using this web hosting are:

  1. If you want to use PHP5, you must indicate that to the customer service upfront. The default server uses PHP4, and your data must be moved if you choose PHP5 at a later time (which will cause your web to be down for a while).
  2. Be careful when adding domain and subdomain. For example: When I add yohanes.risna.info the tool will suggest the directory “yohanes” for that domain, and when I add yohanes.org, it will also suggest “yohanes” for that domain. The result is that both will point to the same content (which I didn’t want). You can fix it later but it will waste your time.
  3. Use the live chat if possible, they respond quicker compared to using the trouble ticket.
  4. If you are sure that you have read the documentation and still get an error message, just contact the tech support. I think their software is a bit buggy, but the tech support can override the buggy part.

After a week, it seems that everything on my site has been set up properly. Email works just fine, bandwidth is no longer a problem for me, and I have installed several programs without a problem (latest WordPress, latest Mediawiki, latest Galerry).

I am interested in writing Ruby On Rails application but doesn’t have an idea yet.

They violated the open source license: What should I do?

I have found at least two programs that violated the GPL. I have contacted the companies that broke the license and they have found a way to work around it. I don’t know if this is the correct way to do it. Would the open source community be interested in “damages” that those company has caused? or just let them switch to non-open source solution, and we’ll forget about their sin?

The two programs that violated the GPL are Windows programs and you can’t see it unless you reverse engineer it. It is just my reflex to reverse engineer a program to know how it works and maybe I should look for more programs to see if they violated anything. But sometimes, I just don’t know what to do with my finding. Any ideas?

Offline Blogging

I don’t have an unlimited Internet connection (only a 250 Mb/month GPRS/3G data plan), so I can’t always blog my idea. I have tried so many offline blogging tools, but I gave up because none of the available Desktop Blogging tools fits me. Even the best desktop blogging tools can’t simulate perfectly the appearance of your site while you are offline (so I still have to edit my post after uploading).

But now, I have found the best way to do offline blogging: by installing the blog engine on my computer (in my case WordPress). I can edit and view my website while offline, and I can be sure that it will look the same when I post it. Unfortunately, I still have to manually copy and paste my post (still too lazy to write a plugin to do this automatically).