Great week – Hosting issues, dvd-rw, beanbags, silly putty, windows7, laptop battery

This week was really interesting – too much stuff happening at once.

Hosting issues redux

First of all, I’m moving to 1gb.ru hosting – they have quite good prices for standard virtual hosting and I don’t need anything more. As I’ve blogged earlier, I’m cross with my current hosting Naunet.ru because they’ve got squid installed as a front-end for all their servers, and they don’t even want to be flexible with their clients. When I emailed them saying that I can’t work with chunked encoding because of their SQUID, they said that supporting chunked encoding was not a priority issue for them. Awesome. So I looked at different options, tested few hosting providers and 1gb.ru seems to be the most reasonable so far. For unlimited traffic, standard LAMP + perl + 1 domain I’ll have to pay $50 for a year :) Going to change DNS records for sharovatov.ru domain tomorrow.

DVD-RW

I finally got to the computer store and bought a DVD-RW to replace my old CDRW. 30 bucks and now I can watch my movies on a TV – great. Don’t know why I didn’t replace it earlier.

Laptop battery

I have a really weird issue with my MSI Wind U100 laptop – it will charge only when it’s turned off. I just can’t understand why this is happening, it’s saying “plugged in (not charging)” in the battery properties. This is really frustrating because my company generously bought me this laptop only a couple of months ago. Fortunately, a girl from MSI service centre said it wouldn’t be a problem to replace the battery, however, I’ll have to wait for two weeks while the new battery gets delivered to their store from somewhere else (weird!). So it will be two weeks without a battery. This is especially bad since I’m attending OSPCON IT Project Management conference soon, and it’s awful to go to a conference without a laptop. *Still hoping it’s a software issue and can be resolved by updating BIOS or something*

Windows 7

Installed on both laptop and work PC and still can’t find proper words to describe how it’s cool! In few words: Windows 7 Ultimate RC works faster than XP Pro on my Core 2 Duo + 2GB RAM (and approximately at the same speed as XP Home on my laptop). And it’s UI is something I’ve never used before – really beautiful! All hardware was working right after the installation – and I’ve got 2 webcams, bluetooth dongle, wi-fi etc. All the software works without any problems. IE8 runs so smoothly that I don’t even bother using Chrome while on XP Google Chrome was my main browser for daily surfing.

Beanbag

Beanbags finally came to Moscow – beanbag.ru! For $70 you get a normal-sized beanbag and for $100 you can buy a huge one! Awesome! I’m thinking of getting a big one for sitting with laptop.

Silly Putty

My boss ordered me a pack of magnetic Silly Putty when he was in London. For some reason it’s sold for crazy prices here in Moscow. On Amazon.co.uk you can get 3” pack for £6.95 (350 roubles) and on handgum.ru you get the same for 1000 roubles (£20.00). Can’t wait to get it :)

And of course, as every other week, it was full of work for the great company I’m employed in – Real Russia Limited :)

Hosting issues

I’ve been trying to prepare some test cases for HTTP Chunked Encoding support, but noticed that something went weird when I was requesting data from my host (sharovatov.ru).

I’ve got a basic LAMP virtual hosting at naunet.ru which worked fine when I was hosting static content. But when I started doing the testcase, I found out all the weird and wonderful issues – mainly because they have SQUID installed before apache, so every single request goes to squid, and it’s a caching proxy that serves all my request from its cache – so I can’t test chunked encoding properly, can’t test ranges support properly… Crap. Seems that they just use squid to reduce load on their web servers.

But the worst thing is bad techsupport – it works 8 hours a day and there’s nobody there on the weekends or bank holidays. I ask a question and nobody answers it in 3 days. It just drives me insane.

Will have to move to somewhere else where sysadmins know how to do load-balancing without installing front-end proxies.

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