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Articles that don’t fit in to any other categories.

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Webmin Virtual Host Not Working? Here’s How To Fix It.

One of the most frustrating experiences when setting up a new web server is trying to get your virtual hosts to work correctly.  The program Webmin is supposed to make this easier, however you’re are often left by Webmin with a virtual host (or hosts) that is not working.  There are a few tell-tale signs that your virtual host files are broken or not working correctly, and the most obvious is that you go to one site, but get another.  For instance, lets say that you have a virtual host set up for apacheWebSite.com and it points to /home/apacheWebSite.com/htdocs.  Now let’s assume you have another virtual host setup for nginxWebSite.com and it points to /home/nginxWebSite.com/htdocs.  Webmin has configured your virtual host wrong if you go to apacheWebSite.com and get nginxWebSite.com’s content (or vice-versa).  To fix it, do the following:

1:  Open /etc/apache2/apache2.conf in the editor of your choice.

2:  Comment out (using ‘#’) or delete the line that says:

# Include the virtual host configurations:
Include /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

3:  Add the following to the bottom of the same file (substituting your site information) and then follow it as a template for adding more virtual hosts in the future.

#Virtualhosts
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot “/home/wrestlingaddix.com/htdocs”
ServerName wrestlingaddix.com
ServerAlias www.wrestlingaddix.com
<Directory “/home/wrestlingaddix.com/htdocs”>
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot “/home/dansbikeshop.org/htdocs/dansbikesWP”
ServerName dansbikeshop.org
ServerAlias www.dansbikeshop.org
<Directory “/home/dansbikeshop.org/htdocs/dansbikesWP”>
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

4:  Reload Apache by executing /etc/init.d/apache2 reload.

That’s it!  It’s really much simpler to create the virtual hosts without Webmin.

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Wedding & Honeymoon

Just wanted to put a quick post out saying that there won’t be any updates for the next few weeks. My fiancé and I will be getting married on 7/31 and will be leaving for our honeymoon on 8/3.

Wish me luck! When I return, I hope to run a post on making custom post types play nice in WordPress 3.0.

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The Idea That Wasn’t Meant To Be

Two summers ago I had a brilliant idea. College kids hate spending money. Books for classes cost money. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew whether or not you needed the book for class? That way, you could save money!

“Should I Get The Book?” was born out of this thought process. I worked hard on getting the coding part out of the way. It took about 4 weeks to get functional, working every day after work for 3 hours. After the coding was out of the way, I tried to make the site as nice as I could. I was a bit lazy with this though, and essentially “borrowed” a WordPress template and let ‘er rip.

I added schools, added subjects, added classes, and even seeded some reviews. Nobody came. I submitted my site for review to Hacker News, and they basically told me the idea was great, but the site wasn’t usable. In my infinite wisdom, I trudged ahead. I thought, if I advertise enough, people will surely come and leave reviews.

I ended up trying a few different advertising campaigns (Adwords, Facebook), and all brought some traffic, but nobody returned. It turns out that the site was fairly hard to use (which I’d been told by HN) and that without some kind of incentive nobody was going to leave reviews. There was also the part about nobody wanting to leave reviews because there weren’t any reviews there already (chicken & and egg problem?).

After unsuccessfully marketing my product for a few months and trying to get people to seed reviews, I gave up on the original and started on my redesign. The redesign was going to be grand! A huge ajaxy call to action form field in the middle of the screen just begging to be used, a karma system for people who seed reviews, special status for moderators, and incentives to invite your friends. The overall design also allowed people to discern the site’s purpose without reading a single word. Unfortunately, life has a way of putting a damper on even the best laid plans.

I quit grad school in January just as I was starting to make progress on the re-design. When I secured a real job, I found it became much harder to balance work, the fiance, side projects, and free time. I made the choice to sit on Should I Get the Book until the winter when I would have a bit more free time to work on it. Bad choice.

My fiance informed me today that Rate My Professor now has functionality that mimics Should I Get The Book. They implemented it better, already have a user base, and have the money and time to make it happen.

Does this make me sad? Sure it does. But I also feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. For so long I thought Should I Get The Book would be my salvation from the life of a salary man, but as it turns out, it was only holding me back from other ideas that are probably better anyways.

Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe I didn’t put enough money into it. Or maybe I didn’t sacrifice enough. It could be any of these things, but I tend to think that this idea just wasn’t meant to be.

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Unobtrusive Subversion

Sometimes you enter a development environment that just isn’t going to work well with version control software.  Maybe they don’t want to use version control software, or maybe the way their infrastructure is set up makes it hard to do.
I currently work at such a place, so I came up with a way to use Subversion for the vast majority of projects that I work on.
Note:  This method works only if you have full ownership over a project.  Any other people working on it would have their changes overwritten.

If I have full ownership over a project, I do the following.
1) Import the project of relevant subdirectory into a new Subversion repository.
2) Make my edits locally, committing whenever I feel inclined.
3) When it’s time to update on the server, I do an “svn export” of the project, and then Rsync it with the server.
It’s not ideal situation, but it works well for now.
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PC to Mac Transition (Developer’s View)

For the longest time I’ve been a PC user.  My very first computer related memory was playing video games on a 286 with some version of MS-DOS on it (4.?).  After that, my family graduated to Windows 3.1, then 95,98, XP, Vista, and then Windows 7.  Needless to say, I have been using using PCs for the better part of my entire life.  I’ve been using PCs with Windows for most of that time as well.  However, not exclusively.

When I started college, I found that REAL programmers used Linux.  So, I installed Ubuntu 4.10, and went from there.  From that point on, I have been using Linux (Ubuntu) as my development environment for all applications.  I’ve done my level best to stay away from Macs because I feel they are overpriced, overhyped, and have a generally pretentious user base (not true for all Mac people, just the types I encounter).  I also figured knowing 2 operating systems well was probably good enough.  Turns out that it wasn’t as soon as I started working for DDM.

DDM is a company filled with graphic designers.  It’s also a fairly progressive place, with nice perks, a fun office layout.  Due to the abundance of graphic designers, DDM is an all Mac shop.  I would argue that the graphic designers can have their Macs and I can have my PC, but alas, that is not possible.  So, with great hesitation, I accepted by brand new 17inch Macbook Pro.

Firstly, the specs on this machine aren’t spectacular, but they aren’t bad either.   It has a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Due in it, with 4 GB of DDR3 memory.  It has some type of Nvidia card in it as well, but I can’t seem to find out what type.  Either way, good, but not amazing or anything.

The display is probably the high point of the laptop.  It has a nice matte finish (per my request), and some ridiculously high resolution.  Problem for me is that the resolution is so high that it makes it hard to read text.  That’s okay though, because I’ve learned the zoom shortcut keys for all of my favorite applications.

Coding on a Mac works much the same as it does anywhere else.  I tried to use a port of Gedit as my default editor, but I ran into problems with it saving backups when I didn’t want them.  I ended up switching to Textmate, which so far seems like a nice package.  My only real gripe with Textmate is that it changed the default behavior for the “End” key.  It says “Oh, you want to go to the end of the line?  I don’t!  Lets go to the end of the document instead!”.  Turns out, you need to press CMD+Arrow to get to the end of the line, which I find extremely annoying.  Actually, CMD + anything is annoying.  The ctrl key works fine for everyone else, but Apple just has to go an ruin it for everyone.

Aside from that, life goes on much as it always has.  Code works much the same no matter where you are, it’s just a matter of how comfortable you are in that environment.

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Tether a Blackberry on Alltel

I cannot even describe to you the overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that I have now that I have finally tethered my Blackberry Curve (Alltel) to BOTH my laptops.  On Windows 7, it was fairly simple:  pair the phone, then set up a com port.  On the Mac, is was pair the device, set up the DUN for Generic & CDMA.  After that, the phone number, user name, and password are: #777, <your 10 digit phone number>, alltel.

It took me over a year to find that information on the internet.  I don’t know if people just don’t use Alltel or what, but it was exceedingly hard to find.

Down speeds are around 280kb/s, with uploads coming it at about 90kb/s.  Latency is around 330ms.  Not great, but not bad either.  I can easily work on those speeds, so long as I don’t need to do any heavy uploading/downloading.

If you need help tethering, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help.

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Back

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, so I thought that I’d write a quick blurb about what has been going on in my life.  So far this year, I have:

  • Quit grad school.
  • Got a job as a PHP + MySQL developer for DDM Marketing and Communications in Grand Rapids, MI.
  • Become far better at PHP that I used to be.
  • Commuted over 5000 miles.
  • Bought a new car.
  • Went to Arizona to visit my sister.
  • Moved to Grand Rapids.
  • Ate at some excellent new food places.
  • …and FINALLY learned how to tether my Blackberry Curve (Alltel) to my computer via Bluetooth.

Overall, it’s been a fairly exciting couple of months.  I get married at the end of July, and look forward to that above all else.

Thanks for being patient.  New posts on the way.

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2001 VW Passat

For Sale! SOLD

2001 VW Passat – V6 – 5spd
167,800 Miles