Tag: oks

Well Here We Are Again

Lots has happened for OKS since I last wrote. The things that have happened have been good and bad, but where we are at now is a place I am content with.

Comcast began blocking port 25 TCP, and that was very greedy of them. They want my family to, during this economic downturn, pay more for that, and that just ain’t happening.  However, those nice people at Google gave me a good deal, and now I am using Google Apps for mail at no charge. Aren’t they nice?

On brighter news, the OKS Minecraft server has become a beautiful place. It isn’t exactly stock, but people like it. The latest and coolest addition is the Dynamic Map. The Dynamic Map lets you see what is on the server right now. As the world updates, the Dynamic Map does as well. Hence the name, Dynamic. Right now, an Amazon EC2 instance is hard at work preparing a new static map render, and when it completes, the link will be shown here on this page.

UPDATE: The render that was taking place is long since done, and it is available at http://ec2.theoks.tk/mczoomable_new/.

Thanks, and have fun!

A post? They have those on blogs?

I load the front page of my blog nearly every day. I just can’t seem to create a post that has enough value that it’s worth posting at all. However, now I will.

That aside, I have been looking at CloudFlare, and I’ve implemented it in some areas. WordPress is locked to a domain, so this blog isn’t behind CloudFlare. Most sections of theoks.net can be viewed behind CloudFlare by replacing theoks.net with theoks.tk.

What CloudFlare does for you is that it caches static resources like CSS, Javascript, and images, closer to you, resulting in faster load of images and styles. Especially on the image board, and the zoomable Minecraft map render this can be advantageous.

I have also added Google’s +1 button to post pages, as well as the home page, and moved the Tweet button with it to below the post content.

In related news I got into Google+, which is pretty exciting. You may ask me for an invite, but I cannot guarantee that you will be allowed to join.

Things around here might get a lot faster

I was able to compile the memcache PECL extension for my copy of PHP on my Mac. Now I just need a separate machine for memcached. When I get such a thing, OKS Blog would be much better, as queries from the DB would be cached through memcached, and memory is *much* faster than hard drive.

Click on a few ads (seen near the top of the page) to support my crazy venture of a separate memcached machine, and we’ll see how speed improves when we get a memcached machine up.

The memcached machine will be running a stripped Fedora 11 install (as in no GUI), with a 64-bit kernel (because it’s a whole new machine I’m gonna put together). I know that memcached is used in the Fedora Infrastructure with MediaWiki. Possibly, I might have the wordpress-mu install use memcached as well.

For those of you who don’t know what memcached is, memcached is “a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.” (from the memcached home page) memcached came from LiveJournal, a project of Danga Interactive. We’ll see if when we get a memcached instance (if we get a memcached instance) things speed up.

Despite systematic IE6 denials, Users continue to use the lame browser.

Such users are my dad, KCLS (the library system), and other people who don’t realize that IE6 sucks. It supports only the most primitive forms of JavaScript and CSS and HTML. And, as of 2009, it’s 8 years old. Sadly, I have to be tortured by this demonic browser every time I visit the web. Even IE7 is better. EVEN A ROCK WOULD GET A BETTER RATING AS A WEB BROWSER!!!

So I wish people would realize this and switch. Cause 20 years from now, no one’s gonna be talking about this (thank god). At least OKS blog still remotely works, but not as good. Images don’t show up, the font and style are all wonky, and other crap. But OKS blog is telling users in BIG LETTERS AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE to switch. Thank you OKS.

It’s the 85th post

Here at OKS Blog, we’ve come a long way. We’ve faced downtime, but we prevail. I want you all to know how great you are and how important you are to me.

I’m very fortunate to have the number of visitors I have, and I’m fortunate to have the enthusiastic authors here as my friends.

It’s been a long time coming, and one more comment will be the 100th comment.

I am happy to continue administering OKS Blog, and we will continue to flourish for years to come!

Thanks,

Darren VanBuren

Administrator of Onekopakaspace

Posting here from ScribeFire

In case you don’t know what ScribeFire is, it’s an addon for Firefox that lets a user write posts from the bottom of Firefox without ever leaving the web page you’re on. You can get it at http://tinyurl.com/yrnml6.

ScribeFire allows you to post to blogs such as WordPress and Blagger. This blog, in fact, is supported by WordPress. What I would like to know is if it is possible to post to this blog. The site editor can reply to this post by including a list of steps to set up ScribeFire to post to here.

UPDATE (6/15/2009 @ 7:20): The site editor has replied

OKS Blog is powered by WordPress 2.9-rare (as I write this comment).

Setting up ScribeFire to post to OKS Blog is easy.

Just use http://oks.verymad.net/~onekopaka/blog/ as the URL and your username and password to login to the Admin interface here.

-Darren VanBuren

UPDATE (6/15/2009 @ 15:46) by Darren VanBuren:

My last name doesn’t have a space…

UPDATE (6/15/2009 @ 16:25)

Hmmm… I’m trying it out and it doesn’t seem to be working. When I try to load a post, it refuses to load. I just have to try publishing a new post.

16:30 – ScribeFire can now post (I sent a test post), but can’t edit. Looks like Mr. VanBuren will have to work this out.