Problems multiple computers, wrong files on wrong machines, wrong versions, old backups? Dropbox may be your solution to these problems!

Dropbox

When I use 2 or more computers at same time I sometimes just want to move one single file to another computer. I could set up FTP server, but that’s a bit overkill for moving single files… I could also move it to another server and download it from there or I could move it via samba…

Sometimes I just don’t want to think. I just want that my file goes from one computer to another. And this is where Dropbox is awesome. Dropbox instantly syncs files on it’s directory to it’s own cloud server and to other computers that are linked to the account. With small files it is awesome, but with bigger files it can be annoyingly slow, because it moves it first to Dropbox server and then downloads it to other computer.

Sharing files is also possible. After placing file to public directory, you can find public link via right click menu. With the link you can share any file to friend easily. Actually, this way to share files is one of the best ways. I personally like to upload my files to ftp server and then share link, but for most users Dropbox is the best way. (Ftp gives nice directory list and it is just more 1337 way to share stuff

Best thing is that you get 2 gigs of free storage! (You can extend it to 3gigs by inviting friends… My own invite link below)

Try Dropbox now

I don’t know why, but I love also all kind of stats. It’s just fun to have dozens of data and then analyze it with graphs and pie charts. Here is list of services that gives stats from various sources. I use all of them regularly.

• Google analytics – Nice stats of the website
• Woopra – Awesome realtime website stats tracking
• Feedburner – Nice feed subscribers/reach tracking
• Webalizer – Bandwith monitor provided by my webhost
• Hlstatsx – Most of my games are source games, so the Hlstatsx generates nice stats. (Open source version)
• Etqw stats site – The official stats site
• My own script that generates graphs from official ET:QW tracker
• Steamcommunity – Steamcommunity gives gametime stats and also very detailed stats for some games (tf2,l4d)
• Tweetstats – Very clean and nice stats for twitter usage
• Twitter grader – Another cool stats tool for twitter
• Twittercounter – Get graphs from followers
• Cloc/ohcount – Some stats from my programming
• Ohloh – Stats for almost every open source project. Code analysis.
• mon.itor.us – Just pinging my site and checking that it’s up and running
• Pisg – Stats from IRC
• Last fm – All of the music I listen is listed on last.fm Also see my history/progress graph generated from last.fm stats
• Wakoopa – Wakoopa tracks what apps I use and how much.

I have tried Ruby on Rails many times, but this time I managed to create something useful that works. I created a simple pastebin. Actually I didn’t write any code. I just executed couple of scripts and then removed unnecessary parts from ruby code and edited the views.

To host the pastebin I used Heroku. Heroku is very simple platform to host Ruby on Rails apps. It is also very easy to deploy a app to it. Heroku offers free hosting, but it also offers very big plans. Biggest hosting packages can be over 2000$. I recommend to try heroku.

My pastebin runs at pastebin.heroku.com

I have recently tried the Amazon EC2 service. If you don’t know what EC2 is, read this.

Prize of instance isn’t very high. If you need to run couple of heavy apps for couple of hours, it costs maybe couple of dollars. But for hosting website it is very expensive. So if you need powerful machine for quick tasks, try EC2. If you need hosting, try vps/shared hosting.

If you try EC2 I really recommend to try Elasticfox Firefox addon, because it makes managing of EC2 much easier. I also recommend to read the documentations well before booting instances. Connecting to EC2 instance via ssh is done with private-keys. This was first time I used private keys with ssh, so I first forgot to include the key when I booted my first instance.

I got my second instance running without problems and I got ssh access to root shell. After some modifications to source.list file I was able to install irssi and htop. It seems like there isn’t any limitations on ports etc.

htop running on ec2

What I will try next on EC2 is game server. As these are very powerful servers, it would be great to just boot instance with game server pre-installed and then stop it when it isn’t needed anymore. Also, a large EC2 instance would be nice render node for 3d rendering.

I may move static files of this blog to S3, but I am not sure if that speeds up my blog…

Edit: I found official management console of AWS and it looks pretty nice. Try it before Ellasticfox.

I recently have released new version of my website. Now it is good time to look what I have done. Two and half years ago, I started my website on free hosting. There wasn’t lots of content and the layout weren’t very good… Here is screenshot from early layout. I have unfortunately lost the first original layout.

After sometime, I decided to move to “real” webhosting. After that I installed WordPress and tried to have a blog. I didn’t have enough time/skills to keep it up, so I went to “normal” website. I installed Joomla for two months. I hated joomla and moved back to hand code my website.

Old Pelikoira website. CMS is cutenews.

After couple of big difficulties on my hosting, I moved to new servers, and got much better systems. I restarted blogging with better succession.

Couple days ago, I read some of my text on my website, I realized that the content isn’t good. Most of text contains lots of typos and it’s mostly boring.

So I recreated my website in two parts. Blog and Website. Blog is the place where I write my random thoughts, and other stuff. On the “main” website you can find my projects, links and other non-blogging stuff.

Screenshot of Pelikoira website before total makeover.

So what is my records? Well, one of my popular pages is the joke about vista’s source code. It got very popular on stumbleupon with over 350 comments. I got about 80,000 unique visitors in two days. Best hit was about 130,000 unique visitors on my website at year 2008 on my previous server. The page was http://www.pelikoira.net/stumble. Stats are here.

Old content is now deleted, but  you can still access the downloads to get old stuff. Some big projects are coming soon…

http://www.pelikoira.net