The Taber Family Blog

I had my six week check up with Dr. Woolf on Friday. He typically felt my neck looking for anything swollen, jammed his fingers into the space my tonsils formerly occupied and finally ran a scope down my nose and throat. Signs indicate nothing new and the healing has continued along nicely. My throat is still a bit swollen, which explains the difficulty swallowing I’m still having. Overall it was a good checkup and I feel good my progress.

Also Saturday started my week long (9 days actually) stay-cation over the Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll be hanging around the house, finally getting to chores I’ve been postponing for months. Icky things like cleaning the gutters of years of pigeon poop and fixing the backyard fence.  Oh yeah. Jealous?

Every now and then a tool comes along that offers you the ability to do things you would never have guessed you could do. To me there are a few memorable ones, including such things as super glue, digital cameras, the Internet, 802.11 wireless and the ubiquitous iPhone. Add to that list the Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine, or Wolfram|Alpha for short.

I’ve played around with the Wolfram Alpha tool a few times in the past, but after reading about the top 100 innovations for 2009, and that Wolfram|Alpha was named as the “Best of What’s New” Grand Award winner in the category of computing, I thought I’d check it out once again. I was not disappointed.

If you think of Google as a fantastic research tool, well, I think of it as providing you “road signs” to information that may or may not be what you’re ultimately looking for.  Wolfram|Alpha takes that idea and expands it into offering you the information you were looking for without having to blindly click link after link. And the type of information you can derive from Wolfram|Alpha is in my estimation without boundaries. It has the ability to take your question in terms of a sentence, mathematical equation, dates, calculations, comparisons or just about anything and give you meaningful results almost instantly. Wolfram|Alpha is not designed to replace Google by any means, since it would be unfair to classify it as a simply a search engine. However in terms of quick and powerful data research, you simply can’t do any better.

Take it for a spin yourself and prepare to be amazed.  http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Or watch this video hosted by Stephen Wolfram himself. Make sure you’re sitting down first.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Oh, and if you take the Wolfram|Alpha and mix it with an iPhone, you get the a very powerful combination indeed! http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone/

I finished the last piece of my home web/mail server migration today! Several weeks ago, my home web/mail server went down with a bad power supply fan, which meant all of my web sites and email services were no longer available to my family and paying customers.

First some history: In the not too distant past I actually ran all of these services from multiple rack mounted servers in my garage, but over the years and after paying way too many high PGE bills, I consolidated all of my servers into a single Dell small form factor server running on my desktop. My PGE bills naturally went down, but I was still at the mercy of how reliable my DSL connection to the world was each day. And with a business DSL connection, the fastest upload speed I was able to get in the comfortable price range was 768 megabits per second. Not nearly fast enough for a robust email and web server environment in my opinion.

Well, when this little Dell went down a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that the time had come to end this home server experiment and move all of my sites and services into a hosted environment. But I couldn’t do all of that overnight, so I quickly ordered a replacement fan for the Dell server and until that arrived, I was able to continue operating the server with the case open and by pointing a small fan at the open CPU. This kept things cool enough to run each day. When the replacement power supply arrived, I was able to get that installed in a record 10 minutes (for me anyway), close the server case and resume normal operations!

The next step was finding a suitable Linux-based hosting provider with affordable monthly rates, shell access and the type of granular control I would need to continue hosting my websites and email. After evaluating a few candidates, I settled with a company called HostMonster.com. In addition to unlimited domains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited server space and unlimited bandwidth, the price per month dropped to an incredible $3.95 if you paid for three years up front. Sounded like a great deal, so I signed up and started the migration process for all of my websites and email customers.

Fortunately with shell access and using rsync over SSH, I was able to upload/copy all of my data (and there was a lot of it) over to the new HostMonster server. The migration process took a number of days, since my upload speeds from the house are so slow.  A couple of highlights include that HM used the Dovecot IMAP mail server, so the formatting of my existing mail boxes was exactly the same as where they would ultimately be hosted. What a time saver! Setting up Apache and the various domains was pretty easy, in addition to keeping things clearly compartmentalized on the server too. I’m also very happy with being able to offer my customers a much better webmail experience too. Not only does HM have SquirrelMail (which my customers had already been using), but Horde and RoundCube webmail are also available.

The last phase of my server migration involved moving my entire Nagios server/services monitoring application from my home server to the Amazon EC2 Cloud. I got this done today. Essentially I brought up a new server instance in the Amazon Ec2 Cloud, installed all the LAMP stack requirements and then installed and configured Nagios. I was able to save a great deal of time by rsyncing my existing plugins and configuration files from the old server. With a few tweaks here and there, Nagios came up clean and is now monitoring all of the sites and services offered by my employer. And I can sleep better at night knowing that the monitoring is now being done outside of my home network, which can be spotty on its own, and lead to erroneous notifications.

And finally, the coup de grâce. I was able to power off the little Dell home web/email server this morning. Sleep well buddy, you done good.