Jack Scott, Author at Jack Scott's Blog

Pre-Internet Win

This evening I spent time on Youtube (uh oh…). After the usual clicking between videos, I ended up on this song. For the uninitiated, the Ning Nang Nong is a song by legendary poet Spike Milligan, but made famous (to Australians at least) by being made into an animation sequence on a children’s television show (Play School, on ABC TV). I spent about an hour listening to this video, over and over and over. It never gets old.

According to Wikipedia, Play School is the longest-running childrens television show in Australia, and more than 80% of young children watch it at least once a week. I’d say that’s been true for the entire running of the series too. Every person I’ve talked to on the matter has watched Play School as a child. Even though they’ve taken the Ning Nang Nong off the regular programming, it does occasionally get a run. And boy does it deserve it.

The Ning Nang Nong has so much pure win in it. It’s hilariously funny, completely insane, horribly addictive, and it impregnates itself in your brain forever. Very few Internet memes can pull as much win. From one comment on YouTube:

GreenCristina: […] The amount of win it contains cannot even be articulated.

So after a bit of thought, I came to the decision that more Australians would be able to recite more of the Ning Nang Nong than they would of the Australian national anthem (Advance Australia Fair), without listening to either song before hand. I know that I know more Ning Nang Nong, for certain.

So tell me (in the comments), have you seen the Ning Nang Nong? Is it the highlight of your childhood? Can you recite more it than Advance Australia Fair? And is it the biggest pre-Internet win ever?

Nullshells Networks

About a month or so ago I investigated replacing my extensive collection of virtual private servers, free web hosting accounts, SSH shell accounts, and so on with a single managed server account. The reason for this is that the time taken up with managing these various accounts and servers was starting to chew up more time than the money I was saving.

A couple of friends had free accounts with Nullshells, and had positive things to say, so I thought I’d give them a go. I chose the “Value” ($7 USD / month) web hosting plan based on the number of domains I planned on hosting. All my websites are fairly low bandwidth and low disk usage, so this was the only one of the listed specifications I really cared about.

I have to report that the signup process was fairly simple, and the setup process was completed quickly. The only thing I found slightly confusing was that (for some odd reason I can’t quite fathom), there seems to be a separate user account for the billing system and the system logons. While this doesn’t really matter (I set them both to the same password and just ignore the fact), it does puzzle me.

The web hosting plan I chose gave me access to one of Nullshell’s servers on the East Coast of the USA. I have had no problems so far with the speed of the server, nor with the speed of the connection. I live in Australia (basically the other side of the world), and was getting ping replies in 250msec. Not quick, but that’s not the fault of Nullshells. Transfer, however, was no problem. It fully saturated an ADSL2+ connection I tried a transfer speed test on. I have no doubt it’s a lot faster than that too.

As with all modern hosting plans, a user control panel is included. The one Nullshells uses is called ISPManager, and everything about it is very nice. It’s a lot easier to work with than CPanel, and makes a lot more sense.

As for the actual plan’s features, well, they’re pretty nice too. $7 a month buys me 1GiB of disk space, 5GiB of data transfers, 10 MySQL databases, and 100 email accounts. As well as that there is the previously-mentioned 5 domain limit. Available for use are PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails and Server-Side Includes. Compared to the larger ISP hosts, this is brilliant value. Even for some of the comparable smaller hosts, it’s still rather outstanding. But there’s one surprise up Nullshells’ sleeve that I haven’t talked about yet.

The service is amazing. I’m yet to have a problem resolved in an unsatisfactory way. The staff are always ready to help. In addition to this (and this is the first time a commercial company has impressed me in this way), I’m asked occasionally if things are working fine and given notice of recent improvements the company has made (I’m interested in such things, which is why they tell me).

Overall, I’m really pleased with Nullshells. For the cost of 3 bottles of Coke a month, I have a web hosting service that’s much more reliable than anything I could do myself, with great service and more features than I’ll ever use. 5 stars.

Webmail in under 5 minutes?!?!

Today, I am in awe. I decided I wanted webmail on my mail server, so that I could check my email on computers I don’t have a proper email client set up on. For instance, on a lab computer at my university. So I started looking around.

I’ve tried setting up webmail in the past, usually unsuccessful. IMP, Horde, squirrelmail, most people would be familiar with the horrors of webmail clients. Some of them even want access to the raw storage files in /var/spool/mail/etc. Which I don’t think is the proper way to go about things. But luckily today I stumbled upon RoundCubeWebmail, which I had downloaded, installed and configured in under 5 minutes.

Where’s the downside to this painless webmail? I’m yet to find one!

It looks nice (unlike some of the others, whose web design is stuck in 1995). A few small icons and a bit of CSS goes a long way.
It works via IMAP, so doesn’t require access to the raw mail files *yuck*.
It seems fairly configurable, but the defaults are sensible.
You can configure it to allow access to multiple IMAP servers, so a single installation on a web server can deal with multiple IMAP servers, no problems at all.

In all, I really like this software!

Why I No Longer Use Facebook…

…and why you probably haven’t noticed.

Facebook, along with its partner in crime MySpace, were touted as the all-singing, all-dancing duo of social networking in the Web 2.0 age. For a long time I didn’t catch on, until about March/April in 2008. It was at that point in time that I decided to open an account on Facebook, to see what friends of mine were up to. And that’s when the trouble started.

Continue reading Why I No Longer Use Facebook…

My First Coppermine CPU

Yesterday evening in the mail I received, amongst a whole package of computer junk I didn’t really want, a couple of socket 370 CPUs. Four of them, to be exact. One is a Pentium III Coppermine CPU proper (an SL52R), the others are Celerons of various speeds.

You’ll notice that the SL52R is the same sSpec I was raving on about in my last post on this subject. So why did I rush out and buy one? Because to me, it has beautiful proportions. 1GHz is a nice round number. In my opinion the amount of cache is a nicer number than any other amount (256KiB instead of the 128KiB found in the Celerons and some Pentium IIIs), and the core voltage is nicer (1.75V). I would have preferred a 100MHz bus speed (instead of 133MHz), since that’s a nice round number, but you can’t have everything. Plus, a 133MHz bus does go a lot faster.

Unfortunately the picture isn’t mine; my digital camera has decided not to work in the cold this morning.