argus

…or, “I’m such a big nerd that I’m writing a tribute to my startup’s website hosting company.” Even though we pay them for services. Sheesh :)

I’m now at Rimu (http://rimuhosting.com) and they are nothing short of outstanding. It’s more expensive ($20/mo, billable 1 month at a time if you prefer) but they give multiple site discounts and their customer support is THE BEST in the business. All that and you get a VPS thats like you’re own *nix box. Only thing you can’t do: recompile the kernel. If you can afford the higher price and the logistics of moving your site, don’t waste one more minute of your life using any hosting service other than Rimu.

Oh — and you get a choice of four available *nix kernels when you purchase a new VPS. I went with the latest Ubuntu, so installation/configuration went something (approximately) like this:

> apt-get update > apt-get install mysql > apt-get install apache2 > apt-get install python > apt-get install mysql-python

I manually checked out the latest Django subversion trunk and configured it, as I wanted to be able to keep up with the bleeding edge Django state (as it’s far superior than their released packages).

And no, I’m not a Rimu employee or something — just someone who has fought with craptacular (or at least “less-than-90%-satisfying”) hosting services for years.

Weird Al Yankovic strikes gold ..again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw

Brilliant. BRILLIANT. All the funnier because …well, I’m white and nerdy.

(And in case you’re wondering, according to — where else? — Wikipedia, the song he’s parodying is “Ridin’” by Chamillionaire and Krayzie Bone)

Yeah, I’m a bit late to this one, but I’ve been slammed lately — just now wading through my backlog of RSS reading material and I stumbled across this Google Blog entry.

Picasa is Google’s picture management package, and it’s niiice. If you’ve looked at it before but didn’t find it compelling enough to really dive into, you might want to look again. A lot of new capability has been rolled into this latest version, including the ability to publish pictures online. The full release notes are here.

I’ve got a handy-dandy little link on the right sidebar if your interest has been piqued ;)

Been playing with a new Google Maps mashup site, http://maps.webfoot.com/ — the gimmick to this one is that U.S. Census data is presented via some easy-to-use filters. After tinkering around with it for a bit, I made a mildly interesting discovery. Open each of the following maps of the Atlanta metro area in their own windows: Map 1 Map 2

What do you notice? If you’re anything like me, and I know I am, the correlation between tracts that have a higher density renting population and a higher density Latino population is striking. Now this may not be “news”, but visuals are always cool.

…is just-launched (Apr 5) startup jumpcut. Like most innovations, it may be a bit hard at first to get your head around what jumpcut is, or why it’s a big deal — but poke around. Think “flickr for videos” — except muy cooler than flickr (taking on flickr seems to be the flavor of the month — zooomr anyone?) and with an emphasis on user collaboration. Quintessential “Web 2.0″ ;)