Intrepidation

VPS.net Review

I created my account with VPS.net with high hopes. Web hosting has always been a troublesome area for my business. It seems that every hosting company has at least one or two major flaws, whether it is poor support, poor offerings, high prices or rampant downtime. With my current hosting provider, it was a combination of high prices and poor offerings. I switched to VPS.net and immediately those two issues were remedied. The performance of the server was incredible. I would say roughly five times faster, if not more than that. This speed, along with a price that was roughly the same, if not a bit less, than what I was previously paying seemed to make a winning combination for me. At least that was until the server started randomly becoming inaccessible, without warning. This wasn’t even during times of high traffic, far from it. The server seemed to handle high traffic loads with ease but then just become inaccessible when traffic was quite low. When this happens, I have no way of knowing without actually attempting to access my site. When this happens, the only method that I have for getting the server back up and running is to manually restart it myself. VPS.net support is helpful at getting the server back online for me when I have problems but they are just about useless at helping me to determine WHY it went down in the first place. I’m not sure if they don’t care or if they don’t know enough to help – but it doesn’t much matter. I’m left with a server that goes down several times a month and requires manual intervention by running and me to get it back up. This always seems to happen at bad times too – whether I’m on vacation in Bermuda (like I was last week) or in the middle of the night when I don’t notice it is down until I wake up (like last night). The price and performance of VPS.net make it immediately attractive, but if the uptime levels and support don’t improve – I’m going to have a hard time staying with them.

Using HDMI video with digital optical audio on a Pioneer VSX-1019AH-K receiver

I spent far too long on this, Googled about a million times and finally figured out the solution on my own. I figured it might be worth putting this on the Intraweb, since I couldn’t find it anywhere in my travels.

The Goal: I have a Mac Mini that I wanted to run through my Pioneer VSX-1019AH-K receiver with the video through HDMI and the audio through a digital optical port.

The Setup: The I have a DVI video output cable for the Mac Mini, which I then connected to a DVI-to-HDMI cable, which I plugged the HDMI cable into the Pioneer. For the audio, I have a TOSlink digital audio to digital optical audio cable that I also plugged into the Pioneer.

The Problem: I could either get the audio to work, or the video to work - but not both at the same time.

The Solution:

1. Make sure to shut off the KURO Link feature
2. Through the ‘Input Setup’ menu, assign the proper HDMI and digital audio inputs to one of the inputs (I used the ‘DVD’ input)
3. This is the key - make sure to change the audio ‘Signal Select’ to ‘Digital’ (it defaults to ‘Auto’, which is why it will try to read the audio from the HDMI cable)

I didn’t put every detail here, but it should be able to put you on the right path. Read the manual and you’ll get it.

skEdit as an alternative to Coda

I tried. Well, I gave it a few hours - I think that counts as trying.

After my well documented problems with Coda, I figured I would give skEdit a try today. After about two hours, I’ve decided that skEdit is very similar to Coda. It’s just not as refined or well thought out.

The projects aspect is very similar to Coda, but more confusing. There is no “Upload All” feature that I was able to find. There’s really no good way to tell if you’re working with a local file or a remote file. That scares me. I need an easy way to tell if I’m using a local or a remote file - otherwise I could overwrite some files that I just don’t want to.

The code highlighting was normal, I didn’t really notice any pros or cons when compared to Coda. They both appear to be missing out on the fact that often times I can’t pick HTML, PHP, CSS or Javascript for the file I’m working on. Most times, it’s all four. Why is that so hard?

So, back to Coda. Hopefully, when I finally reformat my computer and get working with Leopard, my freezing issues will stop. 

Simfatic Forms JS Validation System

I don’t use their program, but the Simfatic Forms Validation sysem is a great. It makes things very easy. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ton of documentation out there, at least that I’ve been able to find. Especially for regular expressions.

Here is a regexp example from an event registration form that I created. It requires a monetary amount to be entered properly.

frmvalidator.addValidation(“family_success_donation”, “regexp=^\d{1,5}(,\d{3})*(\.\d{2})?$”, “Please enter your donation in currency fashion only.\nExample: 10.50”);

My problems with Coda

I love Coda.

I also hate Coda.

I love that Coda has a beautiful interface, I love that it organizes my files into “Sites”, I love that it handles the FTP process for me.

I hate that Coda continually freezes on me and I hate that Panic isn’t really doing much about it. I’ve offered my help to them over and over - they just don’t seem all that interested.