I recently was running into problems with my old VPS provider ConnectSwitch with things like regular downtime. I wasn’t really bothered to go chasing after them every time so I decided I’d look elsewhere for hosting.

I’d only ever heard good things about SliceHost before so I decided for many reasons on top of their good reputation to give them a try.

So far they’ve been great. I’ve had to talk to support for some little things so far and the response times have been incredibly good. Email’s are replied to almost instantly if you don’t want to try their numerous other support methods like IRC or their own chat service.

On top of all that they’re reasonably priced especially with the Dollar to Euro conversation rates these days.

Long story short, if you need a new host give them a try. It’ll be worth your while

Recently I decided that I would try to replace my Apache installation with one of it’s competitors to see what could be gained from a change. While I’d heard good things (and bad) about Lighttpd (lighty) I decided it would be interesting to go with the underdog nginx.org

nginx.org was originally developed to cater for the needs of Rambler, a Russian search engine. It has quickly gained numbers though, and recent surveys put it as fifth most used web server on the internet today. It has many nice features, but above all has a reputation for stability, something I can’t say Lighttpd has in quantities.

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I’m a huge fan of the o2sms, a command line application for sending free SMS messages using the websites of three of Irelands most popular mobile operators being o2, Vodafone and Meteor. All of these operators offer the functionality of sending free text messages from their own websites giving users the option to send up to 300 free SMS messages per month, which is quite a lot considering they charge up to €0.11 per message when you use your phone.

The only problem I find with using these sites is that it takes quite a lot of steps to actually send a message. Open Firefox, load the website, login, navigate to the webtext page etc… This is where o2sms steps into the equation. It acts like a specialised browser that automates the actions taken by the user to send SMS messages and provides the functionality through a CLI (command line interface), reducing the process to a single terminal command. Read the rest of this post…