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

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.

Installation

As usual I installed nginx through apt and started to configure it to my needs until I noticed many of the things on the wiki weren’t working for some reason. I decided to check the version apt had installed and was surprised to find that not only was it a few revisions behind the current stable release, it was what looked to be a year or more out of date. A lot of new features had been implemented since this release so I decided to install from source instead.

I managed to find some great articles on Slicehost about installing NGINX on Ubuntu Intrepid which even included the making of a init.d script for the install (very handy).

Once everything was installed I had to configure the installation for use with fastcgi for php scripts. This was the hardest part of the install as it isn’t the easiest thing to get running compared to the Apache route. Many of the articles I googled included installing lighttpd for the spawn-fcgi functionality, though fortunately this has since been forked into it’s own project at Lighttpd.net.

Fast-CGI PHP support

I installed this along with another init.d script for Spawn-FCGI which I found over at Codefront.net. Once that was done it was a process of porting all my existing virtualhosts over to NGINX.

Configuration

I decided to use a similar system to Apache for handling my virtualhost configuration files by making a sites-available and sites-enabled directory for them and telling nginx to include all the the configuration files in sites-available. This means that putting a site online is exactly the same as with apache by making the necessary configuration file and then placing a symbolic link in the sites-enabled directory. Handy!

After that it was on to rewriting the mod_rewrite rules for nginx, something which actually was not as hard as I had expected it to be. The one thing that you have to be aware of with nginx is that in each virtualhost config file if you want to have php files executed you need to include the necessary block that tells nginx to pass them off to your fast-cgi process. Not that difficult to do at all, just something I didn’t think of in my first round.

Gains?

So after all that what have I gained? Well for one nginx seems to use half the memory Apache did while still providing a speed increase for static content and php files. Worth it? Definitely!

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. The one problem I faced with o2sms was getting it to work on Mac OS X. While there is the option of installing with CPAN it just did not work for me and it was constantly complaining that dependencies were not being met. While the cpan install worked for me on numerous other systems it just failed to install everything on OS X, and so I was left with the task of manually installing it.

The fix turned out to be easier than I expected. When I ran the broken install of o2sms it gave a warning that certain modules could not be found. While I tried installing them individually with CPAN it still wouldn’t work and so I decided I’d build each one individually and install them one by one. To do this I had to get the source from CPAN and build each one from the source code.

When all was said and done I was left with a working install, which looks something like this

patrick@Odysseus0% meteorsms 1234567890                                   < ~ >
[ recipient : +353234567890 ]
lorem ipsum...
.
[ logging in to 0987654321@meteor.ie ... ]
[ login successful ]
[ message sent to +353234567890, 229 remaining this month ]
patrick@Odysseus0%                                                        < ~ >

Its even possible to send messages using a single command using the -m command line argument.

patrick@Odysseus0% meteorsms 1234567890 -m "lorem ipsum"                  < ~ >
[ recipient : +353234567890 ]
[ reusing last login for 0987654321@meteor.ie ... ]
[ message sent to +353234567890, 228 remaining this month ]
patrick@Odysseus0%                                                        < ~ >

Hopefully this article will help others who have been having troubles with getting o2sms to work on their own OS X installs, or enlighten other people to the brilliance that is o2sms.

Enjoy,

Patrick

The softmod approach requires the transferring of modified gamesave files to the xbox which exploited a bad coding technique that developers employed in their gamesaving mechanisms. There “legitimate” way to do this would be to buy both an xbox memory card and the commercial Action Replay kit which includes a usb adapter to read the memory card on a PC. The commercial kit can cost quite a lot so I decided that I would do it my own way and build my own cable for the xbox and use one of the many USB keys lying around the house in place of a memory card. There’s a picture of the messy soldering job that I did to create the necessary cable at the bottom of the post.

Performing the softmod requires a copy of one of the following games for the xbox

• 007 Agent Under Fire
• Mech Assault
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

Fortunately enough I was able to find a copy of Splinter Cell on ebay which only cost €6 including shipping.

The softmod process itself is very easy to follow and almost impossible to get wrong. In all the softmod process took around 10 minutes max after which I was left with an xbox with a copy of the XBMC software on it. XBMC coupled with the DVD remote which I have for the xbox makes it such a nice experience browsing through all the media content in the house.

In the end it has turned out to be a very cost effective way to get a media centre running and its only made better by the amazing XBMC software which is available for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Its great software and I highly recommend people take a look at it over at XBMC.org.

Here’s the cables I soldered together

and the finished product.

If your interested, take a look at mahalo.com and see if you too can help us create a spam free internet