One for the geeks.

Note that if you don’t add the prefix to configure libevent you can end up with bits everywhere and it getting a little bit fiddly.

[root@host ~] wget http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.4.10-stable.tar.gz
[root@host ~] tar xvfz libevent-1.4.10-stable.tar.gz
[root@host ~] cd libevent-1.4.10-stable
[root@host libevent-1.4.10-stable] ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
[root@host libevent-1.4.10-stable] make && make install
[root@host libevent-1.4.10-stable] cd ~
[root@host ~] vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libevent-i386.conf
	insert:
	/usr/local/lib/
[root@host ~] ln -s /usr/local/lib/libevent-1.4.so.2 /lib/libevent-1.4.so.2
[root@host ~] wget http://memcached.googlecode.com/files/memcached-1.4.4.tar.gz
[root@host ~] tar xvfz memcached-1.4.4.tar.gz
[root@host ~] cd memcached-1.4.4
[root@host memcached-1.4.4] ./configure --with-libevent=/usr/local
[root@host memcached-1.4.4] make && make install

Now you should be able to run memcached.

memcached -vv -u nobody

Alternatively of course you can use yum but that’s no fun and not always the latest version.

Myself, I want to be Frank the Bunny (Donnie Darko) when I grow up.

I had a box from The Planet over in sunny Texas which was great, got it on an offer and paid in USD so it worked out great. Problem started to come in that I wanted to upgrade the spec, perhaps more memory, CPU etc. After research most truly dedicated boxes worked out too expensive even in USD as the sites I host are mostly personal ones and I don’t get much money for them.

VPS/Cloud of course was an option and having tried The Rackspace Cloud (formally Mosso), looking at Slicehost and UK2.net’s VPS offering I found Memset. I’d heard of them in the past but quickly found quite a few people who’d used them and had good things to say.

Having signed up my payment was taken quickly and my virtual box was online in less than 15 minutes. The couple of issues I’ve had have been dealt with very quickly and so far performance of the box outweighs that of the fully dedicated machine. Only issue is the DNS control panel is very basic and is not particularly well designed or user friendly. If you understand DNS you’ll be fine, if you don’t, you won’t.

Basically I’d recommend them and now all my sites are happily running from the UK based datacenter.

Merlin Labs! – 5 Surprising House Hacks! from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

• Mrs.
• Mr
• Mrs
• Mr & Mrs
• Miss
• Ms
• Baron
• Baroness
• Sheikh
• Sir
• The Honourable
• The Right Honourable
• Viscount
• Viscountess
• Begum
• Brigadier
• Captain
• Commander
• Colonel
• Count
• Countess
• Dame
• Doctor
• Doctor & Mrs
• Doctors
• Earl
• His Royal Highness
• Her Royal Highness
• Judge
• Lady
• Wing Commander
• Lord
• Lieutenant
• Lieutenant Commander
• Lieutenant Colonel
• Madam
• Mademoiselle
• Major
• Monsieur
• Prince
• Princess
• Professor
• Reverend

o2 have now published their upgrade policy on how you can get a 3GS. Basically, buy a pay as you go phone, pay up your remaining monthly contract and sign a new one or dependent on how much you pay monthly take advantage of the early upgrade windows.

I’ll certainly put 3.0 on my phone but if it’s worth upgrading as much as I’d like to I’m not sure. In my case with 9 months left I think the pay out contract option would be cheapest – still very expensive though. Of course there’s always eBay…

Solution? Pretty simple, just add an environment variable.

ServerName rortest.local
DocumentRoot "/Users/ian/Sites/rortest/public"
RailsEnv development

Now I’ve got to try and write something useful rather than hello world or a blog post/view page.