Organon Version Four: Flame-Broiled
I’ve titled this version of Organon, “Flame-Broiled.” It’s not hard to figure out why. This design is a historic culmination of my skills in CSS-based web design. Fresh off the heels of a website for my aunt and uncle that was very successful (I know my mom liked it, at least) and well received, I bring you my first Red (capitalized because it is just that red) design, though I had planned on using a Red design months ago for my little blogging engine, which hasn’t been worked on since April.
Though it’s only been a week since I last blogged, my fingers are sluggish on the keyboard, as if they need to warm up after so many days of lazy disuse. I must confess that the rest of me really hasn’t done much this week either, save for work on the site for my relatives and stuff myself with junk food. I can feel myself swelling up like a ripe grape. But things should be picking up a bit Friday, as I have a dentist appointment and I’ll be going back to CSHS (the horror!) to work with Mr. Trapani on the school website. He finally won’t be besieged by students and teachers trying to get his attention, so I’ll get to actually talk to him without interruption. I like that.
For now, our plans are this: we’ll look at every page and file and decide whether it needs to be there or not (a lot of information is outdated or superflouous). Then we’ll combine some pages, get rid of others, layout a directory structure, make the pages (using bare markup, no CSS), and finally, apply the final design, which you can look at here. Simple, right? More than likely it won’t be, but we’ll get through it.
As far as the network goes, we really aren’t completely sure about what we want to do. Priority one is to get rid of the Internet proxy that we are forced to connect through. That’s fine for the school network, but ours is not handling the proxy very well, and we were promised a T1 long ago anyway. In the hopefully unlikely event that the school refuses to give us the T1 or a similar pipe (I bet they’ll give us some cheesy $10/month dial-up Internet service), I’ve found an alternative recently that might fit the bill, at least as far as the web server and streaming video server goes.
It all began last week, when the company I’m hosted with, MediaCatch, started getting denial-of-service attacks from some hacker freak. They don’t know who it is, nor can they find out, since the hacker continually changes their IP address. This also means that MC can’t block the hacker, since he can just go to another IP and keep attacking. So my email and websites have been down sporadically for the last several days or so, which is not at all good for me since I also host several other websites that are not my own, such as those of my church, parts of my school’s site, and the new wedding site for my relatives that I just finished.
The attack recently stopped, just a few hours ago, actually, but this has happened before. It stopped on Wednesday for an hour or so too, but then it just started right back up again. So we’ll see if I can even post this or not, as it may have started again before I finish. Anyway, the inability to receive email to my primary address is quite infuriating and frustrating, and so I began looking for another host yesterday, just in case I decided that I wanted to switch. (I won’t unless the attack persists for more than another week or so.) I read through my host’s service policy to see if I would be refunded for the downtime (they have a 99% uptime guarantee), but I was annoyed to find that the guarantee doesn’t cover denial-of-service attacks. That seems stupid to me, since it’s their problem, not mine, but they obviously don’t see it that way.
Anyway, I was looking around to see if there were any other hosts that have the same features and disk space and such as MC, and I found a company called Redwood Virtual. Rather than host individual websites, Redwood gives customers an entire server for their usage. Now, this isn’t the same as a dedicated server for one reason: Redwood’s virtual servers are on the same computer as other virtual servers, but they remain fast and flexible. Not only that, but a customer can choose one of three operating systems (two Debian flavors and Fedora Core 1) to use, even if others on their server are using completely different ones! Cool, eh? Also, you can request that your operating system be changed at any time, as long as you back up your files and settings beforehand.
How much would you expect to pay for this service? Some dedicated servers run as high as $100/month, though virtual servers are about as good. So maybe $50/month? No. Okay, $20/month. Nope. For only $10/month (or $100/year), I can get 2GB of disk space, 64 MB of RAM, the Linux OS of my choice, and 10 Gb of bandwidth. Compare this to my current host, where I get 800MB of space, a 7% CPU usage limitation, and a predefined OS and programs for the same price. The only snag here is that Redwood Virtual’s servers have nothing preconfigured, no control panel, no nothing. I would have to pretty much start from scratch. I’m not sure if I’m up to it, since I don’t know much about how important things like DNS and such work. But I could learn, right?
It just seems risky, that’s all. Especially with the responsibility of those other websites weighing upon me. But this is where CSHS comes in. We already want to be able to host our website ourselves so that we can have the flexibility of Python and custom PHP configurations and streaming audio and the ability to install anything we want. Why not just do it with Redwood? It makes more sense, in a way. Then there’s no need to worry as much about the proxy, since having a web server was the main thing that the proxy would block. I dunno. I’ll run it by Trapani tomorrow and see what he thinks.
It saddens me that there’s not another web host that matches MC. It really does. Partially because that means I’m stuck with MC, and partially because you’d think that prices would have come down some in the two years that I’ve had Brettia. By the way, that two-year anniversary came on May 8th. I had a little celebration and everything. The real date to remember, though, is July 24th, which will mark three years of HTML for me this summer. Not bad, since I’ll only be 15 then. I’ve come a long way, that’s for sure.
The only thing that I’ve been at longer is maintaining a virtual stock portfolio, which I started doing almost five years ago. (I was only ten!) It was in 5th grade, when we did a virtual stock market game in our class, and my team won with an 84% gain. Most of that can be attributed to Yahoo!, which rose 400% or something in a few months. I didn’t really count that gain as real, since it was made during the sharp upswing in late 1999 just before everything went to hell. I started another portfolio in March 2000 (after the major plunge had taken place), and I was able to eke out a small gain while the rest of the market tanked. I almost feel like one of the real traders on the floor of the NYSE, having weathered the tech recession and September 11th and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, I first learned about the World Trade Center attacks by watching CNBC.
When I saw the footage of the plane hitting the building, my first feeling was that it wasn’t real, was that I’d hit some kind of movie channel or something and this was some weird disaster movie. Then on came the Squawk Box anchor, Mark Haines, and all doubts vanished. The one thing that I remember most about that 15 minutes of horror in the early morning that Tuesday was when I was walking out the door to go to school, and I heard my mom screaming, “It’s falling, the building’s collapsing!” I almost wanted to cry right then, but I didn’t because I was just too shocked.
It amazes me now that September 11th happened almost three years ago. When I remember it it seems like it was just yesterday, or just this morning. Why don’t we just nuke the rest of the world to get rid of them? We could invite the British to come and live in the U.S. so that they would at least be spared for staying with us through thick and thin. I think of all the cultures in the world, the two that I admire most are the British for their resilience and good-natured resistence of all things bad and the Japanese for their long history and respect for nature. I admire Americans, too, of course, but sometimes I am not completely proud to be one.
I was going to ramble about how CSS is better than table-based design, and how Dreamweaver and FrontPage should be killed, and how people should take the time to learn HTML the right way, but I don’t have time. Somehow my appointment tomorrow got scheduled for 7:00 (AM!). That sucks; I haven’t gotten up that early since last Thursday.
Computer Fund
This estimate is iffy because it depends on several payments, but my cash hoard should equal $783 right now. Not bad, really. I actually only have $245 in cash and cash equivalents (debit card), but I’m owed $337.50 for various websites ($582.50 total) and another $200 will come in from my dad for weekly cleanings and money borrowed from me ($783 total). Also, I recently had $107 stolen from me out of my debit account by a creepy hacker dude, and if I get that back I’ll be up to $890. Throw in 10 cleanings ($200), birthday money ($170 combined if parents just give me cash), another $100 or so for working for the school, and more work for Jim, and I should easily have $1400 by the end of the summer. This is dependent on several factors, but the estimate that I give here is $300 lower than my official estimate. All I can say is, thank God for my uncanny ability to understand and embrace technology.
Long live Russia!