Today has been a flurry of sysadminlike activity, getting my new server up and running just like it should be. I did have to pester a number of people with annoying questions, mainly in the areas of DNS and email, but in the end I got one of my domain names transferred to the new server, a friend of mine to act as a secondary DNS provider, and email more or less working. I also got Apache, PHP, and MySQL working, and figured out how to set up virtual hosts in Apache. Things are running very much ahead of schedule, so hopefully everything will be moved over to the new server tomorrow or the next day.

Overall, everything has been easier than I would have anticipated. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to get email working, including quite a bit of wasted time on research, looking at solutions that are way too big and complicated for my very meager needs. In the end, a friend mentioned the Dovecot IMAP server, which turns out to be perfect for me. Both Courier and Cyrus are overkill for somebody who needs two mailboxes. I also spent some time reading about Postfix and how to configure it, but it turns out that just reading the comments in the Postfix configuration file was the best approach.

Running your own DNS server certainly makes you feel like a real citizen of the Internet. Everybody should do it once.

Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 is going to be released on Friday. Looking at the feature list for the release, you can see that the browser is basically finished. The biggest feature seems to be more robust RSS support, all of the other features are usability improvements. I’ve had the sense that Firefox was basically finished since version 1.0 was released, and I’m glad to see that the team is still pushing through incremental improvements, unlike a certain other browser that dominates the market and is about to see its first major update in about fifty Web years.

Update: Ben Goodger published a history of Firefox. If you ever wondered where some of the truly hideous early Mozilla themes came from, this article provides the answers.

Well, my new server is set up. Time to start wreaking havoc. I kind of wish they had sent me a picture of it. It’s pretty exciting to have a server of my very own sitting in a rack somewhere. Right now I just need to find those remedial systems administration texts.

Update: One nice thing about Layered Technologies is that when they provision a new server for you, they don’t install lots of extraneous packages. In fact, it doesn’t look like they install any extraneous packages. I approve.

The other day I was going to post about a problem I have with comment systems on weblogs — namely that it’s hard to maintain one conversation, much less several, when you have to go back to each weblog where you commented and see if anyone else has responded to you. When you read tons of weblogs, actually trying to converse at any one of them is just too much. Anyway, it looks like Cocomment is an attempted solution to that problem. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks pretty darn interesting.

Useful email management tips are flying around like crazy these days. Guy Kawasaki posted a great list of tips for writing effective email messages, and Merlin Mann just posted a big list of email tips that he’s posted at 43 Folders.

It seems like most hints for dealing with email are targetted for people who get tons of email and for people who can’t seem to tear themselves away from their inbox. That’s not me. I generally don’t have a problem dealing with the email messages that are important, it’s that I tend to let the ones that are not critical languish. My usual pattern was to deal with only the email that was important and maybe half of the rest, and leave the rest in my inbox unread for months. The next thing you know it’s February and I still have unread email from September sitting there in my inbox. The most common types of things I’d find were mail from mailing lists, automated messages from version control or issue tracking systems, and other computer generated email, like marketing messages. I’m only diligent about getting rid of spam and taking care of actual mail from real people who might be upset if I don’t respond.

Recently I have resolved to deal with all my unread email every morning before I do any other work, and that has worked remarkably well for me. No longer do I have 250 threads in my Gmail inbox that I’m just going to archive anyway. I check my email throughout the day as well, but I have tried to build an email tending habit and have actually had some measure of success. That’s remarkable given my history.

Well, I’ve finally decided how to handle my Web hosting issues. Right now I have an account at pair.com that I’m not using, and an account at TextDrive that works fitfully. A very kind reader offered to host rc3.org on his dedicated box free of charge (like two months ago), but I haven’t moved this site over there yet. If I had done that, I was going to move some other stuff (like mail) back to pair.com so as to avoid giving him too much of a support burden and cancel my TextDrive account. Then I came up with this brilliant idea for a site that I wanted to implement using Ruby on Rails (for synergy with what I’m doing at work). My idea for that was to buy yet more hosting from one of those companies that gives you a virtual server on a partitioned physical server, so that I wouldn’t have to pay much and could break things as badly as I wanted.

At that point I’d be paying pair.com, some yet to be named hosting provider, and causing labor for my generous friend. As I was SSHing into his box yesterday, I noticed the name of his hosting provider, Layered Technologies. I checked out their prices, and they’re pretty affordable (well, they range from pretty affordable to really expensive). You can get their bottom line server for $65 per month with no contract. Pair.com has the specs for all of their servers published online. The specs on the server from Layered Tech are comparable to the specs on the server I shared with 50 other people at Pair.com, so I think I’ll be fine in that regard.

The real victim here will be my friends who are Linux experts. Be prepared for a barrage of stupid questions. (I’m going with Fedora Core 4 as the operating system on the server because Red Hat is what my Linux-loving friends know best.)

The other day I was reading Marginal Revolution, and saw a recommendation for the Lonely Planet Bluelist. The book is a survey of the current state of tourism in most of the countries in the world. It has a bunch of fun lists, a lot of pretty pictures, and some useful information as well. I find the book to be incredibly inspirational, not just when it comes to planning possible vacations, but in feeling better about the human race as a whole. I spend a lot of my time ticked off at the state of mankind, but I am grateful to live in an interesting world filled with amazing places and fascinating people, and to live in a time when a lot of it is accessible to me, not just in person but online and in print. The Bluelist is a good reminder of just how grateful we should be. Lonely Planet also has a companion web site for the book, where you can publish your own “blue list” of travel recommendations.

It looks like Salon is in the process of getting rid of Radio Userland as their blogging tool. Providing what is essentially a hosted service with a fat desktop client puts you outside the mainstream. It wouldn’t surprise me if Salon had a WordPress-based offering before too long, although I still think that Movable Type is the better product.

Once again defeatists and naysayers who dispute the fact that American-style democracy is spreading have been proven wrong. The Hamas recipe for success — campaign like Republicans.