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Bitcoin needs to stop being a thing of specualtion.

Just read that Tradehill has closed its doors and that Paxum is no longer accepting Bitcoin funded accounts.

Wow! – I thought, I wonder how that has impacted prices as I have noticed that Bitcoin rate compared to the USD has risen fairly steadily over the last few months from its lows of about USD2. Looking at MtGox it looks like the exchange rate has softened 25% for the day ad is trading at about USD4.20.

Looks like the various policies recently being put in place to start controlling the use of Bitcoin is starting to bite (I was asked to ID myself before being able to use a particular exchange I had already used before).

My theory is that BTC will soon stop being a thing of speculation (and demand a premium because it is “l33t” or Anonymous) and will soon float with the USD at a price that reflects the cost of creation of bitcoins. Then and only then will Bitcoin become a currency/method of wealth transfer that will gain greater usage around the world.

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Twitter’s Bootstrap frame work for webpages

Having recently moved all my services back to Australia after my from Amazon’s EC2 experiment I thought my old website needed a bit of a re-fresh so that I have one main page from which you can bounce around to all the other bits of my website – enter Twitter Bootstrap.

Now I am no website developer but this thing is very very simple to use. All I do is make sure I point the web page to the CSS code that resides at Twitters github repo and then just code the page using the bootstrap CSS elements e-voila and I created my home page (www.depannone.com). Dead easy and looks really really nice if I may say so.

If you are interested in using Twitters Bootstrap as well see here….http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

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Move of web and mail servers are complete

I have finally transferred all my services back to Australia.

For a few months now I hosted my web and mail server at Amazon. Unless you use the micro instances and the limitation there of its just to expensive (for me) to justify keeping it at Amazon. Luckily a mate of mine has a huge ESX box and was kind enough to create a couple of machines on there for me so here we are, back in Oz.

The web interface to my emails in the past has always been Squirrelmail, its fast, easy and works but is lacking in the looks department. On my new mail server I have installed Roundcube. It looks nice and seems to work well but is a little slower than Squirrel – perhaps it needs some tweaking.

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My new website web application.

You may notice there isn’t much of my old site left, just the wordpress blog. Now that I have commencing moving all my servers back to Australia (thanks Paul) I have cleaned up my website and installed a couple of open source services.

The first was tt-rss (tt-rss.org) which is a great little web application that you use to subscribe to rss feeds. RSS is a great thing if you like to keep tabs of new posts on a bunch of websites. I used to use Google Reader but thought it would be cool if I could own the information about which websites I subscribe to – hence tt-rss.

Second, I have always found it painful to create new pages for photos that we take on my old site, it was time consuming using something like Jalbum. To this end I have installed OpenPhoto on my website (see photos.depannone.com). Go to http://theopenphotoproject.org/ for more info. Its great – very flash and has the tagging facility which I never really considered until you sit down and think how do I find this picture again in a few years. For each photo you upload to it you can tag it with what the photo is about (say it has a photo of a dig, you would tag it “dog”) then in the future if you want to look at say photos of just dogs you can do so (assuming you have been diligent at your tagging in the first place).

The great thing about OpenPhoto is the photo’s don’t actually live on your server, when you upload them they are actually store at Amazon in one of the S3 buckets that you need to create (if you self host). Given all my photos are currently backed up to S3 this was fairly easy. If you don’t have S3 yet – sign up at Amazon, create a bucket for your photos and enjoy owning and staying in control of all your photos.

Two very cool web apps that you should check out of you run your own servers.

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Moving away from EC2

Well, I’m getting off this EC2 ride and moving my servers back to Oz over the next few days.

Its been a wild ride and have learned heaps about the EC2 solution, its shortcomings and strengths. In all, I don’t think its an affordable solution for someone like me that just wants to host some machine images for serving websites etc. I’ll write more later, at the moment I moving house – so to speak.
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Crazy fluctuations in Amazon EC2 spot prices

What in god’s name is going on with EC2 Micro instance spot pricing?

I have recently had my instance shut down because the spot price for micro instances in US East zone went up to some ridiculous price like $5/hour! Crazy price, but it only sits there for an little while and then drops back down.

In any event, I have come of spot prices for the time being and have gone to normal pricing which means it costs a bit more but at least I have control of how much I will be paying and not have instances dropping off. An added drama with micro instances is there is no included persistent storage, so when the thing gets shut down all changes made to that image since that last save have been lost (except for the data that I have saved in a persistent storage device I have paid Amazon protection money for and that I mount on the instance).

In any event, may consider moving my instance to Amazons Singapore data center once I figure out how to do that and perhaps go back on spot prices after the move (Singapore seems to be less volatile, presumably given the lesser demand there – just need to worry about supply).

***UPDATE 30 Dec 2011***

Here is a graph showing the wild fluctuations in spot pricing for t1.micro instances. keep in mind the on demand price is currently $0.02/hour. What the!

Here is what I mean about spot prices for EC2 instances,
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My new bike

Have sold a couple of scooters lately, was looking for a bike that can do most things well and be able to travel long distances (thinking of doing an across the top of Australia ride in 2013). The best bike for the job – the 1994 BMW R1100GS. She a ripper, but pretty big which has taken some time to get used to.

Take a squiz!

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Cloud music – goo idea but bad for your wallet

I recently copped a large mobile phone bill from my friendly mobile service provider – instead of my normal $49 per month it was over $200! The culprit – 3G data.

Now I get 2.5G of data included each month but I exceeded this by 1.2GB in August and the only thing I can think that I have changed in my usage habits was that I started using Music Beta by Google, Amazon Cloud Player and my own self hosted Subsonic.

My providers billing system only sends you an email saying, in effect “your bill is available to view on our website”.  Given I expected it to be $49 I didn’t check it – stupid me.  In any event, why can’t they just attach a brief summary of your usage and the months charges to the email?  Logging on to your account is just another step in the process and its just not necessary.

So, tip for new players, don’t go with a mobile provider that fails to warn you when you are approaching your data usage allowance (because lets face it, its in their interest not to tell you they can graft you if they don’t) and be warned that using cloud based music players has a detrimental effect on your 3G data allowance – watch out!

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Bitcoin price drop 9 September 2011

Wow!

I just looked at Bitcoin Charts and its a sea of red. Prices are at around USD5.45 per BTC!

Wondering what the heack caused this recent plunge I take a look at MtGox and notice the following post.

“Dear Mt.Gox Users,

Due to an intermittently active node in the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin withdrawals are currently unavailable. Users will receive an error message of “invalid bitcoin address” when trying to process their withdrawal. Mt.Gox is currently investigating alternate node pathing options. It will be fixed as soon as possible, and updates will be announced when Bitcoin withdrawal is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you,

Mt.Gox Support”

I could be wrong (I have not followed the trials and tribulations of Bitcoin recently) but perhaps that “spooked the horses” and everyone is trying to cash out fearing the major exchange has taken a hit or somehow will not be able to transfer out BTC – the above announcement doesn’t read that way to me but I’m an amateur really.  How strange people are.  I am guessing there are a bunch of pre defined sells set up that are triggering, what the bet when people realise things are OK the exchange rate will rise again.

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Google Authorship and rel=auth

Have been battling with getting my websites and blog set up so that authorship of the blog and website pages points to me Google+ profile which in turn creates some proof of ownership of my website and blog because of the link. A side effect is that when you search Google for something and I happen to have written something about it (or if in fact you are searching for me website via Google) a little picture of my mug will come up next to the search result – which I recon is kind of cool.

I had some problems getting the blog set up. The two major problems I had were:-

  1. Understanding the significance/difference between rel=author tag and rel=me tag.
  2. Making sure the web-link in my profile were available to be viewed by anyone.

So what were the lessons learned I hear you say?

  1. The rel = author tag basically tells Google search engine that the page with this tag in it is a very important page and (in the case of a wordpress blog) to look at the page with that tag to then look for the html tag rel = me.  In turn, the rel=me tag points the search engine to my Google profile which as a result “connects” my blog to my Google+ profile. I guess a parallel are some of the sites that allow you to “claim” website as your, e.g. claimID.com or the Verisign VIP service (via OpenID)
  2. One of the steps in the process is to make sure that your Google+ profile has a website link that points to your website (or blog) that you linking to your Google+ profile from, ie, the website that you have just added the rel=author or rel=me tags (or both) on.  Just make sure that the links on your Google+ page are available to be viewed by everyone, not just those in your circles (like I did).  If you restrict visibility to only those in your circle you will not obtain the full benefit of Google Authorship.

There are a few sites to look at about all this.  The main ones I used for my WordPress blogs were:-

  1. Google site about it all – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1408986
  2. and most importantly, in relation to WordPress blog – http://www.ryantmalone.com/seo/google-authorship-markup-verification-tutorial-for-bloggers/

These two sites should get you on yor merry way.

Enjoy your head next to search results with your site in it!