Chapter 18 - Hiatus

It has been a long time since I posted here, and I am not sure when my next post will be. There are many things running riot in my head, but who knows how many of these ideas will ever materialize.

For the moment I am having a hiatus.

P.S. the link in my previous post is inactive, I intend to fix this up at some stage.

Chapter 17 - Happypolla takes its first steps

As a continuation on my last post, I am again talking about my web server. I have made it a little more interesting by adding a project I have created (which is a off-shoot of a group project I had as university assessment).

Inspiration towards this project was simply the assessment grades. But, I do also see it as a useful application and gives me a chance to discover the tortures of trying to maintain a project. For the moment it is just for testing purposes. Enjoy.

Find out more at http://www.happypolla.com/holiday/

Chapter 16 - Happypolla is alive

I've been thinking about it for a long time, and have finally got around to setting up a self-hosted web server. Initially, I thought it was going to be a streneous task, but it wasn't too bad in the end. Here, I'll write a summary of what is needed to get your own hosting up and running. The following steps are the bare essentials you will need:

1. Domain name registration
2. Name server
3. Some web server

The importance of the domain name is to reserve your URL address. There will be some free services around, but the names are probably restricted to including some extra information about the hosting service. I use http://www.planetdomain.com/.

Simply having the domain name is not very useful unless it is going to resolve to some hosting. With planetdomain, it has a service to simply forward URLs, and this is what I used for the first year and bit with my own domain. This is where the name server will come into play. Having a name server means you can resolve the URL to an IP adress (if you have a dynamic IP, you may need to investigate further on how to get this set-up). I used http://www.zoneedit.com/ which seems to be free up to some point.

So after you have a domain and the URL is resolving to your URL, you now just need to set-up a web server listening on the ip address. If you have direct access to the internet, this is a simple matter of installing apache server (or some other web server software), use port 80. It is likely your OS will have some firewall installed and so make sure port 80 is cleared for this.

If like many people, you have a router distributing your internet connection, it is not much extra work. All you need to do is access the router (see your manual) and make sure you allow port 80 to be forwarded to your machine's LAN IP.

P.S. let me know if anything is unclear, I haven't really proof read this yet.

Chapter 15 - Reflecting on Social Software

Not really a proper post today, just a link to another post I made elsewhere. For an assignment recently I was asked to use and reflect on Social Software. The focus of the piece was up to me: http://comp3505.blogspot.com/2009/04/i-want-to-be-famous.html

Chapter 14 - Ocean Cycling?

Up until this moment, I haven't really explained the why I ever chose to title my blog "Ocean Cycling". Drum Roll... Well it's actually not that exciting, it popped into my head while watching the movie "Heima" by Sigur ros. Heima is collection of footage the band gathered as they toured their homeland Iceland with several free performances.

In one particular scene, there are a bunch of kids playing at the beach. The beach looks so crappy (I'm from the Gold Coast, Australia, so maybe I have high expectations of what a beach should be like), but the kids look like they are having so much fun. Strangely enough a couple of them are riding their bicycles in the water. It looked so random, yet fun, and so that is why I chose "Ocean Cycling".

Here is a preview to the movie / documentary / live dvd:


There is a brief snippet of the kids at the beach @2:20 in the preview. I highly recommend watching the movie if you get a chance, it is beautiful, sad, uplifting and amazing.

On a lesser note, the fact that I am a cycling fan helped to confirm using the title of "Ocean Cycling".

Chapter 13 - There is a light...

The Smiths are my 9th favourite band according to last.fm. It took me a long time for me to actually give them a chance, but the following cover is the reason I did. I think I actually like it better than the original.

http://www.sbs.com.au/rockwiz/past/179/Laura-Jeana-and-Ned-Collette

If you ever feel depressed and want to compound it x100, listen to The Smiths.

P.S. I might try embed the video if I can be bothered...