Testing myself and a new mini blog

Posted by & filed under Programming, Tech.

I have put up my own separate mini blog diyhackerschool.com just to document some of the things I have worked on and some of the things I continue to work on.

Part of that is challenging my self.  I have started working on Question 2 of Projecteuler.com

here is what I have after my first brute force attempt: The rest of these will go on my new miniblog diyhackerschool.com

=begin
Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...

By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.
=end

def fibo(max)
fib1 = 0
fib2 = 1
sum =0
fibnum=0

while fib2 < max
   if fib2 % 2 == 0
    sum += fib2
    end

fibnum = fib2 + fib1
fib1 = fib2
fib2 = fibnum
end
puts sum

end

App Academy application process – Part 1

Posted by & filed under Programming, Tech.

So a few days after I submitted my application I received the first Challenge.

In the instructions of the challenge invitation, there were links to resources and samples.  I took 2 days to fully review those resources.  You can take as much time as you need to prepare, but when you actually start the challenge you only have a short while.

What really helped prepare me was working thru the sample problems.  Not only did it help me prepare, it was a fun challenge.  I also felt I learned alot from working the sample challenges.

Taking the Challenge

I found the coding challenge a little more difficult than I expected, but not because the puzzles were complicated. My biggest issue was the time dead line, I felt alot of pressure but i liked it, it was a good pressure.  For me one of the issues I face was being out of school for so long, I was not 100% confident in my remembering certain mathematical definitions.  Nothing that a quick Google search couldn’t solve, to reassure my self but it ate some of the time. In Ruby there is always more than one way to do something and I would struggle back and forth testing one way or the other.

 

I think getting ready for the next challenge and just better myself I am going to work on a few more quizes/challenges just to get my mind in to thinking like a programmer.

Making the move to becoming a Developer

Posted by & filed under Programming, Tech.

I having been playing with the idea of becoming a developer/programmer for a while now.  I have taken a few online course, but the rate of learning is limited.  Also many of the online learning sources are great to get you started, but they tell you write something or use a method, but don’t explain what it does or why your doing it.

Today I took a step forward and applied to App Academy (NYC).   I will let you know if I get accepted and how things work from there.

Running a startup script in Xbuntu / Ubuntu

Posted by & filed under Uncategorized.

So my Last dual monitor fix only lasted till I rebooted the system.

I needed to get the command in to a Start up script.   I created a script called dualmon.sh witht he excat same code.

I tried calling it from rc.local file but that didn’t work   I then just just added the command in .bash_login file and it works great.

also .bashrc file updated

 

 

Getting Xbuntu to run on Dual Monitors in Virtualbox

Posted by & filed under Blogging, Programming, Tech.

I since Ubuntu is virtually worthless under virtualbox due to Unity.  I have moved over to running Xbuntu.  So far it is a great and fast OS.  I ran in to an issue when trying to get the Xbuntu to extend the desktop to both of my monitors.

 

fired up the terminal and entered this

xrandr –output VBOX0 –left-of VBOX1

And all works perfectly now.

What does it cost to run WordPress on Amazon AWS?

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As I stated in my previous posts, I am now running my sites on one Amazon EC2 Micro instance and one Micro RDS.

It is 14 days into the months now, and the cost of the RDS is more expensive than EC2.

The RDS is currently $8.35

The EC2 is currently $6.89

The data usage is only 20¢

Running the RDS and EC2 is great for sites that get alot of traffic and are content/media heavy.  My sites are neither, just a bunch of smaller niche sites.  I will be working on setting up an new EC2 with MySql built in and migrating to that.

aws

WordPress Multisite on Amazon AWS EC2

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awsI’ve been working on getting wordpress multisite up and running on my new Amazon server. Configuring the Vhost and the multiple domain plugin was a little tricky, but it all seems to be working fine now.
To give you an idea, I now have six different wordpress instances running on this server. I have five regular wordpress installs and one wordpress multisite install.
Originally set up the server as one ec2 instance and one RDS instance. While this makes the site more reliable and faster in has also almost double the cost of the server. The cost for my RDS is more expensive than the cost for the ec2. Right now I am on track to exceed $30.00 per month for my server.
If the cost become a concern in the future, I will create to in my SQL instance within the ec2 server. This will tax the ec2 to the server more but eliminate the RDS costs.

Running WordPress on Amazon AWS

Posted by & filed under Blogging, Webmaster.

I happy to say that I have a good chunk of my sites up and running on a my EC2 instance. Site performance is pretty good compared to what it was. The only hiccup was some broken links due to a change in permalinks. Additionally, my adsense plugin what causing an error with yoast xml sitemaps. I changed to a different adsense plugin and all was fixed

Managing the Vhosts in Apache is pretty easy, but a little time consuming when setting up the sites.

My next challenge is figuring out mod_rewrite for some of the landing pages.

Web Hosting headaches! GoDaddy hosting is slow.

Posted by & filed under Uncategorized.

Well , I expect this will be the last post on this server.

I started my blog and other site on godaddy hosting and after a few slowdowns I moved to 1and1.    I was with 1and1 for a few years with no real issues, but thier admin interface seems to keep getting slower and the websites ran well; I thought I could simplify my life by moving everything thing to godaddy.  well I tested GD a few sites at a time and it seemed they fixed their speed issues.  I slowly moved all my sites to GD and it was running fine for over 2 years.  in the last month my sites have become unusable slow on godaddy hosting.

Calls to their tech support confirm they are having an issues but have no idea when it will be resolved. They always tell me, probably within 24 hours.  I am done waiting and I can’t afford for some of my sites to be down.

I searched for all types of solutions and providers,  I am now testing Amazon AWS.  I have already moved one of my critical sites there and my FTP is going crazy duplicating files for the move of the rest of my sites there.

AWS is gonna cost me a little more, but should stay running. I hope.   My challenge now is to see how many WordPress sites I can run on one micro instance and 1 RDS.