EasyLinuxGuide Blog

So I called my cable company and they confirmed my suspicion that they were not televising this event in HD. This is quite ridiculous to me so I didn’t order it and I’ll be stubborn and won’t order it until they start offering it in HD.

And onto the fights…

The first televised fight was Chris Leben vs. Kalib Starnes. This overall was a pretty good fight. There were different parts where it seemed either guy could win. Both fighters looked fairly gassed though as this one went the full 3 rounds and ended in a decision for Kalib Starnes.

Next was Keith Jardine vs Houston Alexander. Jardine was irritated in a pre-fight interview indicating that he was frustrated that he was being made to fight Alexander prior to getting a title shot. At the start of the fight, it seemed like Jardine might be right as he appeared to catch Alexander with a punch that dazed him. Following that, Alexander ignited into a flurry of his own punches and eventually knocked out Jardine with an uppercut that made his knees buckle. It will be interesting to see what Jardine says after this one.

Then it was was Terry Martin (so called Mike Tyson lookalike) vs. Ivan Salaverry. Martin was very confident coming in saying it was a mistake for his Salaverry to even take the fight. Martin did end up dominating the fight winning on referee stoppage.

Josh Burkman against Karo Parisyan had a lot of pre-fight tension. The fighters refused to touch gloves in the ring and stood with their faces pressed together while the referee uttered instructions for the fight. The first couple of rounds were fairly even, but I would give the edge to Parisyan as he seemed to control the pace and his punches were landing more squarely while Burkman missed with numerous haymaker style shots. Burkman looked a lot more winded going into the third round than Parisyan.  In the third round, both fighters looked a bit winded.  Parisyan ended up winning a unanimous decision at the end of the fight. Parisyan then pleaded with Dana White for a title shot.

The fight between Din Thomas and Jeremy Stephens who is making his UFC debut at the age of 21 had a great opportunity.  Although Stephens was dominated on the ground in the first round, Stephens did an excellent job avoiding any submissions including several attempts by Thomas to sink in a rear naked choke. Right before the end of the first round, Stephens managed to stand up and then aggressively threw a flurry of punches.  In the second round, there was a controversial stoppage as it didn’t look like Stephens tapped but Thomas has the armbar locked in so hard that he would have broken Stephens’ arm if the fight hadn’t been stopped.

The Main Event was  a rematch between Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell. Rampage is the only fighter to defeat Chuck Liddell where Liddell had not avenged the defeat. Liddell looked very loose coming into the octagon while Jackson looked extremely focused. Liddell was not overly aggressive at the start of the fight and Jackson signaled for Liddell  to bring it. Once the exchanges began, Liddell went for a body shot and upon coming up, Jackson caught him with a right cross that sent Liddell to the canvas. From there, Jackson laid into Liddell until McCarthy stopped the fight.  Liddell didn’t argue the decision but seemed quite dazed after the fight.

Yet another Championship fight upset took place.  This has been an interesting year showing Franklin’s loss to Silva, Hughes loss to St. Pierre followed by St. Pierre’s loss to Serra and now Liddell’s loss to Jackson. There are no guarantees in MMA which is what makes it so exciting to watch.

I’ve seen Chuck in some interviews and I have a feeling that concussions have gotten the best of him. Chuck has a fighter’s spirit but maybe it’s time to consider going out a legend.

It’s been a while in the making, but I compiled a bunch of 64 bit packages today for our Arch Linux repo. There are still a few others that were causing an issue so I will look after those later. There are still quite a few uploaded. If there are any issues, please report them to me. With the extra bandwidth from the new host, this shouldn’t be an issue. Here is what you will need to add to you /etc/pacman.conf in order to use our repo:

[ELG64]

Server = http://easylinuxguide.com/downloads/archpkgs/ELG64

I have tested this out on my own 64 bit install and it works fine. This is also indexed so you can download just one or two packages manually if you want as well. I look forward to being able to do other things with our new host. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

This release was due as the previous release “Berth” was more just a collection to remind Used fans that they were still around. This new release features many relationship laden tunes resulting in some slower tracks like “Smother Me”. Others like “Pretty Handsome Awkward” have a more straight ahead rock element with Bert’s straining and spitting vocals. Songs like “Paralyzed” bring forth trademark sounds like something from a fairly tale and then moves into so called emo style. It may take a few more listens to gain some more solid perspective on this CD as some of The Used’s other material may require. There is no other band like The Used which is why they deserve at least a few listens because when they get things right, it’s like a beautiful accident like you’ve never seen before. There is nothing manufactured or contrived.

For those of you who didn’t know about Pandora, it was a website where you could create your own station and log in from any computer or even share it with others. Songs would be played through streaming and you could accept or reject songs or bands or even add them manually yourself. It was good while it lasted. My only real complaint with Pandora.com was that it only allowed so many songs to be skipped. So initially, if the site guessed wrong at your musical taste, you could only skip a few songs and then you were forced to listen to each song in its entirety.

Why has Canada been ruled out? In Pandora’s words: “We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.”

It’s unfortunate these sort of things happen, but it is just another example of how legislation is disorganized and unsettled. This is technology surpassing legal imagination and it surely is just another example of many more instances to come.

For anyone who has had to change hosts, you know it can be a tedious process. I will share some of the things I had to endure and hopefully it will be useful to others who may one day have to do the same.

Why did I change hosts? My former host was having issues with stability and decided to discontinue the service. This came right out of the blue and it was not very well timed, but these things tend to happen in this manner.

What research did I do? I looked up many websites where there were ratings and such and asked lots of friends and some people I didn’t know too well for their opinions. I didn’t have much time, so I tried to make the most of it and take in as much information as possible. I found that there was quite a range of pricing for hosting.

One alternative was to use a dedicated server which runs about $100 monthly. This is a really nice solution, but the drawback other than price is diskspace. If a company dedicates and entire box to you, they are likely not going to put a large hard drive in it. There are upgrades available but they are very costly, upping your monthly costs by $20-$100 depending on the amount of space you want. Also, ram upgrades are very expensive too and these are monthly charges.

Probably the most popular hosts for regular end users are shared. The least expensive and most popular of these boast very large disk space up to 350G and a monthly transfer rate of 3500GB. This is an incredible amount of space that most people will never use. I actually called 3 places: Bluehost, Host Monster and Lunar Pages. The result of calling Lunar Pages are still somewhat unknown because I couldn’t really understand the sales agent. I discovered that Bluehost and Host Monster were owned by the same company. The funny thing was that I even got the same guy on the phone when I called the second one.

I first called Bluehost and spoke to “Joel” in sales. Maybe because I work in sales and customer service and used to supervise at a call center, I have higher standards but talking to Joel was a great experience in helping me decide not to go with Bluehost. He seemed completely disinterested in getting my business and if I wasn’t speaking, there was totally dead air. I was shocked that this kind of person was in “sales”. When he answered the phone when I called Host Monster , I did the mature thing and hung up. Although I was initially excited at the amount of space and decent pricing of these companies, I was quickly disappointed and crossed them off my list of prospective new hosts.

One of the things I had liked about my previous host was that it was a smaller business and if I needed anything, I could talk directly to him. He had been quite helpful in getting things up and running for me. I really thought a lot about which host to choose and examined all of the numbers closely.

I had viewed the hosting on Godaddy’s site not very long ago and I found that the pricing was a bit high considering the amount of bandwidth and space they allotted. I decided to give a quick visit again. This time I noticed that they had vastly increased the space for their top 2 tier accounts of the 3. The most basic – Economy offered 5GB space with 250GB monthly transfer usage for $3.99 which the next step at Deluxe offered 100GB space with 1,000GB transfer space for $6.99. The Premium offered 500GB space and 2,000GB transfer for $14.99. Previously I had been using around 1.2B of space with around 10-15GB of monthly transfer so the Economy package probably would have worked, but I ended up deciding on the Deluxe because knowing that I have the extra space, I will think of ways to use more I’m sure.

How was the setup? I processed the account online and had it all set up in terms of hosting basics the same night. I was able to get ftp access fairly quickly. I uploaded all of my files overnight and then returned to the work in the morning. I ended up getting everything done the same day. The tedious part was creating the sql databases again on the server and then importing the ones from the previous site. Godaddy makes this fairly easy though with their intuitive tools. Once this was done, I had to edit my corresponding text files that contained the proper information for the server and such and I was done.

Why Godaddy? Apart from them improving their bandwidth allotment, I have used them for my domains for several years and never had an issue. I’ve never heard anyone complain about them. I found that some of the other companies would advertise deals on their front page and then once you got in deeper, they would say this only applies to account sign ups for 1 year. Godaddy is monthly but there are options to purchase longer plans with discounts. With my domain and hosting both with the same company, I can have everything on one bill as well.

Performance? It’s still early, but I find Godaddy every bit as fast as my last host which is around 600-750 kb/s for downloading. The only downside is that I lost some of the more recent posts on the forum, but that had nothing to do with the host.

It wasn’t my favorite way to spend a weekend as I really set my free time at a premium because I am usually so exhausted during the week from working long hours. I am glad that it’s done and I don’t think Godaddy is going anywhere anytime soon so the idea of switching hosts likely won’t come up for a long time.