keeran.com

So after 5 or 6 years of paying a ridiculous rate for one of the first VPS accounts I ever bought, I’ve decided to switch. Pure laziness has cost me a fortune with that account I swear! I’ve started moving all of my personal hosting over to Linode, a UML (update and now Xen) VPS provider in the states.

Why Linode?

• They have great packages, readily available (slicewhat?) and competitively priced.
• Lots of distributions to choose from, all easily managed in their web application.
• They supported the Rails Rumble! Performance during the rumble was great.
• Friendly support on IRC, direct from the owner in some cases.

They’ve already proven themselves at hosting Rails developers and I’m sure a lot of knowledge has been collected for future support, so I have a good feeling about this.

Things might be a bit unstable for the next few days while I move people around, but it’s looking good so far.

Update

Now Linode fully support Xen VPS’. I submitted a support ticket to find out if I would notice a performance improvement if I migrated. They confirmed that I would and started the migration process. All I had to do was shut down the server, hit a button in their (excellent) control panel and wait 5 minutes while the VPS image transferred.

Recently I’ve noticed a problem with Textmate when changing focus between different apps in OSX, usually going back and forth between Firefox and Textmate. Essentially Textmate lags for 3-5 seconds every time it regains focus as it refreshes the project drawer, which when you’re trying to tweak lots of small issues can be a huge annoyance.

After spending an hour or so searching for an explanation (it’s a well documented problem – especially for people editing large projects over network shares), I gave up and asked in the TM IRC channel (##textmate on Freenode). The solution to the problem is here, and it’s not very easy to find online though regular channels:

ReMate Textmate Plugin

Follow the instructions on the page, toggle the option in the Window menu, no more annoying lag!

Apparently the problem will be resolved in TM2.0, but that isn’t shipping until Leopard is out, which isn’t good enough really! Many thanks to the author and the guys in ##textmate for the help :)