I have been using KGB Internet to host my blog for about a year now. They are a affordable hosting solution and the support has been ineradicable. The one thing that I never really liked about the hosting plan was that I was sharing the server with many other users. I wanted to have a server in which I controlled everything. I guess I am a little bit of a control freak but the KGB Internet hosting prices are hard to beat.

Well I have finally found a great compromise, GoDaddy Virtual Hosting . With the Virtual Server provided by GoDaddy I have the best of both worlds, a affordable server that is hosted for me combined with all of the control that I would ever want. I am responsable for everyting from DNS setup to configuring Apache and Tomcat to work together.

I am very pleased with the product that GoDaddy has delivered to me. They got my machine setup in less than two hours. Using there startup guides, I had my server setup and working in less than one hour. Now that I have my site moved here, I have seen increased preformance in my site. I also have much more flexiablily and crontrol.

The service provides you with the following out of the box:

• A control panel to assist you with management
• Apache Http Server
• Choice of Centos or Redhat OS
• Tomcat Server
• DNS Server
• MySql Databases
• EMail Server
• phpMyAdmin
• Squirrel Mail
• SSH Login
• User Creation and Management
• and much more

The Virtual Server is really just like a Centos or RedHat Server you would install a machine sitting around your house. If you are not pleased with you current hosting provider, check this out, you will not be disappointed.

I have been running my Apache Roller 4.0 version on a Apache Tomcat application server. Recently I have been having some performance issues with my blog. It seemed to be taking forever for the pages to come up. I figured that the issue was probably related to a JVM Heap issue and saw some memory issues in the log files. To fix this issue I decided to increase my JVM Heap size and make it a standard 256mb.

To increase the JVM Heap size, you can add the following attribute to the catalina.sh script located in the TOMCAT_HOME/bin directory.

export CATALINA_OPTS="-Xms256M -Xmx256M"

I am not 100% convinced that my problem is solved. I feel that there could be a bigger issue in that another application deployed on the same server is causing some kind of database and/or server issue.

UPDATE
I started getting some Out Of Memory Exception with my new configuration. I decided to change the Tomcat server settings to have a 512mb jvm heap as stated below. This seems to make things a lot faster. I hope I don’t get the Out Of Memory Exception anymore.

export CATALINA_OPTS=-Xmx512M

I was messing around with my Mac computer tonight and discovered that my Boot Camp installation of Windows XP was not working. I was trying to boot up into my Windows XP installation and it continued to fail for me. I could get to the installation thorough Parallels, but that was it. I figured that if there was no way for me to access my Windows installation was through Parallels I might as well reinstall Windows in a Parallels Virtual Machine.

I started the installation, then realized that I did not have my Windows Product Key. Since I did not have a easy way to contact technical support I decided to do a little Google research. I found that I could retrieve the Windows Product Key from another installation of Windows XP by using RockXP 4.0 Beta .

RockXP is a cool little utility that will scan your installation and display your Microsoft Product Keys for you. In about 5 minutes I got my product key and wrote it down in a flash. I then ran over to my Mac and entered the Product Key that was given to me. With a skeptical click of the next button, I was relieved to see that the key was accepted. Thank god for the web and cool utilities like this, that has saved my another sleepless night wondering how I am going to get my computer fixed.

UPDATE: While this product did return the product key that I needed, it might have also introduced some viruses on the system in which it was installed. Be careful when using this software because of viruses. I would only use it as a last resort.

Here is a little online picture book that is great for telling people how to use the internet. Is is full of laughs.

Baby's First Internet

I am a music freak. I have over 10,000 songs on my ipod, and love listening to live concerts streamed from Archive.org . One of the things that I like to do with my ipod is do a random song selection, so I can get a kind of radio station listening experience from my music. The only problem with this is that I have so many different styles of music. I also really love to listen to music online, while I am at work. I don’t know why I prefer it to plugging in my ipod, but I do.

Well today I stumbled upon Pandora Radio . This site can only be described as revolutionary. They say that they have created a “Music Genome Project” where they have related all different aspects of music artists, songs, bands, ect into relationships. When you bring up the online player, you can type in a artist that you are interested in. I typed in Phish and a Phish song was displayed to me. The songs after that are selected to what I might like based on my first artists selection. You can also rate if you liked or disliked the selection. This makes your customized radio station even more fine tuned to your listening tastes. The best thing about this too is that I now can expand my listening tastes, because Pandora will select new artists that they think I will like, based on my habits.

I think I might have found a web site that really has made a impact on me.