D17’s blog

Last week Linden Labs CEO Philip Rosedale announced his stepping down as CEO. He will still be involved with strategy, but leaving the helmsman spot to someone else. Linden Lab is the company behind Second life, the online 3D world that was the big hype of 2006.

Sounds to me like Linden Lab is trying to turn Second life from a hip thing that attracts a lot of media attention into a company with a decent turnover/profit. All companies go through phases, from unknown startup, through hip thing to money machine. Every phase has its own characteristics and requires different sets of skills of the management. So I guess it’s not so strange to see a change like this.

It must be difficult for a CEO like Rosedale to have to let go of a baby like LL, but a decision that is probably very wise. Realizing too late you’re not the right person anymore can be much more painfull. And hey, a startup phase of a company is much more interesting than putting down an organisation with structure and processes, cutting down costs and taking out all the fun but money burning projects.

So now the only question is: how long will Rosedale last next to a new CEO? I don’t think a desk in the room down the hall is a wise idea.. What do you think?

Sometimes some guy is just a genius and a kind person, and writes a brilliant piece of software that he wants to share with the world. Sometimes a genius is well, not such a good person and still writes software he puts online. On Coding Horror there is a post about a shareware program called G-archiver (on purpose no link) that backs up files to your Gmail account. And in the process, very conveniently, emails your username and password to the Gmail account of the creator of the software. Ahem. Sounds like your worst nightmare, doesn’t it?

I wonder why G-archiver can still be downloaded, or wasn’t caught in the first place. In the old days (10-12 years ago) I liked those shareware sites like tucows. In those days open source wasn’t big yet, but programmers would put their software online for 10-30 euros with a trial version. Nowadays they seem to struggle for life, and are trying as hard as possible to drive traffic to their sites. You see that with the money all sense of ethics and responsibilities leave the company.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html

Update 13/3/2008 (yep european notation): G-archiver is removed from download site finally.

testing 1, 2, 3 first post:)

Ha, I figured I should start this blog with a first post about installing Wordpress (version 2.3.3) on a blank Apache/MySQL machine with CentOS as operating system. I have installed Wordpress earlier, but that was with Fantastico. This is a script library that big hosting companies use to offer an easy installation to end users that do not have adminstrative rights on their machine. As I am now the proud owner of a Xen VPS I have my own CentOS machine to manage, including a clean Apache and MySQL. Previous installations were a piece of cake, and I didn’t think this would be otherwise. So there I went, trying to beat previous records. Alas, some things had to tweak before everything was up and running:

1. Getting different virtual hosts up and running.
   As the web sites www.d17.nl, www.d-17.com and blog.d-17.com are running on the same machine with the same ip-address, I wanted to use name based virtual hosting to distinguish between the sites. So I configured my virtual hosts, but nothing happened:(. Turned out that I had to enable it first with the NameVirtualHost directive, which is default turned off. So I added this line to my httpd.conf:

   NameVirtualHost *:80

   which says that name based virtual hosting is active for every ip-address on the machine, but only for connections on port 80.

2. Enabling url rewriting for SEO-friendly URLs.
   So now my homepage worked, admin part also, but clicking through to a post page I got an error. I knew I had SEO-friendly URL’s turned on, and was expecting this to be hampered by a not functional mod_rewrite. I had already put the .htacces file in the root of my blog, so apparently it wasn’t processed. So again to httpd.conf, to add this line:

   AllowOverride All

   and not in the general section, but within the Directory element within the virtualhost config section.

3. Making MySQL behave.
   I was stubborn and didn’t want to follow the 5 minute installation manual. Turned out I misconfigured the rights of the db user related to from what hosts it was allowed to login. So you should just follow the manual precisely:)

Tada, hello word!