2 Mar 2006 jpick   » (Master)

Yay! I drove up to Vancouver, and I now have a new place to live, starting in April. It's a 2 bedroom place in Yaletown.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpick/106785414/

Google Map

http://www.rentyaletown.com/home/home.html

It looks like a great neighborhood - it's sort of like a mini-Soho. There are lots of cool coffee shops and bars, it's an easy walk to downtown, and it's close to the library, GM Place (home of the Canucks) and BC Place (home of the BC Lions). Everybody on the street seems pretty happy and friendly.

I'm just totally amazed to come back to downtown after ten years to see all the empty lots and warehouses torn down and replaced with all the new highrises.

Now I just have to arrange for movers and figure out what I need to do to import my car. Plus a million other small things.

Also, I decided to "kill two birds with one stone" on this trip. So I plunked down for a new dual dual-core Opteron (so it has 4 cores @ 1.8GHz) with 8GB of RAM and 1.6TB of disk in a hot-pluggable SATA RAID. When I drove up to Vancouver, I stopped in Seattle, and installed it at Forona in the Westin building downtown, near Westlake Center and the monorail. I don't know much about the Forona guys, but their prices seemed reasonable, and there aren't many colo places that cater to people with just one 1U box to install. They were very patient with me during the install and they seem to know their stuff. I'm still very happy with Simpli in San Jose, but I wanted to use a second colo just so I can have some redundancy (plus it's a bit closer to Vancouver).

I put Xen 3.0 on the server, but I haven't set much up on it yet.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpick/106781569/

So I now have two servers I can put commercial stuff on. I really needed a second server so I could provide some level of reliable services to (future) customers, while still being able to experiment with new stuff (like clustering and failover). When I finish my move to Vancouver, I'll have some time to put up some websites with some of the new things I'm playing with.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!