I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Shifting to a new VPS provider

I asked myself countless times whether I needed a new VPS. There are plenty of offers that I find daily that can accommodate both my wants and needs. But today was the perfect time to do so. I was using VPSLatch since 2010 to host my personal and some serious websites. I was given a special discount that made me hold on to this virtual box. After all, I was looking for a way to learn how this thing work. Few months passed, the company was acquired by Hostdime. Soon after, bad reviews were posted. I did not bother since I didn’t think I was getting affected by it. During that time, I didn’t even know how to use the bash commands top, free and ps. All I thought was if my sites are loading properly, there’s nothing wrong with my VPS, and the new owners of the company as well.

Today, I moved away from them for several reasons.

  1. Their fully managed service is not true. I know that their prices are really cheap compared to premium providers but they shouldn’t advertise what they don’t really offer. I asked them to install x-cache but they refused to do so, since they do not support that module and they want me to pay a service fee (per hour). It was frustrating. The previous owners did not even charge me anything when I asked them to rebuild my VPS from scratch — which means installing and hardening again. They should have stated in their website the limitations of their services instead of surprising their customers to pay huge service fees.
  2. The dedicated node, I was in, seemed to be overloaded. Load averages hit 6+ for no reason when I begin to login to WHM. It also happens frequently that it hit 2-3 even when idle. I don’t have any running process that uses more than 10% CPU or memory but there are still randomness going on with my load averages. I have a base LAMP box with no customization, similar to a shared hosting setup, and I still wondered what went wrong. I brought this up one time but all they said that it was running fine. Did they even bother investigating?
  3. My websites (and the VPS) are loading slow, even when taking cPanel backups. All of my hosted websites are considered to have low traffic and yet they load slow. I did not bother optimizing the WordPress blogs as I thought that no other person is  even using my VPS than myself; and for that reason, I expected for everything to load fast. The optimization I considered to make needed a server-side configuration which I can’t have because of Reason#1.
  4. Occasional downtime is existent. When I unfortunately notice it, it takes 3-4 hours. Other than that, I just get reports of inaccessibility.

There are still a few small flaws about their service that I don’t want to include here. I haven’t tried of looking for their causes so I am not sure if I should blame it to them. But despite all of it, they had a pretty acceptable service for beginners. If you don’t care about what runs on your server besides from the usual LAMP setup, then you can go with them. Otherwise, I suggest that you look for a better provider — or even an unmanaged one if you already have THE experience.

Hunters embark on a new journey

My most favorite and one of the best Japanese animation is back with a brand new production. Hunter X Hunter is one of the golden memories of my childhood as I grew up actively anticipating the chapters of this great anime. My friends, brother and cousins share a common interest for this series. We often sing to its original soundtracks, “Ohayou!”  mostly, and joined the bandwagon of avid fans. What I like about Hunter X Hunter are its compelling story, great character development and the concept itself.  The bond among the four protagonists was one of the highlights of the first part of the series and during the time where they had to move on with their individual lives to begin a new career as official hunters, I felt sad as if I’m losing a great friend (this while playing “Ohayou!” on the background). Although it’s embarrassing to say, the progression of the story makes you feel as if you are part of it, especially that I was in the same age as Gon and Killua during that time. Seriously though, being a hunter was a cool career. You can do the things you like, be trained like a super ninja, be part of an elite group in the society and most importantly, gain access to the deepest secrets of the world. I’m happy that I would be seeing my favorite characters back in action again! It’s sad to say that I did not completely finish the first adaptation but I’ll make sure I’ll watch the new one as much as I can.

Animax Asia will begin airing Hunter X Hunter on April 24, 7:30pm. This new adaptation will begin the story from the start as the team behind it hopes to more accurately bring the manga to life.

I hope you enjoy this series as much as I did!

Creativity and computing

Here’s a blog post worth reading from Michael Abrash of Valve. Whether you are from the business or computing industry, I’m sure you’ll appreciate what he discussed from his post.

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing

Some excerpt:

“What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones – quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Unlike many organizations, Valve doesn’t build organizational barriers to its employees by default; it just trusts them and gets out of their way so they can create value.”

“But no one told me what to do, and there were no official approvals that I had to obtain; once I had gathered feedback and thought this through to my satisfaction, I just went ahead and started the project. Think about that for a second, and think about your own job. How cool is it that this project spun up almost overnight, just because I thought it was the most valuable thing I could do at Valve?”