Ahem…*cough* Now that that’s out of my system. I made a decision at the beginning of this month to move all of my hosting to an Amazon EC2 instance. While nowhere near ideal for web hosting and not really much cheaper than my current hosting arrangements, and quite frankly only cheaper as long as my bandwidth usage stays down! I decided to switch for a number of reasons. Part of those are the fact I honestly don’t want to deal with the hardware anymore if I can avoid it.  Tehy really really really NEED to get IPv6 support though…and that will be the deciding factor as to if I stay using EC2 or not.  Without IPv6 they’re garbage and I’ll go elsewhere and pay more, because I’ll have no choice, just to get IPv6 support.

The web sites will have about the same CPU and RAM as they had before, but may actually be somewhat faster because the storage should be faster. The (soon to be) old hosting setup I’d elected to build uses NFSv4 and the Linux automounter, an experiment that proved to me that Linux NFSv4 is NOT ready for prime time (even in my limited setup NFSv4 will occasionally go off into the woods and NEVER come back short of a reboot of the machine, this happens most often on the web server and once in a while to the mail server) the automounter has been stable but NFSv4 mounts are dog slow, with, or without encryption setup.

So if you notice any oddities this week that is most likely why.  I’ve already finished moving my @wgops.com email over to the new setup and it seems to be working fine.  This weekend I’m going to try to get dotblag.com moved over to the new setup.  If that goes well then I’ll get in touch with the few people I host and we’ll get them moved over to the new machine too.  This is actually a really small move, but I’m going between completely unmanaged hosting, to trying out a management UI/platform, DTC.  If things don’t go well with the dotblag.com move then I’ll have to scramble and figure out something else ASAP!  I can’t really afford to pay for both the old hosting and the new hosting.

Incidentally if you need reliable  Colo, VPS, or web hosting, especially if you’re running a dynamic PHP application powered site but don’t want to pay premiums for dedicated hosting, get in touch with Modwest.  I might be leaving them, but it’s not because there’s anything wrong with them!

I am NOT a GUI guy, photo guy, etc.  I traditionally have been a systems administrator, lately I’ve gone more whole hog into web application development.  But I still don’t do UI.  So color has never really felt that important to me.  I know my display isn’t right, and it bothers me a bit but it doesn’t cripple me.  Sometimes the grays wash out, they turn blue, colors just aren’t quite right.

My editor displays little gray pips for spaces, they show up well on my 21″ (Sun GDM-5010PT) Sony Trinitron monitor w/ built in color correction/calibrations.  On my (cheap) ASUS G50vt laptop (the same one that the integrated keyboard has a horribly broken debounce to the point it misses keystrokes and words constantly), they’re almost invisible.  The color rendition is quite frankly, just plain bad.  I figure there’s nothing that can fix it.  But being an adventurous soul, I decide to plop down about $230 on a color calibration dongle and software.  If nothing else the Trinitron will probably look better, and I can quantify how bad the laptop is…Figuring worst case I’m out $230 and then won’t be tempted again.  But I’m still definitely as skeptic.

Flash forward a week….

Device arrives, I hook it up, download software from the manufacturers web site and install it.  The device came with a CD but as we all know, they’re always out of date, this one was from ~2007, there is rather quite a bit more up to date software available on the website from the manufacturer.

The software asks a few basic questions about the display, and it’s adjustment capabilities.  Advising on how they should be set, presumably to achieve correct calibration.

After answering the software’s questions which are basic, despite reviews to the contrary.  I hang the dongle over my laptops display as directed and tell it to go to work.  It displays black/white/red/green/blue and samples many levels of each.  After it’s done it applies the profile to the OS’s color calibration system (Windows 7 Ultimate x64 in this case).

Immediately I notice the display color is, overall, a bit warmer, that’s expected, since this display was always on the cool/cold side anyway.  I finish out the utility, and fire up my editor.

I can see the little gray pips that indicate spaces now…the gray title bars show up much more clearly now…

I fire up my web browser and go to newegg.com, which has this light manila background that never really showed up before.  It pops, just like it’s supposed to.  I go hit php.net, which I know has quite a lot of fairly subtle greys, blues, and purples.  Amazing, they all show up now. I spend a few minutes visiting some web sites, and am amazed at the details that now appear, and were so washed out before.  Even my WordPress admin area on this blog looks better, easier to read, as it was intended!

Now, like I said, not a GUI/graphics guy, but I know how to adjust my contrast, brightness, and backlight settings to correct black or white aliasing, simple issues.  But that’s nowhere near enough to fix an overall color rendering or temperature problem.  I can fiddle in the nVidia (or ATI) control panel applets and get it better, but never have I gotten it good, much less great, especially on this particular laptop display.

At this point I have to say wow.  My laptop display looks better than my 21″ Trinitron tube….I can’t wait to try it on that!  I’m definitely *sold*.

The specific device I grabbed was a Datacolor Spyder 3 w/ the Elite software because I figured if I like it or use it at all I’ll need multiple monitors, and multiple machines.

I’ve always said that if you’re doing any sort of graphics development,  you need color calibration.  I now would go so far as to say if you’ve ever been irritated by your laptop, or other display, you need color calibration.  If you’re doing ANY sort of UI work, at all, you need color calibration.  It is WELL worth it.

I wish I could show the difference, unfortunately I can’t, but it really is night and day.

Seriously. WTF? (click the full article to see the screen capture)

Now we can do SSL Names Based VHosts….sorta.  Only IE7 on Vista, Opera 8, and Firefox 2+ support it (sni.velox.ch is a test site FYI).  C’mon Apple!  Get with it.  And Microsoft?  WTF is up with Vista only support.  

Soon.  Soon.  And this becomes more and more important as we run out of IPv4 addresses.  In fact for a LOT of places, it’s the primary use of IPv4 address space, including here!