Sorry for the overwhelming quiet here on RealJenius.com - I’m getting married in two weeks now, and it has been a bit of a time-consuming ‘project’.

Unfortunately, that probably also means that the next two to four weeks will still be quiet.

Rest assured, I haven’t died.

…. and I also got Mass Effect, which might also be a slight additional time-sink in my life ;)

Tonight I officially kicked off the process of moving to Google Apps for my email, calendar, and also for google docs, which I use quite a bit.

I plan to blog on it more, but for now I will say the process was relatively simple, although moving from a fully configured GMail account to a Google Apps account should be less painful than it is.

Okay, so I guess my CAPTCHA has been broken on realjenius.com for a while now. I don’t know how long because nobody was able to comment or for that matter contact me through the contact form… because the CAPTCHA was broken.

I’d say I’m sorry, but… well, I’m not really. Anyway - you can comment again - enjoy!

Drupal 6 was released today after several months of development, and over 1600 issues being closed. Drupal 6.0rc4 was just released on February 8th, leaving the final release a mere week in the future. As is typical, contributed modules (many of which are fairly integral functionality for many users) are not all up to spec to the 6.0 infrastructure. As such, for some Drupal users, 5.0 may still be the best release for some time yet. Also of note, Drupal 6.0 is the last major Drupal release that will run on PHP 4 - as part of the Go PHP 5 initiative, Drupal is using their clout to help push the industry to PHP 5.2 - and Drupal 7 will be PHP 4 incompatible.

The changes in 6.0 are significant as usual - here are some of the interesting ones:

Media Temple has finally hit their stride, and has introduced modern features on their Dedicated Virtual (dv) Servers.

Among the new changes/coolness:

• MySQL 5
• PHP 5 (only 1/2 day behind GoPHP5.org.
• CentOS 5
• Plesk 8.3
• Reduction of OS memory footprint for the (dv) Base by 30%
• Automatic tuning for both Web Server/Database heavy scenarios
• Python 2.3 pre-installed

Life’s funny; today in my Google Reader tally I ran across this post by Steven Wittens - titled ‘On not doing Drupal anymore’, and it helped put some personal frustrations in to perspective for me on the concept of ‘burnout’ in the modern open development age.

I don’t use MediaTemple’s Grid Service for Realjenius.com (I’m on their (dv) dedicated plan) - but I was pleased to see this post come across their blog today:

(mt) Media Temple would like to apologize to our (gs) Grid-Service customers for the series of issues relating to the (gs) system in the past few months. As an appreciation for your patience, we have applied 2 months free credit to your account. This credit has been issued automatically and is reflected in the billing area of your AccountCenter. We appreciate your continued business. […]

It looks like I’m not the only one that had Dreamhost problems - when I first moved to Dreamhost, I saw astronomical uptime numbers similar to what Daviey saw. While these numbers are actually normalized to the number of CPUs (as opposed to 1.00 as he mentions), 430+ is not exactly acceptable.

I’ve switched web hosts more times than I care to admit at this point, and I can tell you that by far the most painful part of the move is getting everything set up before you move the DNS over to the new server.

One very simple trick that I have used the past few times I have switched is to hijack your local machine’s ‘host’ file, allowing you to temporarily ignore what the DNS servers of the world-wide-tubes are telling you.

How do you improve Drupal performance on Dreamhost? It’s a trick question - the answer is move to MediaTemple.

If you’re reading this, then you have hit the new MediaTemple(dv)-hosted Realjenius.com - and you have met one much happier R.J.