the wrathful dove

Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own. Read more

Today I received an email from Pandora.com concerning a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. According to the email, “the new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all”(emphasis added). The email then points out how these sharp increases in fees will effectively strangle Internet radio companies because it artificially inflates the cost of doing business to levels far above what such businesses can expect to afford.

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Well, I could only stand Mephisto’s default simpla theme for so long. Now while I fully intend to create my own look for this blog in short order, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to provide a quick face lift especially after I managed to find a large list of custom themes available for Mephisto. I decided that riddish would do very nicely. It has a clean presentation and I like the usage of red in the theme.

When writing these posts and even more so while playing with the templates that define the look and feel of Mephisto, I much missed the syntax highlighting and editing capabilities of my favorite text editor vim. I did some digging around and found that with the installation of a suitable Firefox extension, I was able to have Firefox pop up vim to let me edit the contents of most text areas in the browser. Pretty convenient!