I will probably write about this in greater detail another time, but I finally updated my primary laptop from Fedora 14 to the latest CrunchBang Statler release.

My biggest frustrations had to do with driver issues, which is strange, as I have not experienced hardware compatibility issues in Linux since installing Dapper on an old Dell laptop. These issues were: broadcom wireless driver support (which is an issue with the 2.6.32 kernel release, not a distro-specific issue), and our title issue with system beeps when running with an Intel sound card.

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Something of an aside: I am finally making some time for Erlang, and have a couple neat projects in the pipeline for which I think it will prove appropriate. I want to focus these projects around server APIs with thick client-side code. I am leaning toward Chicago Boss with Spine. Before I commit to that, I want to spend a little more time with Zotonic and I would like to get to know Nitrogen. On the front-end, Backbone is a possible alternative, and I may avoid the client-side focus altogether and use the templating available in the Erlang framework.

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I have to look this up everytime, and for some reason it is really difficult to find a good resource. So after wasting another hour of my life searching random forums, here is what worked for me.

Using an FTP connection (it worked for me through a local FTP client or through the godaddy Hosting Control Center -> Content -> FTP File Manager), edit the php5.ini in your html directory. The full path is something like ‘/home/content/12/34567890/html/php5.ini’ with different numerical values. Open that file. GoDaddy creates it for you when the account is created, if php5.ini is missing, someone probably deleted it, and you just need to make a new one.

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One of my goals for 2012 is moving away from shared hosting and toward cloud and/or small VPS servers. For now, I am targeting AWS Micro instances for a lot of my efforts. Ultimately, I will probably move to Lighttpd or Nginx, but in the mean time I thought I would relay a configuration that is working well for me on low traffic sites.

For anyone seeing performance or stability issues on a micro instances (using LAMP) that get reasonable traffic, you are probably encountering something like:

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I want open source days. Add those to the list: healthcare, dental, prescription, vision, vacation days, sick days, etc. and open source days.

Many devs are complaining about perks, or lack thereof. Alternatively, many employers are advertising ridiculous benefits. One thing some companies offer is x% of your time for R & D, personal projects, or open source. This is close to what I want, but it fills a different need. Anyway, the following would be quite appealing to me.

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