Author: Mike

Loggly and AWS logging

Just a quick note about loggly.com and AWS logging from S3 and CloudFront. Previously I had looked into parsing CloudFront logs with AWSTATS, just because I’ve used that in the past. That should be possible, but I gave up on it after a few hours.
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Ubuntu 14 LTS upgrade to 16

I’ve been thinking about the Ubuntu 14 LTS to 16 LTS upgrade for awhile. It seemed like it was do-able, though comments on some web sites indicated lots of problems including bricked systems. I made sure I had a snapshot before I gave it a try. sudo apt-get install update-manager-core sudo do-release-upgrade The trickiest part…
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FIRST Robotics BC

I’ve been busy working on the new FIRST Robotics BC website. Just a basic WordPress site hosted on my AWS EC2 instance. I started a WordPress child theme to tweak some of the CSS. Even used Photoshop to prepare some of the images. But what’s really interesting is what FIRST Robotics BC is up to.…
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Monte Carlo Tree Search demo

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a heuristic search algorithm that can make game play decisions. It does this by attempting to determine the most promising move from those available. What’s interesting is that the algorithm just needs to know the game rules and winning conditions, it doesn’t need domain knowledge. Another advantage is that…
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AWS forecast $17 versus old VPS $108

It looks like the move to AWS will save me about 80% off my previous hosting costs. The AWS cost forecast for this month is $17 versus $108 for the old VPS. I also outsourced mail server hosting to FastMail for $45 for the year. I’ll probably have to wait a couple of months to…
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Bug Hunt – Unity game hosted on S3

I just moved my old Webmaster pages to S3. While checking things out I noticed I had hosted a Unity 3D web game on an old AWS instance that’s not up anymore. I don’t plan on bringing up the Node.js game server at this time, but the game is still playable, you just can’t save…
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www.creativekidsathome.com moved to AWS

I finally have Creative Kids at Home working the way I want on Amazon Web Services. The pages are hosted in AWS S3 as a static website. AWS Cloudfront provides the content delivery network (CDN). AWS Route 53 provides domain name system (DNS). So everything is off my old virtual private server.
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Site Moved…

Well, I appear to be up and running using Amazon AWS after the DNS change. I’m using W3 Total Cache (W3TC) which minifies, zips and caches Javascript and CSS to Amazon S3. It also copies images there too. I was thinking of adding Cloudfront too, but probably not needed at this time.
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Moving web host

I’m moving web hosting from RackForce to Amazon AWS with S3 and Cloudfront. RackForce used to be a great VPS host offering a wide variety of plans and unlimited bandwidth which I needed for one of my sites. But they refocused on enterprise customers and then downgraded performance on the VPS that I had with…
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Acres of Art And Festival of Animals 2013

I’m at the Acres of Art festival on the grounds of the Coast Collective today July 7.
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