Category: General Stuff


I’ve been a busy bee, ZPanelX development update!

Filed Under: Coding, General Stuff, Technology by ballen — Leave a comment
January 6, 2012

Ok well I’ve not posted on here for a while, mainly due to the fact that life has been so hecktic and I’ve been getting myself far too involved in too many different things..

So thought I’d better update you all with some info etc.

Well the last week I’ve managed to do a whole load more coding to the main framework of ZPanelX, I’ve now implemented the modular hook system, this enables module developers to ‘hook’ into core parts of the framework and execute their own code from inside their module/controller.ext.php file.

As well as the hook system, the daemon is now fully complete and I’ve spent the last few days implementing XMWS which stands fro ZPanelX Modular Web Services. XMWS is an XML based web service layer for ZPanelX which enables module developers to rapidly develop web service components within their module.

Luckily I have about 8 days off work in total over Christmas and the new year so I managed to get a lot of coding on ZPanelX done and dusted :) – Hopefully not much will come up between now and spring and ZPanel X will be released on time :)

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Github, ReadyNAS Duo and ZPanel DNS module

Filed Under: Apps & OS's, Coding, General Stuff, Technology by ballen — Leave a comment
August 29, 2011

Well I haven’t blog’d for a month so thought I’d better update you all with what’s been going on recently…

Well I decided to give GitHub a try out (I’ve had an account registered on the site and I reserved the ZPanel project name) but haven’t yet given it much of a try-out but as I released the latest version of Zantastico I decided that I would use Github to host the source and maybe I’ll now make the complete jump from SVN to Git for all my source control needs :) – I must say, Github is very cool indeed (once you get your head around how the permissions work and adding your machine keys etc.). The web interface offers some lovely features that allows you to edit code from the browser and will automatically revision it too :)

Also over the last month, I decided that I needed to upgrade and combine my home server’s, I went and bought a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo off Ebuyer… It was knocked down in price a little and thought ‘well why not…’ – It been great, it has some lovely in built features of which not all I am using but comes with DLNA media streaming services, Built in torrent client, APF shares compatible with Apple TimeMachine as well as all the standard NAS protocols.. SMB, CIFS, FTP, RSYNC etc. – I’m really pleased with it, I currently have a single 250GB drive with all my data on it but will be upgrading it 2x 2TB drives which will create a RAID1 mirror. :)

After a long time of meaning to install Rustus’s BIND module for ZPanel 6.1.1 on my CentOS VPS (used for hosting this site and many of my friends personal sites too) I was really impressed.. Rustus is one of the best module developers that I have seen and has produced several third-party modules for ZPanel. I am especially impressed with the DNS module due to how it handles the the ZONE files and how much effort has gone into creating this module. It really is a must for any persons running ZPanel 6.x.x as it is such a time saver… No more logging into UKReg (my domain registrar) to manage my DNS records now… :)

Lastly, not that you are interested… This weekend I went to go and try on a suit for my mums wedding, she is to be married on the 1st of October 2011 and my brother and myself will be giving her away as my beloved grandfather passed away in 2006. Here is a photograph of the awesome suit with me in it (it has ‘tails’ too but the photo isn’t all that good) :)

Until next time… :)

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How awesome… Make your own Cray-1A miniture replica!

Filed Under: General Stuff, Technology by ballen — Leave a comment
September 1, 2010

I read on howtogeek a couple of days ago that someone (Chris Fenton) had created a replica of the 1970′s Cray 1A and in my honest opinion I think that is very awesome indeed!

For those of you that don’t know what a Cray 1A (One of the best known SuperComputers) is, well quite bluntly…. shame on you!!! – If you are any kind of computer geek you should do! – No seriously, if you don’t know what it is read all about it here (wikipedia)

Here is a photo of Chris Fenton’s Cray 1A replica (left) and the actual one (right):-

Cray replica versus 'The cray'

In Chris’s article he explains how he purchased a FPGA board to emulate the actual hardware and fully constructed this 1/10 scale replica (unfortunetly however due to the board design he was unable to make the base the ‘famous ‘c’ shape’

Here is a bigger photo of Chris’s finished ‘Cray 1A’ replica:-

As you can see the FPGA board slides out from the bottom!

My hat off the guy, I think it is amazing and if I had more time and less commitment to various other things I too would love to build such a replica – As he says also in his post and I quote…

Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?

I completely do want one, its a very iconic thing (well in my mind anyway) and ok I wasn’t even born when this was designed and developed by Cray Reasearch but all the same I have a lot of respect for it!

Chris… A great article and I love the idea and the sheer amount of effort you put into this fantastic project :) – Please check out Chris’s post and various images, diagrams and infomation regarding the Cray 1A on his website over at: http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/

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My new HP Mini 210 (netbook)

Filed Under: General Stuff, Technology by ballen — Leave a comment
August 22, 2010

It makes a change (well in recent times anyway) for me to have a new toy to play with however yesterday I thought I’d purchase a netbook so I bought one of the coolest and smallest I have seen so far and from a good manufacturer so I purchased an HP Mini 210 and so far am very happy with it!

The netbook has 1GB of RAM, its powered by an Intel Atom N450 processor running at 1.66GHz and is running Microsoft Windows 7 Professional.

Heres a couple of photo’s of it:

(Will take a photo and upload shortly)

Yes ok, its not going to replace my main PC or is capable of running very memory intensive apps or for playing games on but due to the processor, the 10.1″ screen its power consumption is awesome and the whole netbook is so small and I personally thing the design is awesome :)

Its a great device to use while sitting on the couch, in bed on a Saturday morning – Its perfect for browsing the internet, downloading music, reading and responding to emails etc. etc.

When I purchased the netbook I thought about what apps I would install on it, I didn’t want to bloat it, I wanted on the nessacery stuff installed on it, so this is what I have installed and running:-

  • AVG Antivirus (Free Antivirus software)
  • Dropbox (Free online storage drive and backup)
  • Google Crome (A free, lightwieght and super fast web browser)
  • Offline Gmail (Using Crome and Google Gears when offline can access your emails using Crome and a downloaded version of your Gmail mailbox)
  • Microsoft Office 2007 (For obvious reasons)
  • Skype (Free calls to other Skype users etc.)
  • Spotify (Download and stream music)
  • WinRAR (My favourite file compression and extraction tool)
  • Windows Live (Live Messenger, Live Writer etc.)
  • Adobe Flash player and Reader

If you are stuck for what to install on your netbook try a search on Google there are tons of articles from other Netbook users etc.

Anyway, I hope you found this useful :)

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Blogging with email!

Filed Under: General Stuff, Technology by ballen — Leave a comment
July 16, 2010

Well this is my first official blog post on my new personal blog, I
thought’d I’d write about this awesome new feature with WordPress
3….. I’m even blogging using this method now!

Ok so what the hell am I talking about….

Well good queston I hear you say; Since I have now launched my
personal website again using a hosting account from KevAndrews.co.uk I
decided after trying out a very basic web blog script that I’d go back
to the good’al WordPress software and whilst I was configuring my new
blog I found a new feature from the ‘Admin’ area within WordPress
which enabled me to post blogs via a POP3 account…. So seeing this I
jumped at the chance at configuring it….

After playing with it for a couple of hours, I have fallen in love
with this awesome feature… then configured a cron job from within
my ZPanel control panel so check and post emails every 10 minutes :)

So there you have it, another cool way to blog about stuff using
Wordpress, for more details on how to configure this please check out
this link:-
http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email

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