Moving to blogger

petru.paler.net has been powered by Wordpress and living on a Gandi VPS for the past couple years. I only really need a basic blog, though, and the current setup - even with occasional maintenance - is a bit of an 0wnage hazard. Thus, I don't plan on renewing the Gandi contract when it runs out (in a couple weeks).

Blogger looks like a solid alternative: nice features, solid infrastructure (yes, I've checked :-), and the price is right.

Things might be wonky during the migration, and old URLs might break. Sorry about that.

Edit: umm, yeah, all old URLs broke (what used to be /blog is now on /). Feeds too most likely (although they still go through Feedburner at feeds.paler.net/ppetru). Whoops. It doesn't look like Blogger can redirect whole URL spaces so that's that.

Edit 2: feed URLs changed, and I can't be bothered with Feedburner anymore. If you still care, please re-subscribe.

IPv6 enabled

Gandi started offering native IPv6 connectivity in their Paris datacenter at the beginning of the year and I finally did the remaining work to enable IPv6 on all domains hosted here. Welcome to the future! :-)

Now if only cablecom would start supporting IPv6 too...

Happy new year!

I hope you (all 3 of you) have a wonderful 2011 that's better than 2010 in every way.

In case you're wondering, since I last posted I also:

• grew a beard


• moved to Switzerland: I'm now working for Google in Zürich


• got a significantly better looking flatmate (sorry, Carlo :P)

Welcome to New York! Now, fuck off.

Manhattan, entrance to South Ferry subway station. Returning from a tour of Liberty and Coney islands, I stop to take a photo of a group of street performers taking a break between acts. One of them asks me something I can't quite hear, I get closer and ask him to repeat. He says: "got that in focus?". "I think so, yeah." I take another one anyway, then move on.

Manhattan, the next day. I copy the photos from my camera and see it in detail:

From NYC

What a lovely city.

Twitter ate my blog

Well not really. There wasn't much to eat, anyway. I sat down and thought about why I had a blog in the first place, and it seems that a lot of them disappeared:

• to have a blog: mission accomplished! no need to actually write anything


• for telling people who care about what I've been up to: Twitter is simpler and therefore more likely of actually getting used


• for sharing interesting links: Google Reader is better (and I don't just say that because I work on it)


• for narcissistic circle-jerking with fellow nerds: Facebook dominates that business and is popular with non-nerds (endless stalking opportunities!)


• for posting pictures, it's far easier to use Picasa


• for unleashing unto the world results of applying my masterful word smithing to original, thought-provoking ideas backed by solid research and references.. uh, right, nevermind that one.

So, what's changing? Not much, I guess: the blog stays, and I'll probably be just as lazy in writing - I'll just feel less guilty about it.

PS: Check out Friendfeed if you're a stalker (hi M.!) and don't want to click on the links above over and over again.

Jet propelled cheese

Italians take their food seriously.

How seriously? There's a company called Flying Mozzarella that will deliver you freshly made mozzarella from Italy to anywhere in Europe (and possibly further, I'm not sure). You order online - in 1kg increments - they make it in the morning and ship it by air right away. It's delivered it in the afternoon and you're supposed to eat it the same day in order to fully enjoy it.

This sounds quite crazy and I laughed when a group of coworkers made an order together to split the shipping cost (it's less than €2/kg if you have enough people). It sounded like too much trouble and besides, how would I eat a kilo of cheese by myself?!

The idea took off: people liked the cheese and group orders were organized every other month or so for the past half year. The most recent one happened last week and given that I now have an Italian flatmate that I could split with, I joined in. Last Thursday, my dinner consisted entirely of very freshly made Italian mozzarella, sliced tomatoes, olive oil and bread.

OM NOM NOM NOM

Feedburner migration

I've switched the RSS feed to Feedburner (mostly so I can play with the admin interface). Depending on which software you use to subscribe, this might cause a bunch of old items to show up as unread - my apologies for that.