I recently created a subdomain on my Mediatemple DV service, but for various reasons, I wanted to have a separate user responsible for that subdomain, with FTP and shell access. The user can be created along with the subdomain in Plesk as normally. Unlike the creation of users associated with domains, however, there is no option in Plesk to give this subdomain user shell access.

Fixing it is trivial if you have root access. Just edit /etc/passwd, find the line that starts with the username you just created, then change the last field of that line from /bin/false to /bin/bash (or whatever shell you like). This will allow you to su to the subdomain user or login via SSH, as you prefer. Easy, I know, but I noticed the option wasn't present in Plesk and well, maybe this tip will be helpful to somebody else out there.

I've been getting a few complaints about various sites not being accessible by Comcast users and discovered that quite a lot of domains are inexplicably not resolved by their DNS servers. Here is an extremely partial list, generated purely at random:

• www.ejectejecteject.com
• www.littlegreenfootballs.com
• www.samizdata.net

These are all popular blogs, and none of them work on Comcast's DNS. So I switched to OpenDNS, a free public dns service. You can sign up for an account, which gives you access to some features like porn-filtering and statistics on DNS usage. You don't have to have an account, however, you can just go ahead and start using the servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

So far I'm relatively satisfied with my new Mediatemple DV hosting service. I have, however, discovered a problem with the Mediatemple configuration of Awstats, the logfile-analyzing web statistics package I use. Awstats can't find its images because the path is broken in the standard Mediatemple installation - browser and country icons are missing, and the bar graphs are empty:

Here's how to fix it.

As of yesterday this site is now hosted at Media Temple on my own "Dedicated Virtual" server. It's not exactly a true dedicated server, but it appears as such to me - I get a root login and the ability to reboot the "machine". I get statistics based on Apache logs (something my old service, csoft.net, did not provide for shared hosting). I'm a good deal more insulated from all the other users than I would be on a shared service, which is good for application performance, reliability, database security, etc. But best of all, regular users of this site will notice load times have shortened by a factor of 5!

Not long ago I began writing my Master's thesis, and fortunately took a moment to consider what might be formatting 'best practice' before I got too deep into what will probably be the longest text I've ever written. Of course, most students these days write reports, theses, dissertations, and everything else in Microsoft Word, or (if the student is poor or motivated by hatred toward Microsoft) one of the free clones of the same. But I decided instead to try something I've long been meaning to try: the TeX typesetting system, or to be more precise, the LaTeX language built on top of TeX. I learned some important lessons from this.

To use (tongue only somewhat in cheek) my new favorite metaphor, Microsoft Word is like the Persian Empire: decadent, soft, corrupt, encouraging of mysticism and lazy thinking. Whereas LaTeX is like Sparta: cold, clean, hard, disciplined, rational. And outnumbered 2000 to 1.