Moved to a New Server

TonyJiang.com has a new home! These last few days I have been busy moving my websites to a new server. For almost four years, my websites have been hosted by 50webs.com on their Webmaster plan. Over these years, I never encountered any major problems with my old host and I am satisfied with their service. However, their plans appear to be a little outdated with the storage and bandwidth limits (or perhaps they are just being honest), so with my current hosting expiring in a month I started looking for a new web host. I have heard no shortage of shared hosting horror stories out on the net, so I spent a couple of days doing research. After looking around, I decided to go with StableHost, primarily because they had a coupon code that provided a very good lifetime discount on hosting. Their reputation seems to be decent too, so I signed up with them on their Stable Plus plan.

The move to the new host was pretty straight forward. I initiated the domain transfer process which took about a day, and during that time I transferred all my files over and set up the subdomains. Out of all of my websites, the only one that had any issues was this website. First of all, my new host uses the industry standard Cpanel which for some reason cannot point the default domain (tonyjiang.com or www.tonyjiang.com) to a subfolder within the public_html directory, so this WordPress blog didn’t work when I uploaded it as in a folder into public_html. Once I got that sorted out by uploading the WordPress files into public_html, I was met with the infamous White Screen of Death when I tried to access the admin panel. After searching on the web, I disabled all my plug-ins by renaming the plugins directory within WordPress, and my admin panel came back. After some troubleshooting, it seems that WP-Spamfree was the culprit, which is strange since I didn’t have problems with this plug-in on my old host. I killed that plug-in, but that wasn’t the end of my troubles. Afterwards, I tried to find a new anti-spam plug-in, but that caused WordPress to run into my host’s 32MB PHP memory limit. I didn’t want to delete any of my plug-ins, so I sent a support ticket to my new host, and thankfully they promptly replied by increasing the memory limit and everything was alright again.

I have settled into my new host, and everything looks okay so far. Hopefully my decision to move won’t come back and bite me in the behind. Since my websites receive little traffic, bandwidth and server load shouldn’t pose problems. Hopefully there will be no major downtimes or trouble with the host. Now that tonyjiang.com has found a new home, I’ll probably start working on some of my other websites.

Day Trip to Sidney, Vancouver Island

I recently went to Sidney on a day trip with family for some crabbing and fishing. It’s not the Sidney in Australia; it’s not even the Sidney in Nova Scotia, but rather the Sidney I went to is a town located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada near the city of Victoria. Sidney is a nice little town with great views of the waters, and the fishing and crabbing was pretty decent. Read on to see what my family has caught during the trip.

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TJ’s Guide to UBC

This is probably the last article I’ll write about my experience at the University of British Columbia. UBC has been a pretty good place to me, and so I decided to write a little guide about my Alma Mater. There is a bit of general information about UBC, but a lot of this post is focused on things that I found interesting and relevant through my five year experience at the institution. As such, this is far from a comprehensive guide to the university. More information can be found in UBC’s website, Wikipedia, and the other links contained in this post.

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My Fourth Year of University

This is the last yearly reflections article featuring me as a college undergrad, because of course I finally managed to graduate. This was actually my fifth year as an undergrad (due to co-op), but since I took fourth year courses then technically I was a fourth year student. During the past year I spent two terms in school and only one term on co-op, which is in contrast to my last two years where I spent eight months on co-op and only four months in school. This means there’ll be more stuff on my courses and less on my work, but either way it won’t be too exciting. If you still want to find out what I’ve been up to in the last year, keep on reading.

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Got My Degree

Today I finally received my Bachelors of Applied Science from the University of British Columbia. It took me five years to reach this point. It was a lot of work and a good chunk of time, but I think it was worth it (hopefully :lol: ). I have to thank my family… and friends I suppose… for their support through the years, and I have to thank some of my professors as well.

Even though five years of university is more than enough for many, I’m not done with school yet. I’ll be heading elsewhere for graduate studies, but until then it’s vacation time. There is a lot of stuff I need to get done, but I should have plenty of free time as well. This will probably mean, among other things, that I’ll pay more attention to my websites and produce more artwork. I do have some sizable plans for my sites, and hopefully I’ll actually follow through with my plans.

I’ll probably write a post or two about my last year as a undergrad student, but I’m too tired to start writing today. I’ll end this post with a photo of my graduation.

Stirling Engines and Micro-cogeneration Report

This is a research report that I wrote for one of my fourth year engineering courses. We are supposed to choose topics that are related to renewable or distributed energy, and I chose to write my report about Stirling engines and micro-cogeneration, two topics that have a connection with one another. It’s not the longest report I’ve written, and probably not the best either, but I got a decent mark in the course so the report can’t be that bad. Keep reading if you feel like wasting a couple minutes of time.

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Trip to China

I’m finally back from my three-week vacation to China. I come from China, but I haven’t gone back to my homeland for a long time, so you could say the trip was long overdue. During the trip, my family and I visited a good number of places, and this post is primarily a photo dump of sights and scenery that I saw over my three weeks in China.

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Tatakau Shisho – The Book of Bantorra – Final Thoughts

Here’s another long overdue final thoughts post, and this time it’s for Tatakau Shisho – The Book of Bantorra, a 27-episode anime based on a series of light novels and animated by David Production. I picked up the series on a whim because I thought the promotional art was nice. Luckily, Bantorra turned out to be surprisingly good and is one of the better series I’ve watched recently. To keep things short and to the point, I’m going to use point form for this post. As with most my final thoughts posts, this post contains major spoilers to the series.

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