First went on vacation. I still need to upload the photos though. We have been Salt Lake City, again, doing some awesome skiing! I promise I'll upload the photos to Flickr very soon!

Second, some of you might know that I bought a house recently. It's brand new and was still under construction but last week it was finally finished. So I think you can imagine that I don't have any time to sit still

Third, I started my new job at MediaMonks on March 1st but after a few weeks I knew it wasn't a perfect fit as I had imagined. Unfortunate but it can happen of course.

So, I decided to quit and go independent. Luckily a good friend and ex colleague of mine also decided to go independent as well. So why not work together? We know we make a great team. Finally we can tell all of you that Superhero Cheesecake has been born.

Superhero Cheesecake is a fresh new digital production company. We don't actually make cheesecakes, but we do create delicious digital delicacies.

Today we launched our website and this officially marks the start of our new company. We are very excited and for more information I'll forward you to the new Superhero Cheesecake website.

I wanted a clear and simple solution that would backup my entire server, or at least the most vital information such as website source files and databases. For me it was really important to get these backups, without any human intervention to either an FTP account or my Amazon S3 account. Obviously in the event that something does go wrong, it should be easy to restore from a backup.

The dedicated server has Plesk installed, a fairly simple control panel to manage your server. Plesk does have scheduled backups but unfortunately it's not as stable as I would like. As Eric Nagel pointed out on his blog: "Plesk restorations SUCK. Plesk removes the current (live) site, then attempts the restore. Oh, and if the restore fails? Sorry - you have nothing now. Talk about back-asswards." Besides this major flaw, Plesk backups cannot be transferred automatically from Plesk to an FTP or Amazon S3 server. I'm sure this can be scripted but I'd rather not dive into this messy world of Plesk.

In the same blog post by Eric Nagel, he finally saved my day. He presented a script that would automatically backup everything, including databases to my Amazon S3 account. Perfect!

Indeed, the script ran perfectly. I set it up as a daily cronjob and saw that my Amazon S3 bucket was filling up with daily backup files.

However as the site grew, so did the backup files. At the same time my site had a major outage and I couldn't find out what happened. I restarted my server, checked all the logs and found out that this script timed out while trying to upload a backup file of 2.1 GB to my Amazon S3 account at 100% CPU usage. Oops!

Luckily or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) I wasn't the only one with this problem. It seems like files larger than 2GB are not supported on 32 bit servers due to PHP's signed integer bug. And looking at the comments of the PHP class, timeouts with the Amazon S3 PHP class can occur, even with smaller files.

So this wasn't the way to go, for me at least. However I did think that Eric Nagel's script was a perfect start to getting automated backups to S3. I decided to build on his script and implement a couple features that would fix my problems, and hopefully yours too.

The improvements are:

• Large files are split into separate smaller files. These files are uploaded as part files (.p01, .p02, etc.) with a maximum file size, you can change the maximum file size yourself. Default is 300MB.
• Rewritten as a process. The jobs in the script have been split into separate smaller tasks.
• Writes a temporary file to your working directory to prevent double executions of the same script to avoid data corruption and too much load. This means you can run it as a cronjob every minute. If the current task isn't finished, new tasks won't run until it's finished.
• Auto exit after 1 hour, just in case the S3 times out. You can change this yourself ofcourse, but for most this will be enough.

The new version is fairly easy to setup. You can download it here. Just open it and change all the configuration variables. You can run it manually in your console by entering php /path/to/script/server_backup.php or set it up as a cronjob. I recommend running it every 2 minutes. Let it run as a user that has access to all directories you want to backup.

Restoring
Restoring is easy too. Just download the backup files from your S3 server. Upload them to your server and untar them. If you downloaded split files (.p01, .p02, etc.) then you can merge them again as one big file by running the command cat prefixoffile.* > largefile.tar.gz, then you can untar that file as well and restore your backup.

The script works for my server and is provided as-is. Please don't ask for support, always ask your system administrator for help first if you can't get it to work or you can figure it out by adjusting the script with trial & error. There are a lot of comments and debug messages provided in the script that can help you further. If not, you can also try to leave a comment below.

Good luck with your server backups!

The name? Snospace. What is it? It's a mix between a guide for ski and snowboard resorts and an online community. The site offers loads of information about almost every ski and snowboard resort in the world: reviews, videos, photos, statistics, snow reports, weather updates, twitter updates, news articles. Most of these subjects have already been covered by other sites obviously, but the most interesting part will be the community.

As you can imagine, right now at the start the community is still pretty much nonexistent but I invite you to join it as you can do so many things such as uploading photos, importing photos from Flickr, create your own powder tracker (you can use this to check where the fresh snow is falling), create your own SnoMap (and show off where you have been to or what to go to), write reviews, write comments, connect with other members and much more (cliché, I know it... but it's true). You don't have to create an account though, you can also use your Facebook account to log in instead.

You can check it at snospace.com and please spread the word! To get more updates you can also follow @snospace on Twitter or become a fan of the Snospace fan page on Facebook.

Snospace Homepage

My Snospace Community Overview

Destinations Overview (this example shows an overview of all ski resorts in the state of Utah in the USA)

Resort Overview (this example shows ski resort Deer Valley in Utah)

User profile (this example shows my own profile, why not join and become a friend?)

Latest News Overview

Snospace Photo Overview (just an example photo, there are many more here)

My last day at MTV will be December 24th 2009. I’m looking forward to an explosive ending during the annual MTV Christmas celebration to complete my ‘journey’ at MTV!

You might be wondering what I’m going to do next. First I’m going to work on my house, work on a personal project (to be revealed soon) and do some work as a freelancer. If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Secondly, on March 1st 2010 I start my new job at MediaMonks as Senior Designer. MediaMonks is the largest interactive media agency in The Netherlands and is mostly known for creative and innovative flash games. I can’t wait to start!

What’s so special about this show? You can follow it on television but also online. People had the chance to submit their own town to TMF and now the 12 best towns have been picked to participate in the show. In each episode the people from these town do their best to get as much points for their assignments. These assignments range from who has the best looking girl in the local supermarket, who can make the most noise with their tractor, etc.

Besides the total score of these towns on television there’s also a big online challenge: To get as many friends on Hyves (biggest social network in The Netherlands). If you have more friends on Hyves, then the town has a bigger chance of winning the race.

After twelve weeks the two best towns will compete with each other in the finals.

Homepage

For this website a special widget has also been made to be distributed on Hyves so that Hyves users can show their support for their town. Each town has their own customized Hyves page.

Hyves Widget

The design and interaction design for the website has been made by me, the website has been built by Niels Filmer and the widget has been designed by Dennis Aarts and built by Fabian Scheepers.

Town overview

During SuperNick well known people from the Netherlands visit and are challenged to tell their secrets. Kids compete with each other in a quiz and in the Superrace. In Make Me Famous kids can become a big celebrity through a makeover. The whole shows revolves around a continuous battle: Will the girls or the boys win?

SuperNick homepage

Most of the games in the show require online registration first and therefore a website with a playful layout that matches the decor was needed. The site has been designed by me and built by Fabian Scheepers and Niels Filmer at MTV Networks.

If you have missed an episode you can view it on the Supernick website. Besides the close connection with the television show, the website also offers online games and a weblog containing updates from the presenters.

SuperNick - About the show & presenters

SuperNick - Items in the show

Last month, I and my girlfriend went on vacation to Florida (again!), I uploaded all of our photos to my Flickr photostream but forgot to write something about it. Oops

We went for two weeks and started off in Orlando. The day after, we drove to Clearwater to visit Honeymoon Island & Caladesi Island State Park. There's a beautiful white beach on the island and you can only go there by a small ferry. It's quiet and peaceful on the island. The next day was not so quiet when we went to Busch Gardens, a theme park slash zoo near Tampa. The theme park was alright, it has a lot of roller coasters but all in all it doesn't really compare to the Disney parks that offer more entertainment and scenery.

Quiet beach on Caladesi Island.

Next stop was Naples, a cute and beautiful town at the coast with many great shops and restaurants. We stayed in a hotel that had a private beach you can only access by using a golf cart on a boardwalk over the mangroves. Naples is pretty close to the Everglades. On our way to our next destination, Key Largo, we visited the park and even took an airboat ride in Everglades City. Wow, never imagined this would be so much fun!

Town of Naples

We only stayed for a day in Key Largo but it was a really beautiful day. Our hotel was on the shoreline tucked away between ancient trees. The water was so clear, you could see all the fish swimming and crabs walking in the water. The next day we arrived in Key West and we stayed there for a couple of days. The first day we rented bikes and checked out the town, the day after we went on a sailing tour to some of the uninhabited keys. The sailing tour was awesome, we also went snorkelling and kayaking. We saw animals that we have never seen in our lives such as the ancient Horseshoe Crab.

Sunset in Key Largo

After three days we left Key West to go back to Orlando. We visited some of the Disney parks in Walt Disney World such as: Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Epcot, Animal Kingdom and Blizzard Beach.

It was a perfect vacation, hope you enjoy our photos

Design for television show Kijk dit nou with SMS chat and SMS voting. On air photo here.

Design for the TMF Awards. Breaking news and winners were announced and viewers could chat about these Dutch music awards through text messages.

Design for TMF Chat, a television program with music videos viewers can chat about through text messages.

The site is basically a daily updated weblog written by the VJ's/presenters of the show. They write about their life, current events, lifestyle, movies, music and everything else that's interesting for their young viewers. The visitors can decide if a post should be discussed in the show at the end of the day. Visitors are constantly up to date through RSS feeds, Twitter and mobile photo uploads from the VJ's/presenters. The television format thrives on input from the viewers and website visitors and currently has a strong following both online and on air.

Kijk Dit Nou is currently on a summer break but next week they're back online and on air again every day on TMF at 16:30

Anyways, here's the interview. It's in Dutch though. Topic is Spongebob.nl and the Cartoon Creator.