My life changed pretty significantly starting January this year. My parents announced their impending divorce, my girlfriend of the time broke up with me not long after, my grades in college began to slip... It's been a crazy year to say the least. In the last 6 months I've moved twice, put up with 'temporary' accommodations, and generally felt like my entire life was in flux. I'm glad to say things are finally starting to balance out now. I have moved closer to town where I don't need to rely on others for transportation, and managed to find a job not far away (no small feat in a blue-collar city like Hamilton where the job market has really hit the dumps).

I finally got my servers and other infrastructure online today, as you can see if you're reading this. Not only that, but I've finally gotten a brand-spankin' new server as well. This site is now hosted on a very fast Core 2 Duo 2.93ghz with 2gb of DDR2-800 RAM, and a couple 500gb hard drives. I took the opportunity to also upgrade to the latest long term support release of Ubuntu, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. All-in-all, I'm very impressed with this release. I've had to do barely any manual configuration for any of the services I'm running: Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3, MySQL 5.1 and Tomcat 6 with Apache Solr. Getting Drupal back up to date after months of being offline was quite a chore however...

In conclusion, I am very much still alive, and good things are coming my way. This is a new life, and I don't intend to let things get as bad as they were before this time around.

Getting Solr to play nice with Tomcat on Ubuntu was an interesting journey, I almost gave up entirely at one point. I'm compiling this how-to from tips I got from multiple websites. I'll try to make as complete a list as I can remember at the end of this post.