The only issues I've had in moving my Drupal sites from one host to another is the Cron jobs. The previous one I was using was calling PHP5 correctly, but wasn't loading the right directory to run the job in and failed out every time.

According to this forum post, the correct way to kick off a Cron job on Hostgator is this:

cd '/home/username/public_html/' ; php -q 'cron.php' > /dev/null ;

For a standard Drupal install, there are two things that need to be backed up: the files and the database. With most shared hosting there is a certain amount of redundancy and backups, but you (and I) don't have control over that. This should solve all of that.

With my new (to me) dual-core atom Zotac with NVidia Ion graphics, I've been wanting to push out a new media center to the living room. The living room machine is currently a dual-core 2.2GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM. Not great specs, but certainly not bad as it can push 1080p easily. The real concern I have with it is the size of the computer. It's a slighly-larger-than-mid tower and has only somewhat quiet fans constantly blowing. Over a movie I can't hear it, but without the TV on it is a little noticeable.

So day two has come and gone on building an HTPC out of the PPC Mac Mini. I burned two different versions of OSX 10.4, one .iso and one .toast. The .iso wouldn't boot, and the .toast burned, but gave errors and wouldn't pass verification before install. I installed anyway, and became stuck in an endless loop that would not allow me to remove the DVD from the drive. So I researched how to burn a .toast without a Mac, and came up with this posting which said to use InfraRecorder and make sure session-at-once was used. Once I had a good version, I removed the four screws on the top of the DVD drive (with the machine turned off, of course) and manually replaced the bad DVD with the good one. The good DVD install passed verification with flying colors, and about 30 minutes later I had a fully functioning OSX system.

I've had a Mac Mini sitting in my garage for a good two years now. It works, to my knowledge, aside from a bad hard drive and no power supply. Last week sometime I ordered a power supply for about $20 on eBay, $10 under the standard price point ;-). So yesterday was Day 1 of the attempt to turn it into a Media Center or HTPC. Obviously this being a PPC G4 Mini, it won't run anything more than 720p from what I've read. But that doesn't matter, because it's going in the bedroom and the best I can stream over 802.11G is 720p MKV's. Linux Mint is my ideal OS for home stuff these days, but unfortunately they don't have a PowerPC Version. Ubuntu and Debian do, so I'm going with Ubuntu. I can always download and install the codecs and whatnot later. The machine only has 512MB PC3200, but my wife's machine has a spare 1GB stick of PC3200, so that's the first thing I swap out.