Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Guess who I’m on the phone to. It’s not hard. It’s the same people I am always on the phone to. UK Online. A somewhat ironic name it would seem. And opening itself up to derogatory word play but someone of any interlect.

Our connection isn’t just dropping, it’s just entirely going away and not coming back. Normally they do a tone test which magically starts it working again but even after that it died again tonight and support have nothing else to try.

After this happened yesterday advanced support refered me to their advanced support team (who don’t work this late) and who were supposed to re-adjust my line this morning. But didn’t. And are now scheduled to do it tomorrow when they arrive at work.

When someone first suggested we hire someone to manually ferry packets from the exchange and back I thought they were joking. Now I’m just wondering…

Play.com has begun selling DRM-free MP3 music downloads! This has to be a big step forward to widespread availabilty of DRM-free downloads which is looking like the only way copyright owners are ever going to prevent (or at least reduce) illegal downloading on their work.

Tracks are available for £0.65 which is competitive to say the least and they claim to have a library of millions of tracks. While there is a lot of stuff in there I haven’t heard of, that may just be because I’m getting old - just looking down the list of top sellers I notice Arctic Moneys, Queen, Phil Collins, Stereophonics and plenty of others so there are plenty of big labels on board with this.

My Windows desktop (Inca) stopped displaying things like filenames. They just disappear into blank test whenever you try to open a file.

My Linux desktop (Zapotec) refuses to play DVDs despite now having the codec installed.

My file server (Olmec) won’t boot if I initialise some of the hard drives into an array. Individually they work fine, if I plug them into the motherboard’s SATA connections. But if I try to run them through my really expensive RAID controller the computer complains of a boot failure even if I just put one into a JBOD configuration.

My Linux server (Nazca) is a write-off because I installed Webmin and Webmin now refuses to remove itself or allow me to run any kind of updates.

My laptop (Toltec) can’t even make 3 hours battery life anymore.

One of my web servers (Jennifer) is just being really, really slow despite my restarting like every service on it.

So, back to this plan for us to all run away and become pirates…

I’m thinking about renouncing my status as a Sony Ericsson fanboy and switching to a Nokia phone :o.

I was planning on getting the k850i but CNet didn’t like. Unfortunately I tend to let CNet tell me what to think. After all, they said they were an honest bunch of guys.

I got looking at the Nokia N95 8GB which seems rather snazzy and has somewhat captured my imagination. While I’m sure the k850i has many of these features it has lured me with promise of GPS, wifi, 8GB internal storage, a 5 megapixel camera, no annoying camera lens that opens every time you take it out of your pocket and best of all - a standard 3.5mm audio jack.

It’s not all good. The battery life will be shockingly bad which will be annoying (might have to keep a travel phone around, I’ve just replaced the battery in my k800i and am now enjoying only having to charge ever 5 days or so). Also the GPS downloads maps on the fly which means monster data usage. This does however give me an excuse to pay for the mobile internet dealie (£7.50 for 120mb a month bandwidth).

If I do go with the Nokia it means sticking with Vodaphone as o2 want £100 for it on the same priced price plan which means I still won’t be getting a signal in Stylus. But on the plus side I will continue to get a signal in my own home :D.

Is there anything more annoying than when you type out a long message to someone on Facebook, click send, it disables the text editor so you can’t edit or even select and copy the text you’ve just written - and then the AJAX request fails and you loose your message.

Obviously that is a rhetorical question. Siblings, the itching of chickenpox and Big Brother are just a number of the many, many items more annoying than that. But I don’t feel such towering feets of annoyance really detract from quite how annoying it is when that happens on Facebook.

But no more! With my Web Developer add-on I just simply select forms from the toolbar and then click “enable form fields” to have all disabled elements enabled once again. Chew on that one Mark Zuckerberg :D.

Having been backward compatibility testing my Web 2.0 apps without JavaScript I have several times now forgotten to turn JavaScript back on before heading off to browse some other websites. It’s interesting to see which websites work and which don’t.

Facebook is the notable website I have spent the most time on and it’s a fairly mixed bag. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. For instance you can poke someone back without JavaScript but you cannot accept or reject requests without it. Netvibes (rightfully so probably) didn’t work at all without JavaScript. WordPress seemed to work fine for the most part though I didn’t do anything other than start typing this post.

Which led me on to thinking, will we reach a point where you need JavaScript? Whether or not you agree with the increased use of JavaScript on the web (aka Web 2.0 really, and don’t get me wrong, I do agree with it, that is just my token comment to keep Mr. O’Shea happy :p), it is happening. The question is, how far will it go? How long will people keep writing code backward compatible with non-JavaScript? Indefinitely or have they already stopped doing it? Something to think about.

I’ve added a few Firefox extentions recently and it’s quickly making me wonder how I lived without them.

I’ve had IE View installed for ages which is really simple but really valuable. All it does is add an option when I right click on a page to open it in Internet Explorer. As I said it sounds so simple but I use it so much, especially when I’m testing cross browser compatibility of my sites.

I finally got round to reinstalling Web Developer which adds a toolbar and a load of functionality specifically designed for those developing websites and web apps. I’ve been without it for ages (we’re talking years) but I don’t know why, it add loads of stuff.

For example I can disable JavaScript and CSS with a click to see how the page degrades. This is especially useful in backward compatibility testing my Web 2.0 apps for users without JavaScript. What I also find mega useful is the ability for it to display all forum values including hidden elements and allow you to edit them so you can easily test things like people putting in rogue values (such as trying to edit someone elses profile by changing the user id in the hidden form variable to someone elses user id). I’m just scratching the surface here though, it has a massive toolbar of stuff.

Finally I also installed FireFTP which is an FTP client which sits in a tab of Firefox. I never got round to installing an FTP client on my desktop as I always used my laptop but it was annoying a lot of the time. So it’s convient to have one, especially that just sits in my always open browser. It’s not too shabby either it supports multiple accounts, quick connect, two panes (local and remote) and even lock-stepping.

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.

I’m currently trying to report an issue with my VPS. I can’t though because ServInt’s support site is down.

Seriously, why is it so hard to find a reliable host?

I was moving away from PowerVPS as I’ve had a few problems with them recently including hostnames and root passwords mysteriously changing in the middle of my trying to set up my new VPS. But I’m not getting any further with ServInt. Bare in mind that these are the two most well respected VPS companies in existence. So it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than than I am cursed.

Consider some of the fun problems we’re currently tackling. Most of the websites in the network use nsx.mazedev.com as their nameservers. These are registered with the domain registrar and so are seperate to the server which hosts mazedev.com itself. Yet if you take that server offline, all domains that are not .com or .net (such as .co.uk, .info and .org) stop resolving. Yep, get your head around that one.

Meanwhile I still can’t get any work on my project done, run my website backups or generally access anything at Burchett Place because of our connectivity issues. The replacement modem was supposed to arrive today, after all I ordered it middle of last week and payed for next day delivery. It hasn’t turned up. I can’t phone City Link because eBuyer haven’t given me a consignment number and I can’t phone eBuyer because they are closed for new year.

This results in me not being able to go home and do some revision because I need to be here with internet access to resolve these issues I am having with all the websites which is now starting to cost me lots of money, money which I don’t have. Still, who really wanted a degree anyway?

Many people are probably in bed by now.

After all it’s 1am on Christmas Day morning.

Of course most people didn’t have to drag their ass out of their nice warm bedroom at 11pm Christmas Eve to go spend 2 hours trying to bring the internet back online so that they could get on with doing some of their final year project for their degree which requires remote access.

As it turns out, I’m not in this group of most people. Nor have I actually got anywhere with the time I’ve spent unless you class ensuring I don’t get enough sleep before getting up tomorrow as getting somewhere. Personally, I don’t. But maybe I should as it would ensure far more victories in life for me.

So there is some quality time down the drain now it’s just a case of waiting to see how much money goes down the drain as well. Of course that’s a joke - it’s going to cost far more of my valuable time to sort it out than has been taken up so far. Happy holidays everyone.