Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Google have started pushing their new browser, Google Chrome.

I will give it a full review once I’ve had a play around with it though first impressions I can’t say I am filled with excitement. It doesn’t seem to have any particuarly innovative features though it does do quite a bit of bragging about features that Opera have already beaten them to.

To be honest though it’s just going to be another browser to have to test and fix for if it takes off. I have enough of these already, we we sure we don’t just want to use one browser like back in the day?

Has anyone else been getting a lot of these recently?

We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.

I’ve been getting loads. At first I thought it was that YouTube had withdrawn the video but it hadn’t come out of the search results and people’s profiles yet. But apparently they haven’t as many of the videos, including some of mine are still available.

Indeed, if you just hit refresh a few times on a video that is displaying that message it will eventually show you the video.

Having had a google around people seemed to initially blame it on embed code for videos which have since been withdrawn but based on what I have described above and the fact I have experienced it on YouTube.com itself, it would seem otherwise.

I did hear one blog blame it on high traffic and the servers not being able to cope. Seems a very plausable explanation. Maybe Google is letting itself go a bit?

Facebook’s developer platform is a joke.

I mean, it wasn’t great initially but they made an effort. They launched a wiki and tried to provide good documentation. They often didn’t succeed but a little more time and experience and they would probably get the hang of writing good quality documentation.

But it’s just gone down hill. As you probably know they have re-designed Facebook and as part of their changes they have altered much of the API and mark-up language. The only problem is, they didn’t bother to updatr any of the documentation. So none of it works anymore.

Nothing is coherant either. There are dead links and nothing matches – the new integration guide will say one thing and the documentation for the function it is talking about is completely different.

Worst of all, the final hope of salvation, asking users who have actually managed to get it working, isn’t a simple search of the forums at the moment as it’s returning no results for any search term I care to put in. Fantastic stuff.

Having finally got round to upgrading to Firefox 3 I have to say that I am impressed. It’s quite an improvement on Firefox 2 despite what quick makeover may suggest.

My biggest problem with Firefox 2 was that it eats memory like Claire eats men. Firefox 3 however seems far more conservative and doesn’t continue to plough through all your system resources until everything is gone. I leave my desktop open 24/7 with my browser open and Firefox 2 would just clunk up, it would take ages just to do things like open a new tab after a while and I would have to restart it. Firefox 3 is much faster, new tabs open immediately.

The second big improvement is that the download manager can now resume interrupted downloads so no longer will you get half way through a download only to find it dropped out for a second and you now have to restart the whole thing.

I haven’t really had a good look around the other new features and changes but they seem to have really hit the nail on the head with fixing Firefox’s shortcomings.

When you use Windows, disk space randomly disappears.

When you use Linux, disk space randomly disappears just as rapidly. Luckily, when you are using Linux you can use the disk usage command to see which folders are eating up all the disk space. Chances are you won’t be able to do anything about it, but you can at least look at it.

I’ve wanted something similar that I could use on Windows to give me an overview of my directories and tell me where all the disk space was actually going. Recently I found a tool called WinDirStat which scans a drive and gives you a breakdown of the space, files and sub-folders of each directory as well as a graphical representation of where all the space is going.

For example, on my system the fact that half the map is blue suggests I really need to clear my WoW downoads out while the amount of green suggests Windows comes bundled with too much crap. More importantly I can see at a glance that Program Files is using 42% of my disk space while My Document is using 31% and I can then break it down into the various sub-folders and find the offending files.

It uncovers some interesting things – for example Thunderbird is consuming a crazy 4.3GB of space simply storing my emails! World of Warcraft uses 8GB. Windows by comparission only uses 4GB.

One feature of Firefox I’ve just found about is smart keywords. If you hadn’t heard about them easier it is basically a way to run searches on any site you like from the address bar.

Basically, you go to a website you want to be able to search without visiting, select the search form and select add a keyword for this search. For example, on Amazon (I’m using Amazon because the stock example is IMDb and I wanted to do something different :p), you could enter “amazon” and then to search via your address bar you would just type amazon digital cameras and it would bring up said page.

A lot of obvious sites to do this with are already in the quick search bar on Firefox but I don’t find I ever use this even when I’m searching these sites because you have to change it away from Google before you search and then change it back to Google after you’re done and in the time you have done that you could have just typed in the URL of the site, especially given that can be done via keyboard shortcuts and if there is one for selecting a different quick search engine, I don’t know it and can’t imagine it would actually be much of a shortcut if it does exist.

While I don’t think it’s particularly useful to be able to search Amazon or IMDb this way as I don’t actually visit them that much, the more I got thinking about it the more I started thinking of sites that it would be useful for. Notably, Wikipedia, Mininova and eBay – all of which I go to one of my recently visited pages at on that site just so I can get to the search bar. I mean, who ever really wants to look at the Wikipedia homepage? I’m guessing it will also work with the search on Facebook too.

20:57

It’s true, we have your money!

Regards,

PowerVPS Hosting

21:07

Hello,

A few minutes ago a member of our Engineering staff crafted an email to test email templates on our PBA system. This email was destined for internal use and was never meant to be sent out to our customer base.

Unfortunately, the mail template was misconfigured, and was sent to all current customers on our PBA system.

These people are responsible for keeping my entire business up and running :D.

If you want to allow access to SVN via Apache, it’s actually nice and easy to install and configure it on a blank system. First, install Apache.

yum install httpd httpd-devel httpd-manual

Next, install Subversion.

yum install subversion

Now we need to bridge he two.

yum install mod_dav_svn

Once you have done this, we have everything we need. So we can go ahead and edit the Subversion configuration to add the Subversion directory to Apache.

vim subversion.conf

Finally, start and reload Apache, then go about creating your SVN repository.

Before we flee from Burchett Place I thought I would post a few pictures of the current setup at Burchett Place.

The internal network is gigabit, the external is fast ethernet all connected up by Linksys equipment. The first image below shows the internal switches and router which connect up to the main network which is connected to the internet via the routers shown in the second image.

These connect all the servers together of about half of which are racked up as shown below. The rest are just in random locations – the server in the other image is currently sitting in the middle of the floor while it is being setup for example.

These are all kept online by a series of UPS devices.

These are all connected by an endless series of cables. I tried to get some pictures to really show how much cableage there is going on but I couldn’t really achieve the affect I was after. Needless to say though, there is a lot of well organised and structured cabling such as below.

To ensure everything stays cool and the air circulates there is an advanced climate control system as shown below.

Finally this is all monitored and controlled via the NOC, complete with an array of no less than 4 monitors and your choice of both wired and wireless peripherals.

The results seem to have been quite good. Check the router’s uptime – 226 days, that is a little over 7 and a half months and I believe the reason that it came up then was because that was when it was taken offline to install the UPS.

Nick just pointed me towards a site named Ajaxload which is really useful for generating loading icons while waiting for things like AJAX content to load into a page. You select the type of spinning “loading” symbol you want and set the colours and it generates all the code for you. Have a play.