Archive for the ‘General Comments’ Category

Meriden

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Well I have managed to move successfully and seamlessly and now instead of living in the city centre of Birmingham I am now living in the centre of Meriden which is apparently also the centre of England! (The centre of the centre! was also tempted to throw in a HTTP 301 reference, but I’ll spare you that)

Anyway, Meriden is a wonderful and quiet little village roughly 6 km from Birmingham International and around 3 miles from where I work, which has cut my commute down to 5 minutes by bus which is awesome.

I find that I am a lot happier here with friendly people from the village who say hello and don’t mind if you talk to them. Also not having to pass through Birmingham New Street station is a plus as the entire place is just pure depression and to be honest, it is not what you need first thing on a Monday morning, especially when that is combined with the arrogance and ignorance of inner city dwellers/commuters.

Anyway, I have a bigger flat that is actually a one bedroom flat and not a tiny little studio. It has a kitchen, bathroom and separate living and bedroom. Combined with the lack of drunkards walking past the window at night and central heating (oh my god electric storage heaters are utterly rubbish at keeping you warm) my sudden departure from Birmingham doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all, however I am lacking in the freezer, computer desk and land line department, but those will be sorted out in due course I suppose.

Looking forward to trying out the Heart of England way and attempting to walk down towards Henley-In-Arden and perhaps see some remnants of the Arden forrest.

Sadly the internet is in the form of net book and E71 which sometimes can be fairly stable and other times wont stay connected for more than a minute, which suffices for day to day Facebook browsing. Another development concerns my Nokia E71 and how woefully unstable it is becoming. It no longer can produce sound out from the speaker, so that means no ring tones, no alarms and certainly no text message alerts which is rather infuriating and also indicates that I will need a new phone in the very near future. Another thing is that it seems to be getting more and more unstable as time goes on. The web browser takes an age to load and running a few programs usually causes a kernel panic and the phone reboots without warning at random intervals, which is both worrying and vexing.

Geeking wise, I haven’t been up to much at all recently. I’ve set up Subversion and Trac to play with when I have the free time and to also get all my code up in to a central location as I keep loosing things that are scattered over several hard disks and machines. I am also going to get accustomed with Nagios again so that I have a playground to fiddle and break so that I can finally get that monitoring server set up at work (Which has been on my TODO list for around a year now). Started coding for a project handed to me by a friend over a year ago and another that started in November. Very slow progress as the last thing I want to do is code when I get in from work during the week.

Anyway all is good in the land of Meriden, we had a drugs bust in the flats across the way which was talk of the village, so it’s all happening here, very glad I moved.

Snow, Games, HTC HD2 and Explosions

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

A Happy New Year to all!

Sadly my immune system decided to take two days off resulting in most of new year’s eve consisting of watching films in bed and getting up at midnight to watch the fireworks from the terrace. Which I might add were rather spectacular and I am left warm and fuzzy knowing that Birmingham City Council are spending my council tax well.

Anyway, this gave me time to play Assassins Creed 2, which to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything fantastic considering the first one was pretty, unique and fun to play.  Sadly it was killed by the repetitive side missions and mundane tasks which did not fit in to the assassin theme. I was however impressed, the storyline in the game continues right where you left off in the first game, so at least there is a little consistency. The game is far more pretty than the first one, running through Italian streets gazing at the architecture and finding new and amusing ways to kill the guards on the roofs.

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The Weekend & MySQL fail

Friday, October 16th, 2009

This has been a long week, with MySQL fails left right and centre.

The actual MySQL server ships with a bomb ready to go off as we found out at work. For every connection to the server it does DNS lookups for the user to verify where the connection is coming from and for a production server all connections will be from a limited amount of known hosts. So when the hosting provider’s DNS blows up in your face, you are left with a MySQL server which is not allowing any connections what so ever, the web servers go nuts with requests failing and retrying and a lot of clients on the phone giving you a good ear bashing. (Plus the boss gets a headache)

You can switch the DNS lookups off, the solution was found here:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/05/31/dns-achilles-heel-mysql-installation/

Another fail comes in the form of the Administrator GUI tool which started today. When connecting to a remote database through an SSH tunnel, (which might I add has worked for the past 2 years.) I get the wonderful 2013 MySQL error, sadly Google has yet to provide me with a solution, however Navicat Lite has provided a clue which is the also unhelpful: Lost connection to MySQL Server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 0.

If I find a solution, I’ll post it here.

Ah well, at least the weekend is now here, I can go get drunk off my face and make a tit of myself in front of the general public. Also I’ve just realised that Grey Area is now 2 years old! A rather quiet celebration as there is no user base here.

Squash, Screen and Irssi

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

First off,seeing as I am testing out this new VPS to see if it is more suited to my needs. (despite being a complete turncoat and using Windows instead of Linux). I mean to be honest as long as the web server works and I can serve ASP.NET either through IIS or Mod_Mono I am happy. Well I say happy, I don’t enjoy spending endless tweaking of config files to see if changing settings will finally allow the web server to start serving files properly. Platform ambivalent, you could say.

Anyway, I’m currently hunting for a nice replacement to screen on Linux for Windows, as that is one of the main things that I use my VPS for, logging on to the server, bring up the stored screen and use irssi to spread more white noise on to the internet. Anyway, been looking at Cygwin which doesn’t appear to have changed much since I last tried it about 2-3 years ago. So far I have been running a separate SSH Server called freeSSHd and starting a bash shell from there, however putty doesn’t seem to handle this well and the command execution seems particularly slow.

Going to try using just Cygwin for the SSH Daemon and see how the command execution time goes, it might actually work! Anyway, anyone have any suggestions for screen and irssi replacements?

On another note, Played squash with my Boss and co-worker last night, make a complete arse of myself and my left arm has fallen out with me. Still good fun though and now off to be shamed at work. :D

Not Invented Here … again

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Another blog, different server.

Well, I’ve decided to install wordpress again, this time on my test Windows 2003 VPS. Sadly it hasn’t lived up to it’s fabulous 5 minute install claim, but I eventually got it running thanks to this useful site: http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/ which contains some useful tips for php and wordpress installation.

What I will say is that attempting to customise wordpress is a breeze, that is if you want to use the already built solutions! Creating your own custom wordpress theme is a complete pain in the backside. So far I’ve managed to rip up the default theme and whip in some css and re arrange some PHP to create what is seen here. At least it now validates against the W3C validators.

Now to see if this VPS if up to the task and finish off my MVC site revamp. It’s nothing exciting, very similar to the theme here with a slightly better cms for me to update the site more often. Hopefully this blog will force me to keep publishing more white noise on to the internet. The only thing now is to see if I can replicate SSH, SFTP and possibly scrreen with irssi. A tall order, but I need something to keep me out of trouble! :)