Asgrim

So after a little hacking at lunch today, I discovered just why half my websites don’t work. It’s a very simple reason…

PHP4 vs. PHP5.

Yes, Newnet are still stuck in the year 2000, and are using the “favourite old shoes” version 4 of PHP. Please, Newnet, PLEASE upgrade to PHP5. Not for me, but for the sake of your hosting service. Not to mention the fact development for PHP4 actually stopped seven months ago! Not only that but security updates will be stopping in August apparently! Surely that’s two really big reasons to upgrade.

And that goes to every other webhost stuck on PHP4. At least provide two hosting options - one PHP4 for those developers stuck in the year 2000, and a PHP5 option for those developers who are modern and up-to-date.

This article is a good debate.

After several days of stress, tiredness, anger, fustration and all sorts, we’ve moved into the new house and everything is done (for the mean time anyway…).

Firstly, the servers. I took them to a friend’s house to stay there temporarily until I could get my new internet line set up. Unfortunately after a day or two of waiting for DNS updates to propogate through the world, it looked like it just wouldn’t work. I didn’t have time to fiddle around making it work, I just needed the sites up as I have a couple of important clients. I’ve had to shell out at my own cost, temporary hosting at Newnet. So far so good except for the fact I cannot get any PHP error logs, which is fustrating as the Frosthold site does not work properly at the moment. I managed to get this blog back up and running after finding that my Feedburner Stats plug-in doesn’t work on the Newnet servers, so that’s disabled for now (coding fail perhaps?). I’m still waiting for their online support service to give me some sort of response (24 hours later, and not even a “we have acknowledged your ticket”… Unfortunately due to the temporary migration to newnet, Tom’s blog and Hannah’s blog won’t be working as I stupidly set them to use the same DB prefix (wp_), and I can only afford one MySQL database. Sorry chap and chapette…

The actual house move went fairly smoothly, albeit loads of heavy lifting and Hannah and I cursing at each other when boxes were dropped on each other (and no, thats not some kind of kinky game..). The new house is absolutely gorgeous, and we’re having a few people over tonight to celebrate our engagement as well as the house warming. Now I know that the blog is working, I’ll take a few pictures to show everyone what it’s like.

This article I found on the Mind Tree Blog sort of covers old ground for me, but it was interesting nonetheless. It’s interesting the way he doesn’t forward specific things, but rather everything in the URL… so we’d forward something like:

http://www.asgrim.com/channel/Google/news/something/

to:

http://www.asgrim.com/index.php?p=channel/Google/news/something/

and letting the PHP script decode the specifics of the URL, rather than setting up specific forwards like:

http://www.asgrim.com/index.php?module=channel&provider=Google&section=news&article=something

I’m not sure which I prefer. The method mentioned in the article does give extra flexibility without having to modify the .htaccess, but the latter gives more specification as to how the URLs should work. I guess at the end of the day it’s up to opinion.

If this BBC news story is anything to go by, this web address could actually exist soon. It looks like Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be allowing registration of TLDs (Top Level Domains). For the immediate future at least, I doubt it will be very used apart from the big companies (hello Google!) due to the “low six-figure” price tag (in USD). This means that web addresses could change something like this:

• http://www.google.com/ »» http://google/ or http://www.google/ or http://news.google/ etc.
• http://www.microsoft.com/ »» http://microsoft/ or http://windows.microsoft/
• And potentially personal addresses (when prices drop..) such as http://james.titcumb/

It’s certainly a revelation, but is it a good idea, thats the question… How will this be recieved by the general public? How easily will people take to typing addresses without .com or .co.uk or other TLDs? Since practically the dawn of the internet, these popular TLDs such as .com, .net, .org etc. have been a staple of the internet. Even phrases have been named after these TLDs, such as “the dot com crash” and so on.

The other extreme of course, is that it gets taken up a little too well, and it goes mad, and companies register TLDs such as in the title of this article. I’m a bit aprehensive until I read further into it, but if executed properly, I think it could work well, and would benefit the internet immensely.

On the third hand (?!), there’s the already heaving size of the internet. Capacity problems are being taken care of by the introduction of IPv6 to replace IPv4 at some point, and releasing TLDs generally will allow more combinations of domains (to a certain degree), but don’t you think there’s already just way too much information on the internet? Or perhaps there’s not enough… I think thats a whole other debate there, so I’ll put the lid back on that one for the time being.

Of course, part of this proposal is to allow non-Roman text in domain names. So instead of http://news.yahoo.co.jp/, we could see http://ニュース.yahoo.co.jp/… The problem I see with that of course, is that I don’t have a japanese keyboard, so I’d have to use character map… which would take a while. Japanese keyboards of course have Roman letters. Although to me personally, it doesn’t matter as I can’t speak or understand non-Roman languages, but I’m sure it’d matter to someone out there!

Due to my house move, I’m relocating my servers to a temporary location for a couple of weeks until my new internet line is set up. Therefore all websites that run on my servers will be down for several hours during transit to the temporary location on Saturday 28th July 2008. The move will be done some time mid-afternoon, and I anticipate they will be running again late afternoon. The temporary location does have a different IP, so I will have to update the DNS records, which can take up to 24-48 hours to propogate around the world. I aim to keep disruption to a minimum, but please bear with me!

Note that once I have the internet line working in my new house, similar downtime will occur again due to transit from the temporary location to the new house. I will inform again when this is due to happen!

If you head over to my Project Page, you’ll find links to download:

• This theme
• Matched Ad sidebar widget
• Feedburner Stats sidebar widget

Feel free to download/modify them etc., but please keep me in the credits.

Everyone already knows about the server downtime when they were trying to break the record blah blah.

The botch I’m talking about is my experience of downloading it this morning and trying it out.

My experience was about 15 minutes…

• 1 minute to download Firefox 3
• 1 minute to install Firefox 3
• 1 minute to find out half of my add-ons don’t work
• 1 minute to try and hack the MaxVersion to work and fail miserably
• 2 minutes to locate a Firefox 2 installer
• 3 minutes to download it from the stupidly slow FTP
• 1 minute to uninstall Firefox 3 and install Firefox 2
• 2 minutes to find out Firefox 2 kept crashing because the Firebug I upgraded to crashes it
• 1 minute to uninstall Firefox 2 and re-install it
• 2 minutes to set it up back to the way I like and restore my previous profile

I think I’ll leave Firefox 3 for a little while to get rid of teething issues.

At lunch, I asked Sii (one of our design guru’s here at Netbasic) to see what he thought of my new theme. He said pretty much straight away to get rid of the solid black lines, so I’ve replaced them all (except the date by the post titles as I stupidly put the border in the image itself…) with more subtle greys. So if you’re still seeing solid black lines around stuff, clear your cache and enjoy the new easier-on-the-eye greys. Cheers Sii!

I’ve always used fancy tools like PhpMyAdmin to create users in mysql etc. as I don’t normally remember the syntax.

Here it is:

CREATE USER 'username'@'hostname'
     IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT USAGE ON * . * TO 'username'@'hostname'
     IDENTIFIED BY 'password'
     WITH
          MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 0
          MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_HOUR 0
          MAX_UPDATES_PER_HOUR 0
          MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 0 ;

For each database you want the user to access, do:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `databasename` . * TO 'username'@'hostname';

This basically means: create a user, with password “password”, don’t allow them to access anything except USAGE. Then, allow them to do anything they want in database “databasename”.

Well, not really. It looks like Google’s Feedburner API is broken. My home-made in-development widget called Feedstats (seen to the right in the “How Popular I am…” section) is displaying 0 for subscribers, hits and reach! Thankfully, it’s not my fault:

<feed id="1948050" uri="asgrimthemighty">
<entry date="2008-06-16" circulation="0" hits="0" reach="0"/>
</feed>

This is the case, even though I looked at my Feedburner stats page, it’s just the AwAPI (Awareness API) that appears b0rked. Come on Google, sort it out.