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.

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!

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.

Thanks to a link found by Newboy, it looks like the new rage is Open Source Phone operating systems. Apparently I missed Google’s announcement of the Open Handset Alliance which looks pretty interesting! Nokia seem to be luke-warm on their heals by buying up the Symbian Foundation. Symbian is OK, but I’d be interested in what Google can do. Integration with the rest of my other Google services? Yes please!

And as for the latter part of that article, who cares if the iPhone will be 3G soon? It should’ve been 3G in the first place, and who the hell will pay $200 for an iPhone? iPhones are a bane on this earth, just like any other Apple product is.

Bring on Google’s world domination I say!

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.

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.

Opening my inbox at work yet again revealing tens of spam e-mails in my junk e-mail folder got me thinking. Why does the “bad spam” still exist? By “bad spam”, I mean the extremely un-inventive stuff that is clearly spam, and is always picked up by Junk e-mail filters. E-mails with subjects such as:

• Your insatiable chick will be full of pleasure
• Improve your men’s health with WonderCum!
• Just Read What Our Satisfied Customers Say
• Disappointed with your sexual health?
• Bring back time when girls were yours.

Read the rest of this entry »

No sooner after I had started packing away the 360, Blu-Ray player, PS2 etc., Mike, a member of Pompey Music forum brought round the Nintendo Wii that Hannah wanted to buy. So unfortunately, the entire afternoon which was meant to be spent packing up for the new house was in fact spent playing on the Wii. We’ve set up our Mii’s, and have been playing a little Wii Sports and Mario Party 8. She’s still playing, but someone has to cook the dinner, so while the oven is warming up I thought I’d mention what we’re up to.

Things are getting pretty hectic around here now. Packing the house up for moving to Whiteley, as well as preparing for the imminent Hellfest (yay!). We managed to get down town today for a bit and pick up some bits (baby wipes, Euros and the like) ready for that. We’re on a really tight budget this year, and it’s made even tighter by the fact we have to save a shed load of money for the wedding, and more importantly, Hannah’s engagement ring! The new house’s rent is £170 more a month between us as well, so that’s another kick in the budget’s teeth.

Another headache I’ve been trying to figure out is what I’m going to do with the servers during the move. I can’t get internet at the new place until the BT line is activated which is on the day we move in (and not a minute sooner!). This means that I probably won’t have internet at all from 1st July for about 10-15 days, providing the new ISP doesn’t mess anything up. I spoke to Kelvin briefly, and understandably, he said no to letting me put the servers in the work’s server cabinet (security risks and all that), so ideally I need to find a home for them at a friend’s house. I’ll try and chat up a few friends who I know have good internet connections, but if any of you are my clients reading this, I will try and keep downtime to a minimum, but there will be a bit of disruption, so be warned!

Anyway, off to cook dinner, ta ta for now!