Found this video, couldn’t stop laughing for about 3 days.
Monthly Archive for July, 2007
Well that’s me finished the restructure, there has been some major changes including a whole new looks and a new domain.
The new domain is designed to be easy to remember, all other domains that have been used for this domain in the past now redirect automatically so there is no need to use this one if you prefer another.
As for the new looks, I have went dark for a change and I am loving it! There is lot’s of new features some are listed below:
+ Comment’s now have captcha, this monitors spam and does away with comment moderation.
+ Pages that were once separate on the website now use WordPress and can be found using the tabs at the top.
+ You can share posts, either via sites such as Digg or email to a friend.
+ You can rate individual post’s using a 5 star system.
+ The contact me page now involves answering a simple sum, this again is an anti-spam feature.
If you have any suggestions or comments please leave a comment on this post or use the contact me tab at the top of this blog.
My blog might become unavailable for a few hours in the next couple of days, this is because I am changing the structure of the way I store things on my web hosting server. With this change will most likely bring a new site design to bring it up to the current Web 2.0 standards, so look forward to that.
On other news, my laptop has been dispatched for the 3rd time by Acer and I should be receiving it either Wednesday or Thursday at the latest. Let’s hope everything has been fixed this time and there is no more nasty surprises which would lead to it having to be sent away for a 4th time.
Well that’s all people, again sorry for any inconvenience caused with the web server updates and hopefully the new design will be up to everyone’s standards. 
Yesterday was quite a day, went to a party and had some nice food courtesy of the trusty old BBQ. Enjoyed myself and didn’t get too drunk.
Before anything got underway I got the job of building the BBQ , got that was hard. The instructions were no use at all. I eventually gave up and left it semi-built for someone else to finish and began looking at my uncles internet connection. He is with Virgin Media and was getting the full 8 Mbps last week, he phoned a couple of days before and complained that his downloads were going very slow, a quick look into the router config showed why, his sync speed had fell to 576/235.
I tried the usual reboot, filter change but nothing made a difference. I phoned Virgin and they were great, asked me a few questions about the phone setup in the house and then checked the exchange records and noticed it had been gradually falling throughout the week to the point we were at now.
He then suggested to run the ADSL router without anything else plugged into the phone line for example the phone and the Sky boxes. I left my uncle with this last night but still no change this morning. Phoned Virgin again and they said that’s fine and the test results pointed to something wrong externally either with the wiring from the exchange to house or something to do with the actual equipment in the exchange. They have now booked an engineer to go out and have a look all free of charge. Hopefully he will find the problem and solve it.
On the 1st September my contract runs out and I get my phone upgrade. I am currently undecided between two phones. The Sony Ericsson W880i (Black) and the LG Prada. The LG Prada is nice and Apple cloned it with the iPhone. The W880i is uber thin though and has the usual SE high quality firmware. o
As mentioned in the last post my new Netgear DG834PN arrived and I have set it up. The configuration bit was easy as pie as my previous router was the Netgear DG834G. Everything is neatly arranged and easily changed in the well set out web interface, it has options for everything right down to the dome LED’s on the router. I have included a screen shot is below. (I have removed some details that could be abused. 
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The performance has increased over the LAN with transfers to the server and to other computers on the network is much faster, wireless performance won’t be tested until my laptop returns from it’s 3rd repair though. 
As for the SnapShots just roll your mouse over any links to external sites and you will see them in action!
Well as the last post stated, the laptop did indeed turn back up. I signed for it and said goodbye to the nice DHL woman. I then started unpacking the laptop and all look well. I booted up and went into the the horrible Acer Windows XP factory installation. Got a pop up concerning corrupt files which is something you don’t want to see on a laptop just back from a repair center. I then opened the CD drive to pop in Windows Vista and noticed that it wouldn’t open. I checked in the BIOS and the model was showing up as scrambled text containing squares and question marks. Something was wrong. 
After this discovery the laptop now wouldn’t post instead giving two beeps. Not being familiar with Acer BIOS, I don’t have a clue what this meant. Also at this point I discovered one of the rubber feet on the laptop was missing. I phoned Acer support and they replied with their usual “it will have to come back to the repair center”. I explained that it had just returned from there today, the support guy apologized but it would still have to go in.
I then asked him to send an official complaint to the correct department which he done. I then asked him to add a note to the account stating I wished a replacement rather than another repair. :@
So it’s getting picked up tomorrow again and we will just have to wait and see what happens. Also Parcel Force is coming to pick up the PSU I sold on eBay.
I also bought myself a new router as the wireless signal was slightly dodgy in my house due to the router being re-located. I choose the Netgear RangeMax DG834PN. This is a great little router and well worth the £63.30. Just need to wait until it arrives and lives up to all the 5 star reviews. (yn)
Time for an upgrade for my phone, current phones I am looking at are the LG Prada, Sony Ericsson W880i or K810i.
Well that’s Acer just text me alerting me that the laptop has been dispatched and will be back with me tomorrow. This is good news as the last time I spoke to Acer they told me the motherboard was gone and a replacement would be at least two working weeks, that was three days ago.
Nothing else has been happening, I did try using Windows Home Server on my server. I ran completely fine due to the RAM upgrade. While the backup and restore was second to none everything else was inefficient and just ended up wasting time rather than saving it. I ended up reinstalling ClarkConnect Linux back on the server as it’s much more efficient than any Windows offering. I have now put Arconis TrueImage 10 to use as it uses the same image and restore technique that Windows Home Server uses, and I can still use it to store backups on the network storage. 
Also someone bought my unused Tagan EasyCon Series 530W PSU for £70 on eBay, this is great considering you could buy a brand new one from Scan for 65 pounds.
And my very expensive earphones that I RMA’d a couple of weeks back have been replaced and are on there way home via UPS. The company has been great and offered a quick turn around considering I had to send these back to America, they have also included some accessories with the return shipment to compensate for the postage costs although this was only £2.00.
As you can see by reading the last post I was having some memory troubles with my server, there simply was not enough! The new 512MB sticks (that’s eight times more RAM) have arrived and works perfectly. As far as improvements go it’s off the scale, pages are loading much, much faster and the server load has also decreased, presumably because it’s not having to look for things in the swap partition. The new server status page is shown below and as you can see it’s using absolutely no swap what so ever.
Well I thought it would be a screen shot but I have just discovered my Apple Keyboard doesn’t have a Print Screen button, will post one up soon once I get my hands on another keyboard. The screen shot has now been added and can be seen below. 
As for the laptop sides of things, it’s not as good as news. They are still waiting on the part and I haven’t received any further information.
Got certificate for effort in Computing, English and Maths. I don’t know what happened with Maths, must be some kind of mistake.
Well not a good week overall, for many reason’s the main being I am still laptop less. Acer are now waiting on a new motherboard for the computer. So far they have replaced the RAM, HDD, GFX and now that’s the motherboard. I don’t see why they are doing this rather than turning round and replacing the fecking thing! :@
The server has changed yet again, firstly I tried FreeBSD but that was just too complicated for my liking and even simple tasks such as installing Apache 2, PHP5, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin turned into a nightmare and went completely wrong. I then went back to Ubuntu to get my server back up and running. I was looking for a guide to setting up a proxy server and came across another Linux distribution called ClarkConnect. At first glance at there website there is pricing mentioned and I started to become uninterested but on closer inspection you only had to pay for the enterprise editions. They provided a Home version with a limit of 10 users because at most I would only be using 5. I downloaded the ISO which was around 440MB, installation was painless and required simple selections such as language and root password. Once the install finished the server just displays a command line interface telling you that all configuration can be done using a web interface which I was really happy about as it’s so simple to work!
Below is a screen shot of the web interface displaying server information, I know the RAM and CPU are low spec but again the server doesn’t do anything but a web proxy and as you can see by the screen shot the load is always below 1. As for the swap usage I know about this and have bought 512MB of memory (2 X 256MB sticks) to replace the very low 64MB currently in the system.
Lastly would like to say thanks to Jamie for lending me his server for the laptop less times. This keeps me on-line and up to date. Cheers again!
Well that’s my desk all sorted and tidied up. Great to have somewhere to work without a pile of clutter that it has been this week. Not been up to much else. Screen finally sold on eBay for a not bad price, it was sitting at £71 and then in the last few minutes someone placed a bid for £81 and won the item. I said I would be happy with £75 so that’s a bonus. Now need to arrange Parcel Force to come and pick it up but unfortunately to book this I need to weigh the parcel and I don’t have scales. Need to ask Jamie to do it for me and then print the label with his new toy the Dymo label printer 310 (I think).
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