Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B
And whilst I’m ranting about Dominos Pizza, they have the following deals:
“Feed Four for £5 each: 2 x Medium Pizzas, 1 x Garlic Pizza Bread, 1 x Potato Wedges plus 1 x bottle of 1.25l Coca Cola for only £19.99”
“Double Deal Medium: 2 Medium Pizza (from the menu or create your own up to 4 toppings, Premium Crusts & Bases charged as extra ) £20.99”
So, if you actually want 2 Medium pizzas (as we do), it works out £1 cheaper to get it with garlic bread, potato wedges and Cola!
We were just looking for some food to eat on the Dominos Pizza website when I came across their “Box Busting deal” which includes “Large Pizza, Garlic Pizza Bread, Potato Wedges and a [current or library movie] rental” for £19.99. It looked tempting as we were possibly considering going to the cinema to see “something”, so I had a look at which films they had “stocked”.
1) It’s not clear that this are actually “streaming” videos: i.e. you aren’t actually renting a physical item to play in your DVD or Blu-Ray player
2) No technical specifications are given on the main site at http://www.dominos.co.uk/menu/movies/ (they are in the FAQ on http://pizzaboxoffice.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions though: an entirely separate site).
3) It says it can be viewed on a “PC or Mac” (is that Windows and Mac or “Windows, Linux, RISC OS” [i.e. anything in a “PC form factor] and Mac”)
4) It will” only work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox 15, Opera 12.02, Chrome 21, IE9 and Safari 5.1.7″. I run Chrome 25 on my Linux laptop: can I actually play the movie (the “latest version” of “Chrome 21” as far as I can tell was Chrome 21.0.1180.90 (released September 24 2012). Since around that, “Chrome 21” has been ended. I would under stand if it said “Latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Chrome, IE and Safari” (and is it compatible with IE10?)
5) And the biggest problem I’ve got is the movie choice. The titles are provided by Lions Gate UK Limited and the choices are:
“Latest” (not available under the deal)
(I’ve heard of “What to expect when you’re expecting”, “Magic Mike” and “The Expendables 2”: but I’ve not been tempted to see any of them).[3 heard, 0 “want to watch”, 0 owned]
“Current” (part of the deal)
(I’ve heard of “The Hunger Games”: but not been tempted to see it. I’e not heard of the others).[1 heard, 0 “want to watch”, 0 owned]
“Library Title”
(We own “The Princess Bride”, “Maybe Baby” and “Clerks” and I’ve heard “The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus”, “Dirty Dancing”, “The Blair Witch Project”, “Jeepers Creepers”, “Reservoir Dogs”, “The Expendables” and the 3 “Spy Kids” films and we may be very slightly tempted by “Conan: The Barbarian”). [9 heard, 1 “want to watch”, 3 owned]
So, out of 76 available movies, I’ve heard of 10, own 3 and may be slightly tempted by 1.
I don’t think we’ll bother with this deal.
We’ve just started our annual “provider audit” and our first “task” was to look at comparable dedicated hosting providers to make sure we are getting a package for us at the lowest reasonable rate. Our requirements are:
* Minimum 4Gb RAM
* 4 CPU Cores at 2.0Ghz or above
* 2x 500Gb hard drives
* RAID 1 or RAID 10 (software or hardware)
* 1Tb monthly data transfer limit
* Minimum of 4 IPv4 IP addresses
* Europe hosting (UK preferred)
* CentOS/RedHat operating system
* Ideally cPanel, IPv6 and remote “console” support
* Not “Cloud/VPS” (we’re going to be using the server for shared hosting and shared hosting on shared hardware just seems silly)
Our budget for this was £200+vat. Here’s what we found:
View in new window.
We haven’t yet made a decision (I must admit, we’ve been extremely happy with Memset for quite a few years now) – it is interesting what all the companies offer. Please remember that this spreadsheet is incomplete in parts (the ? should show where), doesn’t actually assess the providers networks or what support package is offered (i.e. there may be an “unlisted” reason one costs £100pm more than another!).
Is there any one you think we’ve missed?
If you want to search your Gmail/Google Email mail for emails received between two dates, the following search term should help;
before:2013/02/01 after:2012/12/31
For code testing against a live site, I’ve had to extract all urls from an Apache access file – but how to do this from the Linux command line?
The secret is to use two regular expressions (regexp) in a “awk” command – for example:
cat examine.txt | awk 'sub(/.*(GET|POST) \//,"")&&sub(/ HTTP.*/,"")'
This will pipe the contents of the file examine.txt to AWK which will run two regular expressions. The first one will remove the “phrase” “GET /” or “POST /” and anything before it – and the second will remove the “phrase” ” HTTP” and anything after it. It’ll then give you a nice list of URLs to test.
Oh – and if you’d like it to produce a nice “curl friendly” file of just URLs starting “xyz.php” from host example.com then:
cat examine.txt | grep "GET /xyz.php" | awk 'sub(/.*(GET|POST) \//,"http://example.com/")&&sub(/ HTTP.*/,"")' > curl.txt
should do the trick (combine that with cat curl.txt | xargs -n1 -i curl {} > /dev/null to test)