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Author: Richy B.

Follow me on Mastodon at @rbairwell@mastodon.org.uk or just the posts on this blog by following @richyb@blog.rac.me.uk .

Snippet: Still At Work

September 19, 2003
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It’s gone 7pm and I’m still at work and look to be here for another hour afterwards finishing a recruitment site (I was meant to be able to pass the design onto a coworker, but unfortently they didn’t “meet requirements” and hence I’m having to do all of the work myself). And once I get back home, I’ve got to give the DNS system a really good kicking as, by looking at things, my main website is still showing the “Under maintenance” page (how it can do that with Apache down I’m not sure: attempt to stop Apache comes up with “Apache not running” attempting to start it comes up with “segmentation fault”): and checking on DNS Report shows there’s some really strange things happening with my DNS at the moment.

Groan. Can’t I have an “easy week” for once?

Snippet: Server Failure

September 18, 2003
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My London web server (yep, I’ve got two dedicated web servers at the moment) has just had a minor crash and Apache has failed. Removing and reinstalling and configuring it still pulls up faults, but luckily I’m on the brink of decommissioning that 3year old server anyway – however, it wasn’t scheduled to happen for another fortnight at least to give me time to write all the scripts that run on it (it’s complete CGI driven).

So I’ve just had to copy all the files across to this server and try and juggle everything I can – I think it’s all worked as well as can be expected (still got a few problems with the scripting but I’ve patched around it for now), but I won’t be able to check if the DNS has properly updated for another 12 hours or so. The thing is, I’m not sure if I’ve got the configuration “spot on” – the old server was a totally customised DNS system and now it’s automated: but it’s still got to interact with my external slave nameservers (all 12 of them!). Fingers crossed – but if my blog disappears for a day, you’ll know what I screwed up (hopefully all my other sites will shortly update). It doesn’t really help that I’m “between registry’s” at the moment 🙁

Snippet: Nooo!!!!!

September 17, 2003
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Nooo!!!! 200,000 MySQL inserts comprising of over 2.16Gb of data won’t work because there’s a single comma missing in the SQL insert statement in every single row… Nooo! I just hope I can rescue the data with a Perl regexp or else I’ll have to wipe out the last 3.5days of work and processing (that’s 24/7 processing by the way: in the last ten days, I’ve downloaded over 5.3Gb of data and already made over 20,190,979 MySQL inserts – and I’ve still got all the above to do: working on project DBC is a lot harder than first expected!)

Personal: Telephone Soliciting

September 16, 2003
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All my personal telephone numbers have been registered with The Telephone Preference Service for some time, but today I received a recorded advertising message which has just p–ed me off. I’ve reported it to TPS and to ICSTIS (the UK regulator of premium rate numbers) with the following message:

On 15th September 2003 at 19.29BST, I received a recorded (female voice) telephone call to my home residential number (that is listed with the Telephone Preference Service).

The message said I had won a £1000 prize award (well, my telephone number had) and that I had to call 0906 638 9992 at £1.50 per minute (call last 7 minutes) to claim the £1000 award. For terms and conditions, I was to see www.moreflights.net (may be incorrect) or write to PO Box 6017, Basingstoke, RG21 4BZ.

It’s bad enough that I was called whilst my number is listed on the TPS, it’s twice as bad that it was a recorded message that had no human operator at the other end, third that I had just got to sleep after an extremely long and hard shift at work, fourthly that it was advertising a premium rate phone number and fifthly that it’s probably a “rip-off/con”!

I hope this company (which failed to give a name, details of where they had got my number – apart from ‘randomly chosen’ or any other identifying information) gets massively fined and shut down!

Weird: Letter Orders

September 14, 2003
3 Comments

Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dosen’t mttaer, the olny thnig thta’s iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry wrod is in the corerct ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.

(and, yep, I mangaed to raed it wthiout any porbelms at all).

Actually, I think it’s slightly more complex than that – if you can “split” a word (such as “manage” and “managed” and “without” and “with out”) then you’ve got to try and preserve the first and last letters in the word split otherwise it just doesn’t “scan” right.

(Lifted from Big Pink Cookie who lifted it from Blogdaddy)