Category: Life: Work and Techy

As the orders on the hosting side of work have been down the last fortnight, we’ve decided to take action and revamp one of our two web site hosting sites.

Well, I’ve ended up revamping it as the version done by a co-worker wasn’t quite -erm- I’m not sure, it just didn’t have the “umpf” factor. Anyway, after 10 hours of work I’ve completed it. It’s 95% CSS, XHTML Transitional and it looks quite good (in Internet Explorer and Mozilla!). It was a bit difficult getting things just right due to the various bugs in Internet Explorer: whenever you design a website, remember the following:

Put the DOCTYPE in the page FIRST! If you don’t have one in, Internet Explorer runs in “buggy” mode, put one in and it then changes the rendering model to be closer to the standard as used by Mozilla – but it’ll change how the site looks.

Be careful of “Float”. I’ve used the CSS float: setting to get some of the page positioning just right, but depending if it’s used or not effects how the elements render on the page (adding it double the size of some of the menus I was using it one). Totally unexpected, and probably another Internet Explorer bug.

Page sizes differ in browsers. I’ve set the width of the “main section” of the page to 100%: in Internet Explorer, it looks good and it fills 100% of the browser window (as expected). In Mozilla, however, it seems to fill 101% so you’ve got a very very tiny horizontal scroll area.

DIV and SPAN are different. Yeah, yeah – use “DIV” for divisions of the page (it automatically inserts linebreaks) and use SPAN for “inline” sections. However, the differences go deeper then that – the “width” setting doesn’t seem to work correctly on Spans and there are a few other differences.

Oh well, it’s all done now and I’ve sent the URL of the test site to my co-workers for their comments: fingers crossed!

Ever had to block “free” email address domains (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Mail.com etc) but couldn’t find a source of the domains used? Well, since I needed to do a very similar thing – I managed to get a little list compiled: it’s only got 12,302 domains on it, so it’s not too comprehensive yet and it doesn’t really cope well with the “free subdomains” systems (you know the anything@yourname.example.com style free addresses), but it’s a start.

If anybody has any more contributions to the list, please feel free to add them as a comment – or, if you’ve got a really long list and don’t want to bother merging them/checking them against the list here – just leave a quick note and I’ll contact you about it.

(For those of you reading just the “summary” of this post – you’ll have to read the full article for the long list of domains):

Despite our disaster recovery system operating correctly when a transformer next to our datacentre blew up (UPS kicked in straight away, followed by the generators and additional generators were on site whilst we waited nearly a week for a new transformer to be installed: all the time running on generator power), it seems that we’ve been “bitten on the a–” anyway.

Basically, servers hosted in our 3—-.net datacentre area (aka “Server farm 1”) have been suffering major problems recently ever since we upgraded to the new Ensim Pro control panel. We suspect the additional load Ensim Pro caused on the server resulted in the servers hitting unexpected high usage (Ensim Pro seems to take up around 10x as much resources: but don’t quote me on that figure), so the servers have been shutting down to preserve data integrity (a bit like the way a human body faints or falls into a coma if something is wrong) and the associated downtime this causes for customers and the amount of stress we get (if you’ve ever been woken up at 2am by your mobile phone dancing off the desk as another text message comes in to tell you “Datacentre down” you’ll know what I mean).

So we’ve rushed 2 more datacentres online and started moving customers off the affected datacentre to the new ones with the intention that once the datacentre has been massively reduced in load we’ll be able to do some proper investigation on it (small snippet of information: none of our data centres are even touching 1/20th of the available bandwidth to them!).

However…

Well, it looks like my internet activities will be restricted until tomorrow morning. Why? Well, since 1.30pm today I’ve been unable to use my main ADSL connection and had to resort to 56k dialup via my backup ISP supplier (actually myself: I can’t actually sell ADSL access myself only standard dialup, but I need ADSL access… don’t ask: it’s complicated!). However, my ADSL supplier has just made the following announcement (my amendments are in italic):

ADSL customers on pipe anchor-r26a (that includes myself) are reporting routing difficulties. Web sites may be slow or unavailable (routing issues actually affect web, email, SSH, FTP etc access and it’s so bad I can’t even “finger” or “ping” one of the ISPs main routers). Another licensed operator (actually BT: I believe for legal reasons my ISP have got to refer to BT Wholesale – who provide the ADSL links from the exchange – as “another licensed operator”) has identified the cause and, as a result, shall be completing emergency maintenance at midnight tonight to rectify the problem (i.e. I’m stuck on dialup access until gone midnight)

Bummer. Especially with an update to Guess That Movie being due, “end of month” statistics due for update (yep, it’s the first of June) AND I’m having to redownload Apple Quicktime. Not fun 🙁

Just a quick update on the RAM shortage I blogged about earlier.

For a while at work, we’ve had a massive 1Gb of RAM just “sitting around” the office: we came across it in the office move, but it isn’t compatible with any of our work machines so it had just been looking for a home. My boss tried it in his home machine, but it wasn’t compatible, so I decided to try it in my new Dell… 200Mhz DDR RAM won’t work in a 333Mhz FBR bus DDR requiring machine. Drat and double drat.

So I’ve been forced to actually get out my credit card (yet again) and purchase some RAM…. I managed to get a 333Mhz FBR suitable 512Mb DRAM SIMM thingy (hey, I’ve given up trying to remember how many different types of RAM there are) for a total of £89.41 from PCUpgrader and hopefully it should be arriving tomorrow or Friday. And boy do I need it! 256Mb RAM running Windows XP, Digiguide, Norton Antivirus, ZoneAlarm Pro, Mailwasher, MySQL, Apache, PGP, EditPlus, various drivers for the display, ADSL modem, printer, dual cameras, and Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer doesn’t go too far.

It seems odd that now I’ve having to upgrade up from a quarter of a gigabyte of memory as it “isn’t enough”, when just over 10 years ago I was happy with just 32Kb of RAM and floppy discs which could store a maximum of 400K of data (double sided, double density 5¼ floppies!). And has my “productivity level” really increased? Hmmm….