Category: Life: Work and Techy

Well, it looks like i’m already pushing my new computer to its limits and I need to consider upgrading it’s Kb storage capacity. To think my first computer – a ZX Spectrum – had just 48Kb of RAM which lasted my father and I for 5 years and then my dear old BBC B with its 32Kb of RAM which lasted me over 6years, it makes it seem a bit funny that my new wizz-bang 261,124Kb (or 256Mb if you prefer) machine needs upgrading within a month of its purchase…

And the cost! For a DDR 333 RAM (which I need for my 533Mhz FSB P4 Dell) 512Mb DIMM will cost me a further £87.77 (excluding £9.40 delivery charge) – that’s one tenth of the price of the whole unit I originally purchased!

The price of RAM is bound to go down over time, but can I really put up with the…annoy…ing.. pauses that long?

Since I started my new job on the 15^th of January as a search engine optimiser, we had been residing in an office suite around 30 minutes walk away from me and a bit closer to Leicester city centre. However, since it was beginning to get a bit crowded – there’s my boss, MSSC (my sweet shy co-worker), BRCW (bike riding co-worker) and myself in an office around 15ft by 10ft – add into the fact there’s desks, computers and whatnots: then it’s pretty crowded – plus the business centre we had our suite in was, to put it politely, not too well maintained and cleaned.

Anyway, my boss managed to find us this much larger office (around 25minutes walk away from my house – but in the opposite direction) and we booked the move for the 1^st of April. It had been nice and sunny the past few days – but, wouldn’t you guess it, on April Fools Day it decided to rain like anybodies business! The move still went ahead (after all, we had a moving van and everything booked), and we managed to be back up and running by 1pm: not too bad (that includes moving all the furniture, reconnecting the computers and getting the internet connection up and running). The new offices are extremely nice, spacious, warm and quiet and I think we all like it there.

Yes! I should be able to get back to normal blogging and stuff shortly – I’ve now finished setting up my brand new computer! Yep, I splashed out £880.80 on a brand spanking new machine last week and it was delivered at 8.10am on Wednesday (whilst I was in my dressing gown). I spent Wednesday night setting it up, Thursday cleaning the house, Friday sleeping and Saturday making a voyage of discovery…

Before I jump the shark (wheee!), I may also well be an “ultimate geek” and list the spec. of the new machine. It’s a Dell Dimension 4550 mini-tower machine with a 2.5Ghz Intel Pentium 4 (dah-dah-dah-ding!) processor and 256Mb RAM: complete with a 10/100 NIC, NEC DVD+RW drive (yep, it’s a DVD writer!), 64Mb NVIDIA GeForce Graphics card, 60Gb IDE hard drive, 17″ monitor, 6 USB ports, in built 56K modem and a nifty ball-less scrollwheel mouse.

Software wise, it came with Windows XP Home Edition and some other stuff (such as MS Works). For the time being at least, I’m keeping Win XP on this machine until I decide what I’m doing with my old machine: but I’ve installed Office 2000, ZoneAlarm, Symantec Anti-virus, Digiguide, EditPlus, Mailwasher Pro, Adobe Photoshop and all the other software I had on my old machine.

Aren’t I worried about breaching the “one machine/one license” rule? Nope. Because as soon as I had installed the essentials and upgraded Windows XP (it had nearly 40 critical updates to install), I “downed” my old machine (just as it was beginning to make funny noises)…

I’ve recently got my own Nominet “tag” so that I can register my very own .uk domain names with the registry body. Ok, my employer has their own Nominet tag as well – but since they are now a member of Nominet they can register domain names at a cost of around £5 instead of £80 I’ve got to fork out if I want to register one (yep, you get a £75 discount PER DOMAIN if you are a member of Nominet – tag holders get no discount).

Anyway, I’ve got to put in place a mechanism so that the registration of domain names via Nominet is quick, simple and automated. Sounds easy – after all, Nominet do have a nice Automaton that you can interface with via email. Ok – it’s not perfect (as it isvia email instead of one of the many many other protocols such as SOAP with XML that could be used for ‘instantaneous’ results) but at least it’s automated…

Alas – there’s a catch. To confirm the authenticity of each request, every email to the Nominet Automaton has to be PGP signed. And can I get a nice automated PGP signing system running? Nope. There’s nothing on the internet I can find to do the entire DNS management system for us (you’d think that of all the hundreds of companies that use Nominet at least one of them would have released some sort of code!) – nor can I get our servers to play nicely. I just want to use either Perl or PHP (I’m not fussy which!) to generate a nice templated email that has the appropriate PGP signature (either generated using Perl or PHP modules or even forking off and using GPG to sign it) and emailing it off to Nominet. Not too hard is it? Why am I having so much trouble though? PHP manages to save the pre-signed file to the temp storage area alright, but then GnuPG (GPG) refuses to either encrypt it or store the output – but it works all right from the command line. Perl – practically like wise. I’ve tried using Benjamin Trott’s OpenPGP module (yep, Ben Trott of MovableType fame) – it’s installed nicely on the server and I can run it as root. Go back to “standard user permissions” and Perl (and the Linux filing system) denies all knowledge that the module even exists!

Does ANY ONE have either a Nominet aware (or other registry – I can adapt it) domain name registration system that I/we can use that’s capable of sending the appropriate emails to Nominet? Or has someone got a bit more experience with using PGP/GPG (GPG being the Gnu PGP variant without certain patent-involving code) on a RedHat Linux (ideally in a “shared server” environment) system that can offer some advice?

I’m going to try and see if I can reverse-engineer Ben’s Stamp application at some point over the next few days to see if I can get any ideas – but third party contributions are more than welcome! I would have thought Nominet themselves would have at least provided a “basic toolkit” to their members – but alas, nope 🙁 And s–ds law dictates just as I finish writing a system from scratch, Nominet will implement the domain registration system using SSL HTTP SOAP…

For the last week and a bit, along with all my many other work duties, I’ve been constructing a new website for the company I work for. Nothing too amazing about that – I’ve already lost count of the number of websites I’ve built (I can only just remember the domain names for sites that I personally own!), but this is the first time I’m using Flash .

Yep, the “nearly-the-spawn- of-Satan-if- Frontpage -and-Dreamweaver -didn’t-get-there first” web coding thingy. Search engine unfriendly, dial up access unfriendly and bloated like hell. Yuck! Oh well, I just make the sites to “the client specification” and it’s just my luck that in this case the client is my own boss 🙂 If he wants a Flash driven website, then a Flash driven website he gets…

Actually, whilst SWiSH (the program I’m using to make the Flash movie/site) is quite easy to use (the website is already quite nifty looking and does everything it needs to do), it doesn’t seem that “stable”. I some how managed to crash it around 6 times in 20 minutes just by amending parts of the movie. Blarg.