Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 117 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Snippet: Server Failure

September 18, 2003

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

Personal: Telephone Soliciting

September 16, 2003

473 Comments

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)

Personal: Life Update

September 10, 2003

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Well, it seems I’ve managed to sort out that data parser I was working on – it finished its first successful run at 2.34am this morning. However, I was just falling asleep before it completed as I’ve just been too tired to do much (amount of code added to the parser since last week: 6 lines of regexp’s – number of runs to attempt to parse the data – I’ve lost count!).

So now I’ve got 1Gb of SQL statements that I’ve got to load into a database whilst combining at least another 85Mb of unstructured data to it. Then I’ve got to parse out HTML/PHP pages which has dynamic remote XML/SOAP parsing systems with cachability whilst ensuring the whole database can be searched – and then I’ve got to work on stage two which is “data expansion” as then I’ll have enough data to seed the new system which will use the dynamic SOAP system to capture even more data whilst another system spiders a few items. It’s hard work (even the theoretical planning and timeframes a beast), but hopefully I’ve have a helluva good system by the month end if I can actually get time to work on it.

Why don’t I devote more time to it? Well, let’s just say this – I’ve been at work 3 days so far this week and yet I’ve spent so long in the office I’ve already done 4 days work if you count the hours (Monday was systems upgrades and hardware modifications to the sales machines, Tuesday was finishing off the coding for a dynamic employment site along with finalising some bits with two new billing systems/CRM systems I’ve written, today was “manual labour” – move lots of stuff half way across the building and up a floor and then totally rearrange and rewire the office). And tonight I need an early night as I’m going “preliminary job hunting” tomorrow.