So when people ask me what I do I give one of several answers depending on who I´m talking to:
- Web Developer (person has some computer knowledge)
- Work with computers (person has recently moved here from the 19th century)
- IT Manager (another manager and I´m trying to be vague)
- Head of IT and Technologies for the Evology Group (trying to impress girls mostly)
But now I´ve given myself another promotion: Health & Safety Officer! It´s mainly cos no-one else wants to do it and we´re getting a work experience student so we need to make sure there´s fire procedures in place and what not. It´s a really boring, stupid job but someones got to do it and I don´t get any more money!
… something gets blown up! Last year I went to France camping for two weeks. We managed to get through the first weekend before I got a phone call saying the building had lost power during a thunder storm and the internet connection had gone down. Back then all internet traffic was routed through the main server and this had lost power and needed to be booted again. Since I´m the only technical person in the company and the Linux box needed the etho interface bringing up so thats why I got a call. After 5 minutes of my boss not being able to log in to the box because the keyboard he was tapping away at wasn´t plugged into anything, it was up again and I was off to the beach.
This week I had another few days off and the last night that I was off we had another thunder storm. The lights flickered a bit in the pub but apart from that I didn´t think that anything would be wrong. Especially now that we have seperate routers, UPSes on the main servers and most things were set to automatically boot up again on a power failure. I got to work though and it turned out we had got a few more lightning problems but all that had happened was a few fuses in the power sockets had blown. They managed to sort this out by the time I got there so I just had to check what had been going on with the automatic invoicing system and get it to run off the ones that were lost when a print server was down.
Next time I want some time off we´re getting a 3 day forcast first.
The isn´t a real post in that I´ve got something to report, it´s just that the blog runs off my own custom code and I´ve made some changes to the backend and need to test it by adding a new post and couldn´t think of anything to put.
On hindsight I could delete this post but now I´ve typed a whole paragraph I don´t want to!
As a small company focusing on starting up new ventures we have to think very hard about marketing and how to contact new customers. Since the new spam laws mean that we can´t just bulk email every email address we come accross then we have to get people to the sites and then get them to opt-in to a mailing list. Generally the only way they would do this if there´s some incentive for them.
In the past we´ve done things like "Win a PC" competitions and suych but it still involves getting people to the sites in the first place either through traditional offline marketing or by getting up the SERPs. This means that I spend a lot of time tweaking code and key words to try and boost of search results placing.
We did have the idea of trying to get people to distribute marketing bumf for us. One way of doing this is to create videos of games that people will want to forward to their friends and include links to our sites in them. Just got to think of a few ideas for Flash games and then figure out a way of getting them from the "fun" sites to our more product orientated sites.
The original Splinter Cell was absolute gold. The second didn´t get the best reviews so I skipped it but the third installment: Chaos Theory is set to be one of the best games of the year. So I´ve downloaded the demo version and installed it. the menu graphics look good but about 2 seconds into the entire thing crashes!
I´ve downloaded the lastest drivers, checked the help forums but no joy. Its definately a graphocs problem since after the crash Windows reverts back to using the built in driver. I´m going to go and half-inch a GeForce 4 card from one of the PCs in the office to replace the Radeon 9200 in it at the moment. If that doesn´t work then it must be the stupid built in graphics. I so want to get this working so I can go and buy the full game!
My server requirements are fairly simplistic compared to some setups as I only use Apache, PHP and MySQL on my actual web servers. All the other stuff like DNS and email are handled by other servers managed by our hosting company. This means that if I keep a copy of the httpd.conf and cron job files then all I need to do is take regular copies of all the web files and the MySQL database store. That way I can get back up and running even if I get a complete hard drive failure within a few hours using the original server image. Sorted.
The only problem is that I want a nice automated set of scripts that will take daily backups of the database, weekly backups of the web files and do it in a completely redundant way.
After a fair bit of messing around I?ve managed to get two identicle Linux boxes that I?m going to use as development servers, one for each of the dedicated servers we?re getting. Using FTP from protected directories and mysqldump run by cron with plenty of error checking and reporting by email. The same thing is done by tar and gzip to the web files. All these files are then copied by a third server onto our windows file server. All these servers perform error checking on each other and if something hasn?t been done then they report it by email. The final stage is to FTP the weekly backup to an offsite backup server which also performs error checking on the main office servers. This way, if something is not working, it gets reported so everything from individual server crashes up to complete power failure or loss of internet connection on one of the sites is flagged up.
Just got to wait for a week or so till we get through the hassle of moving the servers over and then I can test this whole lot.
Its looking pretty definate that Adobe is going to buy out Macromedia and so I´ve started thinking about what this might mean for the various products lines that they have. To be honest I don´t use Adobe desktop software that much since I´m not really a creative/print/publishing type person anyway. As far as image manipulation goes then Fireworks as part of Studio MX does everything I need to do. As far as other Adobe technologies are concerned, PDF is the only one that springs to mind. We use PDFs on a daily basis for automatic generation and printing of invoices from our online ventures, but this is all done by PHP scripts using the PDF specification as opposed to the full version of Acrobat. So when it comes to Adobe any changes they make to their software and technologies won´t bother me at all (the PDF generation is set up and uses PostScript from a Linux server so won´t need to be changed at all.
Macromedia is a different matter though. I have Dreamweaver open 24/7 and also use Flash and Fireworks some times. I like the UI in the current versions and find that the intergrated nature of the products is very handy. They are also very stable on my system (if they aren´t on your tell Macromedia, not me) and make my life a lot easier. My only concern is that if Adobe start messing around with them too much they might end up as the bloated, crash-prone beasts that a lot of Adobe products have become. This would be an absolute nightmare and might make me switch to another platform. Since most of what I do is MySQL and PHP code editing the main benefit of Dreamweaver to me is the code highlighting, code hints for PHP functions and the integrated FTP utility, but if they muck up the product I should be able to find something similar elsewhere.
Flash is a great programme and they are doing great things with it as a server-type platform as well, but I have limited flash knowledge so anything they do that might be of use to us would require learning something new anyway, so this only leaves the question of Fireworks.Since it can be considered a competing product for Illustrator, cances are that one of them will get dropped and I think that it will be Fireworks. This doesn´t bother me too much but hopefully they will take certain aspects from both products, i.e. Fireworks simplicity of use and Illustrators more advanced capabilities. Ah well, I can dream.
On the bright side they should hopefully combine PDF and SWF into a great document format and multimedia/server archtechure. Since M$ are planning something similar with Longhorn then this could be the best thing the companies could do to capture the online and print creative markets. Only time will tell.
Its nice for us who live and work in urban areas and have 4Mb ADSL in the office and 2Mb at home complete with wireless access to make browing the web a breeze. But some poor sods are still stuck in areas where BT hasn´t upgraded the exchanges yet and are stuck on dial-up still. Well there is an answer! A service from Onspeed uses a proxy and compression techniques to increase the speed of your dial-up connection. Some content can be compressed by 50% effectively doubling your connection speed.
The compression techniques work best on text therefore the largest benefits come from standard web pages and email. There are other compression techniques that are used depending on the content being accessed but since jpegs and mpegs are already compressed as part of the file format, you don´t benefit that much. Its therefore best for those users whoo browse the web and use email a lot but if you want to access streaming media and other online multimedia content then its best to wait for adsl.
Check it out and see what you think. It only costs a couple of quid a month so whats the harm.
We went out for lunch on Friday to KFC and after stuffing my face with a nice Fillet Tower Meal I was just resting my head on the table thinking about things while the others were talking about… something. The MD knows me well enough now that means there´s some technical impending doom on the way. It´s also a dead giveaway when he asks me if something is possible and I respond with "Can´t be done".
Anyway, what was bothering me was that a series of sites had started to run slower and slower over the last few weeks. This is mostly becuase they are starting to get more and more hits from search engines, the SEO is kicking in a bit and so the traffic is rising fairly sharply. I´d spent all morning tinkering with the code in the templates and got the PHP execution time down to about half what it was but it hadn´t had much effect on the non-static pages. Only one answer to this – DB overload. There was no way I could optimise the DB queries any more so the only option was an upgrade. Luckily the current hosting package is a "Professional" package on a shared server.
I talked to the boss about it and we decided to upgrade to a dedicated server since the extra cost was worth it. But it got better than that when we looked at the options available. We currently have two "Professional" packages and a "Business" (Pfff.. right) package with the various domains spread accross them. Since there are basically two ´main´ projects (ones that´ll cause high server load) he said I could have two dedicated servers! Ace! We´re now gonna get a nice top of the range server and a mid-range server and spread the load accross them. Plus they´re solely ours so I get root access to them and everything. Sweet, I´m happy!
Just got to go and plan the switch accross without causing more than a few hours of downtime and without losing any database information… Easy Peasy!?!
Well the Xbox 2 is due out sometime before the end of the world (it is Microsoft after all) and there have been leaked reports on the interweb about the specification. These aren´t official so they may change on release or be completely different altogether.
The hardware consists of some juicy goodies such as:
- 3 core PowerPC CPU with each core running at 3.2 GHz. Nice.
- Another custom ATI graphics chip running at 500 MHz with a load of embedded RAM to increase performance.
- Half a Gig of fast high bandwidth RAM
- Dolby 5.1 Audio
- Extras such as Wi-Fi ready, removable hdd, 4 wireless controllers
There´s also mention of the various online and offline features but these are a bit vague until Microsoft releases more information. There´s also no info on things such as OS. It´s fairly certain that it won´t be backwards compatible either, but, oh well.