splee.blog

It seems my poor websites all seem to suffer due to my dire choice of hosts. I’ve moved the blog to another host yet again.

My previous host was with Lycos, using their VDS hosting plan. It all went swimmingly for about 2 months before the real cracks in the service showed up.

The main problem, above anything else (even the fact that the servers seem to be unbelievably fragile) is the complete lack of support. The only way to contact the support team is through their forums. I haven’t seen a dev post on those forums for about 3 weeks, and a huge number of customers have been having the same problem for around the same time, including myself.

It’s not even that you can call the support “bad”. For it to be bad there has to be some evidence of support to compare with!

I shopped around and the only service I could find that was close to the same price for similar features was at Linode. I’m a control freak you see, so I need to be able to have root access, but I can’t afford a dedicated server. This puts me at a happy medium.

I’ve now switched half of my websites over to the Linode, with the other (more important) half staying put for the moment as the server seems to be holding it’s own for now. As soon as I’m happy that everything is hunky dory the rest of them will migrate too.

After that it’s a case of getting the email set up correctly. It took me days before hand because I’m using a complicated postfix+courier+mysql setup that is similar to an ISP solution due to the domains I’m hosting. sigh I don’t look forward to setting that up again. :(

Not much to say as I’ve been hard at work and doing very little else. Time is at a premium, but even so, I found this which ate at least 5 minutes of my day today:

My favorite quote from sloganizer: “With a name like Splee, it has to be good.”

I’m in a terrible mood today. I got home all over excited ready to build my new machine. I installed the RAM and then went about installing the new graphics card. This is where things took a turn for the worse. It turns out that there are two types of PCI-Express slot. One has a tiny brown slot and the other is a huge beige one. The ML110 has one of the small brown slots.

Guess which type of slot the Radeon X800 needed?

So, I’ve got to decide what I’m going to do. I’m pretty sure I’m going to ebay the ML110 as I’ll probably get around £500-£600 for it with the 2GB of RAM. From there I’ll buy a new motherboard, processor, case and RAM and build a new machine.

The other option is to stick with the ML110, save some cash and buy the components to compliment my now redundant graphics card. That way I’ll be able to have my cake and eat it too.

Decisions, decisions.

On a slight tangent, I’m thinking about redesigning my site. Only thinking about it mind you, it may be months before anything actually gets done. I’d like a darker site, and It’ll make use of PNG’s. Apologies in advance to any IE people out there, but I’m not going to do all the time consuming javascript/activex hacks to make IE properly render an industry standard image format, so it may look pretty shite to you.

Well, it’s been a year so it’s time for me to upgrade my gaming machine. I’ve done rather well this year in terms of a bargain PC.

About 2 months ago I entered a competition on the HP website to win an HP ML110 for only £99. Well, I won so I contacted the suppliers and, lo and behold, I have a brand new ML110 sitting in my front room right now.

I’ve bought more ram for it so it’s up to 2GB and bought a new PCI-Express ATI Radeon X800 with 256MB VRAM. I’m going to steal the soundcard out of my old machine and I’m set.

So, basically I have the following:

3.2GHz P4 HT 2GB RAM ATI Radeon X800 256MB 80GB SATA HDD Creative Audigy

I can’t wait to put this baby together tonight. I’ll have XP SP2 + Drivers, WoW, PlanetSide and Battlefield2 installed by 10pm I reckon.

I get so excited about things like this. I’m a big old kid really. :D

These three things, while not considered a safe combination, are a lot of fun.

My Uncle has a reasonably large farm house out in the country and we had a family bbq there over the weekend. When I say “family” I don’t just mean my family either. There were about three different families there… my family, my uncle’s current girlfriend’s family and my Mum’s other half’s family.

At first it was like being back at a school disco; this group over here in this corner, that group over there in that corner and the other group in the kitchen, but slowly everyone started socialising and the groups broke up a bit.

The real fun didn’t start until the quad bikes were wheeled out though. Man, those things were fast. I also had a bit of a cruise around the fields on a moped, although that was a lot more of a bumpy ride because the suspension sucked.

All in all, a good time had by everyone.