leyton.org

Well, it’s now a done deal. A little over a week ago last Saturday, Frances and I finally (after 8 years together) tied the knot, and got married. We were in a beautiful setting in the Trossachs, with (thankfully) wonderful weather, and surrounded by friends and family. We really couldn’t have asked for a better day.

We got back from our honeymoon on Sunday evening, which involved a few nights over in North Berwick, and then a short break to Iceland. Because they’re on my camera, a quick selection of snaps from our Iceland break are available on flickr, and I’ll be writing a bit more about that at a later date. It really was a wonderful break, and a wonderful place, but redefined the word expensive. And I thought I’d gone prepared, and had currency fluctuations on my side…

I’m in the process of getting thoughts and pictures together from the last few weeks, but as we’re back to work now, it’s going to take a little while to do. Details will also appear on our wedding website richardandfrances.com.

One item that I was really quite keen to post up was the wedding cake topper we had made. We’d kept it as a secret from everybody until the day, when it took pride of place on top of our cake. Frances did the hard work of hunting out the style we wanted, and eventually we settled on Lily Tsai. We really wanted a ‘life like’ look, having seen something similar at a wedding last year, rather than the ‘characters’ that were offered by many in the UK. We had an amusing evening taking close up pictures of faces and the pose/setup that we wanted was all part of the fun. And Frances enlisted a shop assistant to get a picture of her in her dress. Pictures of this were kept away from me, and even when the topper arrived, she kept her dress covered up, so I didn’t even see it myself until after we were married!

So Frances is shown in her wedding dress, with rose and thistle bouqet, stood atop a C++ and SQL programming book to get her up the same height as me. I’m in my wedding outfit, but with running shorts and shoes, clutching a pint of Deuchars (That part of the pose shot was the really tough part). Unfortunately it went a bit pink in the manufacturing process. Behind me is an Apple Mac laptop. The screen has a ‘root #>’ prompt (which is, I assure you, a riotously funny computer joke)

We’re delighted by the result, and it’s got pride of place in a cabinet in our front room. A lasting memento of the day. The picture also has Frances’ bouquet to the left, and one of Frances’s family buttonholes. Her family wore thistles, me and my side wore roses.

Plenty more detail about the wedding in the coming weeks.

A bit of a ‘meta post’ this one. I’ve been doing some tweaking and fiddling to the website over the last few days. Primarily this means there are some new ‘Chicklets’ and items in the sidebar that may be worth a browse. I wanted to just put a short post together explaining what they are, as they may not be obvious to most folk (especially all you RSS readers…)

• Daily Roundup - This is a trial run for Matt Wardman’s daily weblog roundup. There’s a link below it to the textual version, and feed/podcast subscription buttons, and I’d encourage folk to give it a shot as Matt’s putting in a lot of effort.

• Britblog link and “the brown bar” - There are two links to the britblog.com website. The ‘brown bar’ is a ‘popularity’ guage, and seems to mean this website is in the top twenty (it’s currently #16 on the associated technoranki website), but doesn’t have a title since I changed the main leyton.org landing page to a static HTML page). It’s largely self-selecting, so I don’t think it holds much water that my website is that popular. Especially given the amount of transitory search engine traffic I get..

• The Blogflux ‘BF’ mapstats is a link to see where visitors are coming from.

• The ‘Blog Top Sites’ widget is another ranking service. I’ve just added the counter, so it’ll be interesting to see where it comes in the various categories I’ve added myself.

• MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers is next, and is an interesting ‘website community’ tracker. A useful way of seeing who’s reading what websites, but I just wish they had a smaller widget…

• #1 Top Scottish Website? Me? Again, it’s self-selecting, and I imagine if Celtic or Rangers put the widget on their sites, I’d soon lose that position….

• I’ve also recently moved the RSS feed over to the service at feedburner which means subscribers get a few ‘extra’ items, including my interesting links and a few of my flickr uploads (when they happen). There are some other benefits, including a ‘e-mail subscription’, so you lucky people get a nice e-mail if I post something - particularly useful if you don’t bother with RSS feeds (I’d suggest it’s worth your while).

Traffic to the website continues to grow, and it’s both fascinating and terrifying to think so many people - many of whom I’ve never met - read what I write. Whilst I don’t post as regularly as I’d like, and not necessarily to everybody’s taste, I still hope it’s of interest. The frequency I certainly hope to improve… I also hope that some of the widgets, features and changes here are of use/interest. If there is anything people like or don’t like about what I’ve done or changed, I’m all ears. Suggestions are always welcome.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Why not go give them a hug, or at least a handshake and pat on the back.

Who’re they, I can hear some people saying? Well, for a start it’s what I do for a living, and I like hugs. Well, ok, firm handshakes out of preference.

We’re the folk most people only think of when there’s a problem with their computer, network, printer, database, phone, photocopier, fax machine or practically any other electrical device you might use during your office working life. We’re the folk who then come over and fix it, or at least snarl at you because you didn’t realise that running out of paper isn’t really a problem. We’re also the folk that get called out at 3am to fix a critical production issue so you can do your job properly the next day. Chances are you were sleeping like a log right then.

So, because you only generally only deal with us when there is a problem, we’re often only associated with problems. That really starts to wear thin after a while, as it ignores all the hard work we do to prevent problems happening in the first place, and to ensure all the technology we deal with does it’s job properly.

So, if you’re in an office today, why not break with tradition, and go and find your systems administrator, and say thanks? Buy them a donut, an amazon voucher, a beer, or just refill the photocopier paper tray by yourself just this once?

Because we’re system administrators, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to be loved!

Well at least slightly appreciated, just once in a year

http://www.sysadminday.com

Well I’ve decided that, as my day job is a Systems Administrator, and that my various domains are costing a fair bit to host, I’m as well to secure a dedicated server in a managed data centre, and set things up ideally for my purposes. Not least for leyton.org, but also for places such as theorypractice.org, and leytonconsulting.co.uk. It’ll also enable me to install some software for a business idea I’m playing with (more on that in due course), that requires a more complex environment than most hosts offer.

This will enable me to setup a few services that are impossible to do now, including proper mailing software for labtastic.org, although the wordpress mailing gateway hack is working quite well.

I’ve also a few friends interested in joining in. Whilst I couldn’t necessarily host for free, I’m hoping that I might be able to offer hosting for friends for, at most, the same cost they’re paying now, probably less, but with better services and flexibility than now.

So, if you’re interested in shifting whatever domain you might have, and don’t mind making the assumption that I know what I’m doing, feel free to get in touch.

I’m not a fan of Desperate Housewives, so I generally crank up the computer and do some weblog fiddling when it’s on. Last week, I took the plunge and upgraded Labtastic to Wordpress 2.0, as it was badly broken anyway, and it seemed like a good starting point to explore this new release.

This week, as the machinations of those American Housewives continues, I figured I’d do it for real. So Techie Musings has been upgraded as of a couple of minutes ago, and I’m about to tackle my diary (which forms the foundation of leyton.org).

Let me know if you experience any weirdness! Also, look out for some new ‘features’ I’m hoping to add to the website!

A useful mug at last!. Handy for both reference purposes AND caffeine containment purposes! (via boingboing)

BBC Backstage has launched, which enables people to make use of BBC content in innovative ways via their newly published API’s. There are some excellent ideas already. That the BBC is taking such a step is remarkable, and I’m sure it’ll result in even better uses for the already world-leading content they make available. (via /. )

It’s really a point of principle, rather than anything else. I have to fork out a chunk of money each year for hosting leyton.org, and part of that is to cover the bandwidth that is used. Whilst XCalibre are cheap for the UK, in the grand scheme of things I’m seeing better offers out there, and am starting to look around for another hosting provider, particularly one which offers a better deal regarding MySQL databases (the 5Mb quota per “instance” purchased or included in the package is to be perfectly frank, pathetic, especially given the otherwise generous quotas).

The principle I’m complaining about is the particularly loathsome habit on the part of the weblog spammers of referrer log spamming. This is where they are trying to get their websites mentioned on referrer pages, ie. weblogs which show where people have visited from. This is so easy to spam simply by writing a tool which fetches weblog pages repeatedly with their site in the referrer field. At first I thought it was harmless, but when you add up the sheer number of pages they fetch it really gets quite scary. It also polluted the count of how many people visit my website (at least until I installed a cookie based system, which they don’t affect). Out of the thousands of pages that are fetched each day from this site, only a quarter to a third are actually genuine people. The rest are spammers with entirely suspicious URL’s in the referrer field. This is a waste of my money, and I don’t like other people wasting what is mine.

I’m used to spammers trying their loathsome tricks to publicise entirely awful websites, be it porn, poker or goodness knows what else. I’ve measures in place to battle it and make the tiresome task of deleting it a little easier. But it’s the fact that they’re sucking my bandwidth away for absolutely no good reason that bugs me. I don’t even publish referrer details!

A spot of googling turned up some serious .htaccess toolset to at least cut the basic referrer log spammers which I’ve deployed which has - so far - cut things down quite substantially:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer dodgyurl.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer somethingelsedodgy.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer holdem spammer=yes
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer

The risk of course is that it’s only a matter of time before they change the URL’s, so I’ll be in a never ending battle which I have no hope of winning. But at least it’s a start. I’m also benefiting somewhat from the recent move to Wordpress. The spammers don’t seem to have realised that the posts to my old movable type installation are no longer valid. But seeing old posts to an old php calendar system I put up (and took down) over a year ago are still coming in, I suppose they’ll keep at the old URL’s for quite some time. Still, at least I’m getting what I think is a well-earned break from the task of deleting spam, and have managed to bring it under control at least in the short term.

Well, after battling away most of the day with various idiosyncrasies and not a few misunderstandings on my part, I’ve finally managed to complete my migration from movabletype to wordpress.

I’ve setup two separate installations, one for my personal thoughts and opinions, and another for this technically oriented one. There are .htaccess rewrite rules in place to redirect google searches across to the new (better) naming structure, and some neat-o plugins have been activated to make finding the information much easier.

I’ve rejigged the front page, bringing it into the standard “look and feel” of the theme I’m using (just the default one at the moment, with a few customisations). Only non-trivial item was getting my head around templates and plugins, so that I could pull data from third party sources (as techie musings is, technically, to the template that’s managing the front page), and then rejigging the tables so they didn’t horribly screw everything up.

I’m certainly thinking things are looking a lot crisper and cleaner, not to say a little more sprightly, following the changes. Of course I now have to worry about mySQL quotas being exceeded, but three years of weblog postings only eating 2.5Mb gives me some cause for optimism.

I’ll be working on things a bit more in the next few days, to sort out the various xml feeds, ping services and so on, but in the meantime, please drop me an e-mail or message if things are really badly broken in some way.

I’m so fed up of battling spam, sitting waiting for rebuilds, and all sorts of other hassles that other MovableType users might recognise, that I’m finally giving up and moving over to WordPress.

So big changes are afoot here at leyton.org. Watch this space, as the site is tweaked. There’s a lot of background work necessary to make sure that search engines, links in and feeds are all unaffected. Watch this space, but any comments appreciated in the meantime.