Fun and Games.

13:10.15 - Wednesday 9th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Oh boy, what a mad couple of days.

Remember how I said Demon were really cool about moving domain names away from their servers and everything? Well they still are, but NTL's DNS/Proxy/Cache thing stepped in during the move to our server and sent me on a wild goose chase trying to sort out the problems. Seems everybody else saw the DNS changes as intended, but NTL decided I personally (and others in my area, presumably) would have to suffer a game of DNS ping-pong as they served my up a site at random from the old location and the new one. Thanks guys!

Part of the reason for the move was so that we could add an ASP-based stats package to the website, but I'd never really liked the existing one, and the limiting of cookies across domains meant that only a site-based counter solution, as opposed to a 3rd-party-site-based thing, would work 100%. I sat down yesterday evening and rewrote the existing counter subsite from scratch with the following requirements in mind:

1. It should be self-contained in it's own folder.
2. It must not use .htaccess protection.
3. It should use DBase files (until a PHP/MySQL one appears).
4. It should look nice and be W3C compliant.

The end result actually looks nice, works, and meets all of the requirements I had in mind, plus it's completely text-based aside from the initial web-bug image, and so loads fairly quickly into the bargain. I finally finished the rewrite at around midnight and plonked it online, only to find a stupid, stupid little bug this morning that stopped the entire thing from recording new visitors. Heh.

Anyway, it's fixed, it's working and it's online. I plan to add to the functionality as I go along and I'll give it version numbers and other crap like that. I ordered a PHP/MySQL book the other day which ought to be here fairly soon, so a PHP version might be in the pipeline before long. We'll see.

Hardware Hell

13:44.12 - Wednesday 9th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Another minor cause for concern over the past couple of days was a friend's computer which suddenly died. It appears the PSU popped, which isn't too bad normally, but on this occasion it took the mainboard and everything connected to it bar the drives. Mobo, CPU and Memory, das ist kaput. A friend said he tried the Gfx card and it worked, but I get nothing.

To keep the cost low, and to get them back up and running and online as quickly as possible, I've opted for an ECS K7SOM with onboard Duron 1.4, VGA, Sound and Lan. I think it's even got a modem. I've also plumped for 256MB of DDR where they had 128MB PC133 previously. Total cost for a complete 'guts' replacement comes to about £85, which makes me wonder how much it would cost to build a system using these bits. Some investigation is in order, I feel.

Real-life Robots.

15:41.40 - Wednesday 9th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Here's something you don't see everyday...