what's news today
See what was news back in:
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
More "under-the-hood" maintenance, this time simplifying my anti-bandwidth leeching code.
Lots of "under-the-hood" maintenance, mostly relating to database access.
A visitor to the site got in touch with me recently to ask how things are going with the hosting, since I moved from SupaNames to LiquidSix back in February.
Well I'm pleased to report that everything's going very well with the new hosting. I have two sites hosted with LiquidSix, and I experience next to no problems each month, despite receiving a fair amount of traffic. I get the occasional database connection error, perhaps one a month, but that's acceptable. As you can read in my rant elsewhere, while at SupaNames I was experiencing a huge number of database connection errors each month, and a shocking amount of site downtime too.
I have had to contact LiquidSix support on a couple of occasions, and I can honestly say I've experienced nothing but excellent service. Responses have always been prompt, polite, and more importantly, well informed. I put some of this down to the fact that LiquidSix are a comparatively small host, and are therefore able to give a little more resource to individual customer queries. That doesn't excuse the big boys however - just because a company is large, it's no reason for poor customer service. I guess as a company gets bigger and more successful it sometimes gets greedy, and customer support is an easy place to cut corners (and costs).
Anyway, I digress. Short answer - LiquidSix have been a great host these past 9 months, and they've certainly got my business secured for the foreseeable future.
If I'm trying to view a large PDF document, or a video file, I'd much rather download the file to my hard drive first, rather than have Adobe Acrobat Reader or Windows Media Player try and open/download the file for me, with clumsy caching, and in some cases the inability to save a local copy to my hard drive should I want to.
So it's annoying when you have the URL of a file, but no actual link, so you can't right-click "Save as..." in the browser. This can happen when you've been emailed a link in plain text, or if you're trying to browse to a link from another application (in my case I was trying to browse to a PDF from within Microsoft Visual Studio). In such cases you copy and paste the URL into your browser's address bar, only to have the associated application try and open the file, as described above. It's not the end of the world, but it annoys me approximately once a month, and that's once too often for my tastes!
Today I wrote a simple tool, the Download Link Generator. This tool will allow you to copy and paste the URL of the file you'd like to download, and generate a regular HTML hyperlink, which you can then right-click and "Save as..." as usual.
It's not exactly rocket science, but it saves me getting annoyed now and then - I hope some of you find it useful too.
Last month I finally made some real money as a direct result of this website - I was contacted by a company to write a customised version of the Salary Timer, that they wanted to make available for download to their customers. They wanted a couple of fairly trivial changes, such as adding their logo to the main screen, and a link to their website from the "About" box. They also wanted to rename the "Poo Timer" to something a little less controversial - chickens ;o)
I won't say exactly how much they paid, but it certainly covered all the hosting costs for this site since it went live in 2002, with plenty of change left over to keep things rolling for many years to come. Of course it doesn't come close to reimbursing me for the countless hours I've spent writing software such as the Salary Timer in the first place, or the hours I put in updating and maintaining this website, but then I never intended making any money from this "MrCeri" lark, it was only ever supposed to be a bit of fun. Still, it's nice to finally get a little payback for my efforts, even if it's only to cover my costs.
I should point out that I'm happy to repeat the exercise, so if anyone out there is interested in their own customised version of any of my work, please let me know!
Minor update to my Links page.
Mike Shegog pointed out to me that my Simple Encrypt program was broken in a major way. The original code was about 4 years old, and after a quick review I decided it wasn't worth salvaging. I have therefore removed the program from my site, but if you desperately need a copy, please contact me.
As an aside, I've been using TrueCrypt now for about a year, and I'm finding it an excellent encryption solution. Highly recommended.
Earlier this month I mentioned the problem of bandwidth leeching. I thought it might be useful to write an article describing the issue in more detail, and offer a summary of the various anti-leeching techniques available.
Click here to read the article...
I don't really feel that strongly about the issue of bandwidth leeching (or "leaching" - take your pick), mainly because this site doesn't really get an awful lot of traffic, and I'm always well within my bandwidth allowance each month (oohh, poor me!).
A certain percentage of my bandwidth is leeched each month however, by people linking directly to images on my site. When people are giving MrCeri the major kudos I so deserve, I simply wave, "carry on good Sir, leech away!". But when they are re-using my images for their own evil gains, without an appreciative nod in my direction, I shake my head in despair at how low society has fallen.
It's fun once in a while to try and come up with strategies to prevent people nicking images off your site, and by extension pilfering your bandwidth. There's no real way of course to protect either at the end of the day - there's always "Alt-Print Screen" for the images, and as for bandwidth, there's always Slashdot :o) Still, it's not hard to come up with strategies to thwart 95% of your visitors.
So this month I've started tinkering with some of my worst affected images, not really to save bandwidth, but just to restore a little credit where credit's due ;o)
For example: someone linked to the image on my homescreen:
They now get:
Yes, it's very childish I know, but that's the internet for you!
Updated Salary Timer for 2006-07 UK financial year.
Updated Raise Calculator and Tax Calculator for 2006-07 UK financial year.
Fixed a stupid bug that got introduced as part of the hosting transfer, where "£" signs started being displayed as "$".
Any time I've had to tinker with mrceri.co.uk this month has been spent sorting out the hosting transfer from Supanames to LiquidSix. The site's been live on LiquidSix for over a month now, and so far, so good; I've had none of the problems I was getting with Supanames. Fingers crossed it stays that way...
After an increasing number of increasingly annoying problems with my web hosting company, "Supanames", I decided it was time to stop complaining, and vote with my feet. So this month I've moved hosting to another provider. Click here to read all the boring details of the saga...
I'm a great fan of long sentences, that ramble along full of commas, semi-colons, and other assorted punctuational goodness. I was therefore most pleased to stumble upon this little beauty when I started reading Iain M. Banks' latest sci-fi offering, "The Algebraist":
"The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punchball."
Now that's a sentence to be proud of!
