Steve @ Service: Heads up

Oops! A holiday and an outage

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:05:49 GMT

Sorry about the past week. I've been to Welsh Wales where connectivity is poor for me. (I like it this way.) And the usual text notifications to tell me all's not well didn't materialise, since we were up, though not enough.

We actually crashed over 4,000s time in the pace of a few days.

I didn't know till a customer called, and I was able to remotely fix the issue within a half hour.

I've just moved houses too, and with a new number, not everybody was able to call.

Mistakes and problems pile up on each other to give us such a long outage.

My new number is: 0800 756 6722

Warning to abusive football bloggers

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:53:18 GMT

Warning to abusive bloggers as judge tells site to reveal names: "The judge ordered that three fans whose postings might "reasonably be understood to allege greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour", should be unmasked. "

Another spam attack

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:54:28 GMT

Poor old Black Country Villian. He's been attacked by a message spammer. Comment, member and trackback we've dealt with before. Message spam is a little different, since they need to join up, then post messages. It wasn't just him my site had a few too, and one of my school sites, they joined but backed off sending the nasty spam. Perhaps they had a conscience.

But, since when a new member joins, we get an email notification, and in there a link, so you can delete the member and all their messages, it was easy to wipe them off, see the very satisfying screen off BCV below. However, this didn't stop them re joining and posting another flurry.

So, I've created a script, as tight as the comment checking, which looks for nasty words and doesn't allow the posting of messages containing such pornographic words.

But, as I've come to realise, this isn't the end. They'll try again, and again. Each time, as I operate a zero tolerance of spam, I'll delete, and figure some heuristics to stop further exploitations.

N70 does mp4

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:49:51 GMT

I'm blown away! I've had my beloved N70 for 15 months, and I never knew that it could shoot such good quality. Previously it would only take one minute of low, low quality .3gp, which was meant for sending to other mobiles as a MMS.

The mp4 is:

15 frames per second
352 x 288 pixels

Which isn't bad at all. 30fps and 640 x 480px is obviously much better. Still, I've ordered a 2Gb RS MMS disk for it at £25 including postage. Now, I'll be able to put lots of music and record many, many magic moments from my children's lives.

Here's a sample of my two children Opening presents on Christmas Day 2. (Watch out my Mam's in her dressing gown ;-)

Next on the to-do list is to email these videos from my mobile, into my blog(s) and grab the first frame as a thumb.

My school blog

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 10:46:28 GMT

Need to point to my other business Walsall School Blogs. My old, old blog too. And oddly some fashion advice. More updates coming from Christmas 2, the Aberdare version, as it happens, during the weekend.

Tea drinker from hell

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 09:28:35 GMT

BBC: Tea 'healthier' drink than water: "Drinking three or more cups of tea a day is as good for you as drinking plenty of water and may even have extra health benefits"

I'm a 4 or 5 cups a day man. I'm going to live forever.

Fear not

Mon, 01 May 2006 11:31:24 GMT

One or two of you, are getting trackback emails! These are primarily spammers getting through my defences. In this war there is going to be collateral damage. It's the nature of war.

If you do get a trackback spam email. Please ignore it and soldier on. You need take no other action.

The troops in the frontline will recieve a BCC and use it to block similar TB spams and destroy the ones that get through.

Google and traffic

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:57:45 GMT

I'm going to add Google Adsense to these blogs. Starting with mine. Currently, I'm only showing Public Service Ads, but apparently, once Google's spidered this site, I'll be showing proper ads. I'll then add them to all Blogs on this machine.

Since we're serving about 20-30,000 pages a day, I should get some small monthly revenue to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. I hope none of the blogfootball crew will mind about this, I'm sure you won't

Have a look at the traffic, most read yesterday and most read all time. I'm going to be keeping a better eye on the traffic, much of it is spam in some form or another. I reckon 50% of traffic is spam. Unbelievable? Yes.

In days gone by, I was complaining that 50% of traffic was crawlers and spiders. Now, it's referal, trackback and comment spam. Mostly I send back a 403 to these, and they suck not a lot of bandwidth. But occasionally they get over my barbed wire, and apparent site traffic shoots up.

Not a beach

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:38:49 GMT

Router is out. So, no notifications. New IP address, means DNS updating issues for some. It'll clear in a few hours for those in hard to reach places.

I'll pop to the shops in the morning to get email and everything back to normal...

Friday night, not good fun chasing connectivity problems. At least the websites are up. Mutter, mutter.

I'm doing too much muttering, of late. My mutter detectors are flashing red.

RE: Service note about your web site

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:11:44 GMT

We ballsed-up. Didn't pay the bill on time. Outage for over 24 hours. Across all sites and communities. Businesses, schools, groups, individuals and the long enduring Aston Villa blogs. In apology I sent out this message:

Just a quick service note. I wouldn't send you any other type of messages through this mechanism. It's about your site(s) at:
http://www.what.ever/
Note: you may not be the site(s) owner but you are marked as a site(s)managing editor.

We were cut off for not paying our bill! Since 8.30am Tuesday Jan 31st till 1.15pm today, Wednesday 1st Feb 2006. We've been that busy... Stupid, stupid oversight. I thought he'd paid, he thought... We've had a transition in billing and payments and have now set up a proper standing order.
As a systems admin, I struggle daily to keep the services running. To lose the battle for a stupid, stupid reason breaks my heart. I'm gutted.. In my 6 year history in running this service we've never been off for so long.

My sincere apologies. You can be assured that we'll not let this happen again.

If you're not satisfied with my apology, as you know, you are free to download your entire site and move elsewhere. We wouldn't dream of locking you in to a service you were dissatisfied with.
Regards,
Steve Hooker

One of the nicest return messages, of the many, was from George, my oldest blogger, from over at The Wrekin's site. I think he's 86, there abouts anyways. Retired Headmaster and local raconteur.

Steve, As the locals used to say, when they teached 'em to talk proper like we done - 'Dunner thee chafe my mate, thee'st be alrite.' I have made a lot more mistakes than you have.
Longer to do it.
Absolution and remission granted.
George the Ancient.

And the majority of the messages back have been of the ilk...
Anyway now you have finally gone and fucked up you know how the rest of us feel all the time ;-)
greg
Greg's over at the Save the Ladywell Pool Campaign's site. Which did 1600 hits in one hour today! Well done chaps!

I gotta say that it's been so nice to feel appreciated. I became a little emotional, almost filled up with tears. Oh, and BTW: you're all out of the kitchen and behind the settee now, (don't tell the burglars). Funny when I'm sitting down watching the news, to feel so many people, so close. Makes me chuckle sometimes. Out loud.