Head Rambles

Grandad January 12th, 2011

I have a bit of a bug at the moment.

I mention that because it explains one or two things.  I’m not one of those Mammy’s Boys who whinges about Man Flu or anything like that – I prefer to sit quietly and let the bug try its worst while I  do my best to drown it in whiskey. 

Anyhows, I was sitting here yesterday doing my best to ignore the sweats and aches and I started to mess around with the design of the site.  It was just an idle piece of whimsy to pass the time.  I don’t know whether it was the bug or the whiskey, but I got a couple of files mixed up, and the next thing I knew, part of the new design had crept onto the live site.  It was a messy bit of confusion, so rather than try to sort out the mess, I put the whole new design live, even though there were lots of things I hadn’t tweaked to my satisfaction.

Shortly after that, I feel asleep in my armchair.

I woke a lot later to find that the fucking site was broken.  There were all sorts of things that weren’t working, which didn’t put me into the best of form, but I managed to fix them, and then I went to bed.

I was woken at three this afternoon by Naughty Rita [he’s our Meter Man], but that’s neither here nor there.  I switched on the laptop and took a look at the site to decide whether or not to run with the new design.  It wasn’t too much of a shock, so I think I may leave it there for a while.  After all, the old design must be well over four years old.

So what do you think?  Will I get used to it?  Is it an improvement and what else does it need?

I will leave it in your capable hands.

Mind you…  I don’t half miss those tits.

• Blogging , computers , Health , Web design
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Grandad December 23rd, 2008

The Other Fella is in foul mood today.

I was too, but when I saw him, I cheered up.

He was up half the night playing with his computers, and I haven’t heard language like it since Herself fell into the slurry pit.

I asked him what was up, and he started swearing about hackers and viruses and things.  Apparently a couple of his sites were done yesterday.  He ain’t a happy camper.

One of the sites was the Jack and Jill Foundation.  I admit I was annoyed when I heard that, as I have a bit of a soft spot for them.  That’s why I link to them from this site.

I was thinking about Jack and Jill only yesterday as Mulley wrote about them [fair play to him].  Maybe it was Mulley who attacked the site?

Mulley is giving away all sorts of goodies in return for helping Jack and Jill.

I’d nearly fancy one of those toys.

So get your arses over to Mulley and read all about it.

Say you came from here.

I might even give The Other Fella my prize.

I might cheer the miserable sod up a bit.

• Rambles , Web design
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Grandad July 11th, 2008

Things are not going well at Silver Haired Internet Technologies.

For those of you who have joined recently, my friend Ron helped run a web company.  There was an unfortunate incident, where I accidentally shot Ron, and he went off to Thailand in a huff.  Or maybe he flew.  Who knows?  He is now living the happy life addicted to sex, sunshine and exotic smoking, and has no intentions of coming back.

It’s a long story, but I had to form S.H.I.T to cover the accident, and I have been trying to cope ever since.

It’s doing my fucking head in.

Ron designed a web site for a company.  He did a great job, and the company were delighted.  They were able to update their own site and everyone was very happy.  Ron liked them and trusted them so he gave them access to the server so they could set up their own emails and crap like that.

Then this company sold out.  They sold to a crowd from somewhere foreign.

The new crowd settled in and decided to make their mark on the web site.

The first thing they did was to remove the old site, and replace it with a horrible site of their own.  It’s a nasty looking site and it is impossible to find anything on it because it is HUGE.

The next thing they did was to go mad on the emails.  They made dozens of addresses.  Then they made dozens more that pointed to the others.  So now when a mail arrives there, it heads off on a loop of addresses being redirected here, there and everywhere, without actually finding a mailbox anywhere.  It’s like Spaghetti Junction in there.

Now they keep ringing me, because they are in a mighty mess.  They expect me to fix their tangles.  They can fuck off.  I can’t understand them most of the time because most of them don’t speak English.

They rang me this morning.  They aren’t getting any emails from HP.  So?  I don’t get emails from HP, and I’m not complaining?  But apparently this is upsetting them.  If they did get any mails from HP, I would say those mails are on their server at this very moment, flitting around from address to address frantically trying to find their way out of the maze.  I have never felt sorry for an email, but there is always a first time.

Of course I told them to fuck off, but they didn’t understand me, so that’s all right.

I never mentioned what this company did for a living.

They are a computer training company.

Hahahahahahaha.

Oh God!

Sigh.

• Web design , work
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Grandad April 13th, 2008

I’m a sucker for messing with things I know nothing about.  It’s called ‘gaining experience’. 

I was browsing the Blogs last week and came across a blog post.  I haven’t a clue what it was about but I thought I’d try it anyway.  I bought a server.  Well.. OK, I leased it, but what the hell.

I always wanted to play around with Linux, because a lot of people say it’s great stuff, and it’s not Microsoft.  It works out cheaper to get a server than to buy a new PC so here was my chance.  I have also heard that they bundle a lot of games with Linux.

“Have you much experience with maintaining Linux servers?” says the nice man when I phoned them.

I laughed.  “Sure, I dream about Vi every night and then have Grep and Bash for breakfast” I said.  It’s amazing the words I have picked up from the Interweb.

“So you can recompile a colonel?” [I think that's what he said].

“No problem,” says I, wondering what I was getting myself into.

So he leased me the server.

I asked him when it was being delivered, but he said I couldn’t have it, but that I would have to run it over the Interweb.  So maybe it doesn’t exist, and that is why they call it ‘Virtual’?

I dialled into this new server and began to wonder if I had done the right thing.

I poked around inside it, and at last found the folder called ‘games’.  But the fucking thing is empty.  So now I have to upload all of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is going to take a long time.

I also copied Head Rambles onto it.  That was fun, because it blew up.  It started whinging about databases or something, so I told it to fuck off and deleted it.

Now I have to find Vi.  I know she’s lurking around in there somewhere, and when I find her, we’ll come to Greps and have a right old Bash.

Anyone know anything about Linux?

• Internet , Web design
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Grandad February 9th, 2008

The things I do for my readers!

I have just taken the site asunder.  Once again, the place was in a mess.  I cut my arm on a nasty protruding piece of javascript and I’m bleeding all over the place.

But I think I have found the problem.

Apparently, every time someone tried to load a page or write a comment, my site went ballistic and had to go running off to its database over four thousand times.  This was strange.  Suppose I asked you a question and you had to read four thousand pages of a dictionary before you could reply?  It’s no wonder it was slow.

So I disabled everything and I found the little bugger that was causing the problem.

I had a wee plugin running called Community Cloud.  It showed up on a page I called “Friends?”.  I have discovered that if I remove that, then the site only goes running to the database about forty times.  So everything is faster.  A hundred times faster?

Community Cloud has been removed.  It is no more.  I put it on a bonfire in the garden, and it exploded with a bang.

I’m not saying that Community Cloud is a bad plugin.

It’s just that I probably have too many friends.

• Web design
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