Archive for the 'Web design' Category

Coming to Greps with Vi

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?

Friends can slow you down

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.

end_roadworks

Road closed - Diversions in place

Grandad February 9th, 2008

road_closed

For a while now, this site has been VERY slow to do what it is supposed to do.

I’m not quite sure what it is supposed to do, but it has been very slow at it anyway.

You have all been remarkably polite about it, and I have only had a couple of vociferous complaints, but it was annoying me so I’m going to try to do something about it.

I waited until Saturday, because I know none of you will be visiting today anyway.

If you do accidentally visit, you may find the site doing strange things, or maybe there’ll be bits missing.  I don’t know what you’ll find, because I don’t know yet what I’ll be taking asunder.

I will also be posting lots of comments to myself.  That’s not narcissism.  That’s called testing.

See you later….

My blog did a dump on the carpet

Grandad February 6th, 2008

Some of you may have noticed from my post yesterday that I was in a little bit of a pissy mood.

I set out early to do a little blog fixing. 

And when I say ‘blog fixing’, I don’t mean checking for spelling mistakes.  I mean taking the back off and getting dirty.

But blogs are like cars.  You set out to find what’s causing a little rattle and the next thing you find you’ve dismantled the gearbox.

I was at it for about an hour and realised I was in a mess.  I had boxes of posts lying in one corner of the room.  There were comments scattered all over the place and there was a nasty pile of code sitting on the table, dripping bytes on the floor.

dismantled 

And in the middle of the floor was a huge dump.  I realised it was my own.  It was massive.  A great big steaming pile of database dump.  What a mess!

Even worse - Sandy got skittish and messed up all the comments, so I didn’t know which comment belonged to which blog, let alone which post.

In the end, I got pissed off and just shoved the whole lot back into the servers and hoped for the best.

So if a few of you open your blogs today and find there are posts there that you didn’t write, or comments from people you never heard of, then I’m sorry.  It was Sandy.

And why is it that when you have finished, there is always a block of code left over and you have no idea where it came from?

I’ve been tagged again

Grandad November 11th, 2007

Our K8 has come up with a new meme.

And, bless her little cotton socks, she has passed it on to me.

She wants me to write a post that uses every tag. It’s all very well for her - she only has a few. I have loads. The cow!

Now I may be getting old but I find these difficult. I had a hard days blogging yesterday, as I had a good rant on a podcast to America. That was after I did my post on Cully and Sully.

So today I went for a ramble around the garden, trying to think of a topic. No go. There was no inspiration around the house either, and I’m damned if I’m going around the village or around the town for something so trivial.

Back in the 70’s life was a lot simpler. There were no computers or Internet, or even television so there were no memes. I had no irritating daughter in the family either. We found our pleasures in simple things. I remember learning to drive so we could go on holidays touring in the West, with no worries about flying and Global Warming. We had such simple sports as children in times past, like watching spiders spin their webs, and the designs they’d make. We’d go for rambles through the woods and have picnics of tea and spam sandwiches. We were a lot healthier for it.

Nowadays, work is the new religion and people have lost the use of their imagination. People only get worked up over celebrities and smoking out corrupt politicians. They panic over property prices and have lost sight of the soul of life.

No.

I can’t think of anything.

I elect not to do it.

I’m going to file this under Uncatagorised.

Maybe Sixty should have a bash at this?

Or how about Kirk at Just Thinkin’? I haven’t tagged him before.

And it’s a while since I annoyed Grannymar!!

tag-award

F*cking memes….

Jedi Jihad

Grandad September 14th, 2007

Dick called around yesterday.

I’ve been dreading this for weeks.

“Where’s Ron?” says he.

I had been mentally working on my reply to this for a long time and had a nice excuse about him going West to a wedding. Of course I blurted out the truth.

“Thailand, I think.”

“What in the name of f*ck is he doing in Thailand? When did he go? When’s he coming back?”

“I don’t know. Weeks ago. No idea.” says I.

So I explained how I had accidentally shot Ron, and that he had gone off in a huff saying that he was sick of the weather and being shot and how Dick was a pr*ck to work for. The last bit wasn’t true, but Dick is a bit of a stuffed shirt, and needs the truth from time to time.

“But he’s been churning out the web sites.” says Dick, “He has been doing some great stuff and business has never been better. How could he do that if he’s in Thailand?”

“That was me.”

“But you know f*ck all about web design or web development!”

“True” says I, “but it’s dead easy once you get the hang of it. I just got a couple of books.”

He wasn’t pleased with that. There was a long silence.

“I liked that last site” says he, at last.

“Thanks. It took me two whole days to do that one”

“F*ck! It would have taken Ron a couple of weeks”

“Could you keep the language down a bit” says I, “as I’m recording this for my blog”

“You and you’re f*cking blog” says he. “I suppose you redesigned that too?”

There was another long silence.

“Want to take Ron’s place?” says he.

“Can we rename the company S.H.I.T.?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about that…”

So we decided to stroll down to the pub. We brought the guns in case there were any tourists around.

“What’s all this sh*t about Jedi?” says Dick as we walked.

“I don’t know. They suddenly started attacking me for no reason. They’re some bunch of weirdos. They have some obsession with Ewan McGregor, but they won’t say why. I looked them up on the Net and apparently there are thousands of them. In fact they have officially been added to the culling list.”

“Fair enough” said Dick.

Shortly after that two hoodies jumped out of the hedge in front of us.

“We are Jedi that have been sent by the Council to put an end to your wickedness” they hissed.

“The County Council?” I asked.

“The Council of Morm-Jordil” they muttered.

They whipped out two Maglite torches that had red cellophane wrapped over the lenses and started waving them at us.

….

If anyone wants the hoodies, they’re up in the landfill.

May The Force be with them.

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