Category: Technology

October 4, 2011
Max Life, Technology ,

Applebook vs Amoogle vs Netflix ?

Forget the iPhone 4s that was announced today.

It is not not really that relevant.

The new 4s is an incremental upgrade that sticks rigidly to the Apple design briefs, Launch a product, refine it then redefine it. The iPhone 5 will be the redefinition, the 4s is the 3g or the 3gs for the current cycle.

The new iPod touch in white is nice, the new 64GB capacity is nice, but for $399 I will pass for a while.

There was nothing in that product launch that stood out as ‘new’. The one thing that did stand out for me is that Apple is continuing the battle for the living room. Allowing you to pair your phone with an AppleTV and effectively play a movie or other content on a big screen.

Read More

April 14, 2010
emaren Life, Technology ,

Do I want an iPad ?

My current laptop is a fairly old and beaten PowerBook G4 and recently it has been showing signs of age more than ever. I also have an Acer Aspire One Netbook, that runs ChromiumOS, but this is too small to use for anything beyond uber casual surfing.

Desktop computing is handled by an AMD powered, Quad core machine with lots of memory and plenty of disk space that dual boots Vista (ugh) and Linux.

Having migrated my e-mail, contacts and calender to google services I have little need for a ‘local’ e-mail, just a really good browser and access to my domain’s. Or alternatively a really good e-mail program that copes with imap or exchange services.

Chrome browser support would be great, then I get the plethora of pluggins and bookmarks sync, which is something I never knew I wanted, but now cannot imagine life without.

Battery life is not a huge thing to me, but a decent display is. My Powerbook does 1280×854, more screen real estate would be good, or a decent ‘pinch-to-zoom’ would be cool I guess.

Read More

March 17, 2010
Max Life, Photography, Technology

CNCPICS – an update

Further to my logic catch22 yesterday, it looks like cncpics.com is going to be broken for a while.

Godaddy – the host of both that site and this blog (for the moment) are incapable of keeping a promise, they promised me late last night that they would not take the site off line and would give me time this morning to work through the issues.

The issues are fairly simple, for reasons unknown the caching mechanism is creating a lot of file in the, well, cache area. This is not a bad thing generally as the cache helps the performance.

However, the host has a strict 1024 file limit in any one folder. This limit was broken this week by a 925 picture collection – including the various derivatives the cache folders spiked up to 2-3000 files.

There is a simple answer, all I need is access to the gallery so that I can remove a bunch of photo’s from this week. Once this happens the cache growth will go away everything will return to normal. except this morning the account is suspended.

However, the issues is made a whole lot worse, very, very quickly. As soon as an admin notices that there are 1025 files in a folder, they instantly block access to the entire cache folder hierachy. Which leads the software to dump endless files in the $home folder, which leads to 16k files there, which leads to the account suspension.

Long story short, I need to re-host the site, I am done with godaddy.

I also cannot move the domains elsewhere for 60 day as I recently moved them to godaddy in a fit of ‘trying to keep everything together’.

I have signed up for a new more powerful host elsewhere and I am testing gallery 3

mehpics.com

The biggest issue of course is that uploading 50gb’s of images takes some time and regardless of where I find to host, the upload gap is going to be substantial.

So, my plan is thus

  • Upload the gallery code to the new host – done
  • Upload the 34mb database backup to the new host – in progress
  • Make the gallery work – meh
  • upload the images – in progress
  • convert to gallery 3  (optional step)

Beyond that I need to move this blog and gallery and a couple of others that share this hosting space.

Stay tuned for details…..

March 16, 2010
Max Technology, WebMastering

Access Denied – catch 22

This morning I sat having coffee with a friend when my phone displayed a voicemail

Hi. This is Amanda calling from go daddy hosting at (480) 505-8712
to say we sent you an email regarding your hosting account
recipient keep X dot in for which requires your attention. Thank you.

As this is not the first such call I have had from them I waited until I got home to deal with it.

It appears that the cache had built up to the point of impacting performance, again.

So they simply blocked access to my hosting account.

The first call had the following logic problem

We cannot allow you access to your account until the cache is deleted

But I cannot delete the cache without access to the account

We cannot allow you access to your account until the cache is deleted

But……..

As you can see, this loop has no end and the first support rep was adamant that I needed to delete the files before they would unlock the domain.

The second guy was better, he wanted to create an archive of all of the files that were in the problem folders for me.

this would take a few minutes.

a couple of hours elapsed and I got hold of an exceptionally feisty young man that basically called me a liar and suggested that I needed a dedicated server

Finally I got hold of a much more sensible person called ‘Jared’ that was able to tell me what the files were and to get the ones that I no longer needed, deleted.

i am now waiting for the site to come back and/or more logic errors – I am not sure which will happen though….