Job Applications




I have just finished filling in a job application for SELEX Galileo, and just wanted to make a small comment on the length which some applications are.

It has taken me the best part of three hours to complete the application form, which included a few ‘essay-style’ questions. I’ve saved a copy of the completed application, and it’s wound up as a 6 page PDF. This is worrying, partially because my ‘main’ CV is only a page and a half long. To be fair it asked for – and I was happy to provide – a detailed explanation of our third year group projects from uni. It was actually nice reminisce of the ‘good ol’ days.’

Of course, I’m only further increasing the effort by coming on here to make a blog post about it!

In other news, activity on the site has started to pick up again very slowly, back up to a steady 3-6 hits a day. Still pretty pants, but it’s a step in the right direction, and I still get a nice spike of users every time I make a new post.

I’m thinking of simplifying my categories and including some Formula 1 stuff, and some Lord of the Rings Online stuff, as they’re also things that I’m interested in, that hopefully one in a hundred people may be interested in reading about. EDIT: Done!

Yet ANOTHER Server Move!




Hah, I’ve changed server yet again. Finally fed up with slow and unreliable shared hosting, I’m now running off a VPS yet again. I’ve got a few ideas which I’ll share soon…

The VPS performs far better than shared hosting. Where the hosting was timing out on approximately 80% of packets doing a 60 second 1-250 rush on blitz.io, the VPS times out on less than 4%. Seems good to me, and with a little tweaking I’ll be trying to get that down to 0. Should be possible with a little tweaking of WP Super Cache and some other alternatives…

I’ve heard ‘Varnish’ thrown around a few times, need to look at it and properly see what it is!

That Was My Idea!




buffer logo

BufferApp

I’ve started using a web application called Buffer recently. There are three reasons I’m particularly enjoying it. Firstly is the ability to link both my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then post to both simultaneously. This is handy because I usually find myself focusing on one social network or the other, and rarely spend time on both.

This is easily done through their web interface, but you can also install their Chrome extention, allowing you to instantly share a page. Again, this happens concurrently with all accounts you have linked, and funnily enough the way many of you guys might stumble onto this post, when I finish writing it and bash ‘share.’

The final thing I like is that it allows you to queue up different posts. Unfortunately you don’t get as much control over the scheduling as I would like, but I believe that this is something the developers are working on. I would, for example, occasionally like to schedule a tweet for 12:00. Also, at the moment you pre-specify times at which to fire off the ‘next item in your buffer.’ I would love to see a feature whereby you can specify that you want a maximum of six items per day, and it can spread them out randomly during the day.

The reference in the title… I thought of something a bit similar a year or so ago but aimed at Bebo and MySpace (god, that was ages ago). Bonus points for anyone who leaves me a comment on this post sharing props for social networks of yesteryear.

It’s really an excellent wee app… Just thought I’d tell you all about it!

Updates, and a few Thoughts on Usernames




It has been a rather long time since I posted anything, almost a month in fact. It also shows that the often quoted ‘content is king,’ rings true. Since my last post, my analytics has shown that traffic has dropped from a steady four to five uniques a day, to virtually zero.

Visits over the last month.

Visits over the last month.

With this in mind, my resolution for the coming months is to try and push out posts, but more regularly. When I started this blog I was making a post every day, which in hindsight is probably a little bit excessive. At the other end of the scale, I’ve only managed three posts in the last two months.

One thing I wanted to briefly discuss was a few thoughts on usernames. My significant other (@Annuwin) has finally bullied me into creating a Pottermore account. I don’t entirely understand exactly what it’s about, but as best I can guess it’s some form of text-based adventure game through the world of Harry Potter. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the books. I even went to see the movies… Anyway, enough about that. After finishing the registration process and realising that at no point did I get to choose a username, I get a selection of pre-generated names with a number at the end. WAT?!

WAT?

WAT?

Now, I don’t tend to get that worked up by a lot of things on the web, but not being able to choose my own user name got me kind of pissed off. It’s actually rather convenient that any time I am presented with a login form (especially if I have forgotten my original details), there’s a 99.99% chance that it’s going to be ruu1989. I follow this rule anally, to the point that if I can’t have ruu1989, for a non-essential signup, I refuse to register. Apparently because Kimmi has decided that I must register for Pottermore, it BECOMES an essential signup.

I can appreciate this from a child safety point of view. This is what their website quotes, although to be honest, a child oriented website could easily get away with having a ludicrously overzealous profanity filter, much like the ones in Runescape, LotRO, and many other MMO’s. Point in case, the word ‘password’ is filtered in Runescape.

Ah well. Rant over. Hopefully new post = new visits. Time will tell.

Media Centres and Card Games




Other than my dabbling with web hosting, I’ve not been up to a great deal else tech-wise. I’ve got my home media server/media center running again. I seem to remember scrapping it because the two hard drives that were in there kept continually crashing. However, having recently tried to (unsuccessfully) flog a Hitachi 1TB drive, I figured I would get the thing set up again. It is nice to have our small collection of media shared across the network so Kimmi or I can access it, and also that it’s nice and easy to watch it on the big screen. I have messed around with solutions such as XBMC for viewing and managing the media, but it just wasn’t working how I wanted it. One thing I did particularly like about it was it’s gracenote-style information retrieval. The series that I have ripped from DVD are pretty well named, but XBMC acquired the DVD covers, set suitable thumbnails for each episode, and a variety of other metadata.

Code-wise I’ve been up to very little. I’ve still been slowly working on Django, and a few other small PHP projects. One thing which I’m particularly interested in is kind of a simulator for a form of solitaire card game. The idea is to lay out cards one at a time, so that they form a 3×3 grid. If at any time there is a visible pair of cards adding up to 11, such as 5×6 or 3×8, then you lay two cards over the pair. Also, if king, queen, and jack are visible, then you may lay cards over all three. The thing I find amusing about this game is that as soon as the cards are shuffled, the probability of winning or losing are pre-determined. There is no skill involved, as no choices are made at any time, the game simply works out or doesn’t. I find this game works particularly often, so I am interested in modelling the game and running some simulations to find out the %’age of games which finish. I’m sure some maths boffin will be able to do a whole load of statistics and probability analysis and work it out, but I’d prefer to just code it!

Hosting Adventures




Been quite a while since I actually posted anything of great value, so I figured I would post a quick update on the server moving I’ve done so far this year.

My last post touched on a server move which I have recently completed, the second one in 2012 so far to be precise. To begin with, I was running my own VPS on LeaseWeb (cracking hosting), with Windows Server and some pre-built WAMP solution, although I forget which one. The reason for having the windows server – before I find burning excrement on my doorstep and bricks being put through my windows – was simply because it was easier to run/manage the two gameservers that were hosted there.

I moved everything off there shortly after, partially because I couldn’t justify £20/month for hosting (which nobody reads), and game servers (which nobody used). I went to WebFaction, who were actually fantastic. The thing I particularly liked about their hosting was super easy support for Django, PHP, ROR, etc., all on the same server. It was as easy as specifying a new app, ‘mounting’ it to a subdirectory on your site, and then off you go.

Now, I’m hosting with HostDime. These guys are also good, and have lightning fast tech support, which has been pretty useful this time around. In the new financial year (I don’t want to mess with anything till then), I’m going to start pushing the freelance web developer thing again. As I mentioned in my last post, I think it would be very handy to also be able to easily host peoples sites once they are ready to launch. This in mind, I’m actually on HostDime’s reseller package, and have just set myself up as a ‘customer.’ I already have two other people hosting with me now, and once everything is set up properly they’ll be getting added to le portfolio.

If you need a website done, or know someone who does, feel free to drop me a line:- ruu@ruu1989.com.

I’ll be adding a page with the kinds of things I do, and services which I offer in the near future.

Server Move… Again




Well I’ve moved server again. I post messages like this partly to let anyone who cares know about things which are going on, but also so that I can tell when the domain is fully propagated.

For any non-techies reading this, changing where a domain name points to takes time. This is because the change is first passed from the registrar to the root DNS servers, which then slowly passes on the information to other DNS servers.

Essentially, once I see this post appearing (I’m currently posting it to 109.73.x.x) on ruu1989.com, I’ll know the propagation is complete for my ISP, and I’m sure it’ll be processing for other people too.

The other big reason I’ve moved server is I’m now using my own reseller webhosting. I plan on pushing the whole web freelancer thing pretty hard again in the next few weeks, but with a kick this time. I can now – reliably – host peoples websites. This is great, because I think it is important for customers to be able to recieve a ‘complete’ web design experience, without having to deal with multiple companies.

As usual, I’ll keep you posted!

About Me




It finally happened… The About Me page finally has some content. I have been intending on doing this for a while, but never got around to doing it.

I also spent some more time looking at my Google Analytics results. The Visitor Flow tool is absolutely fantastic. 61% of people leave my blog after viewing the homepage, although that’s not a huge problem as the majority of my blogs content is on the home page. Most of the views that don’t leave go straight to the About Me section. I partially think this is because it’s the next link on the nav page, but also that people who are coming for information about myself will head there next. At least it has some info on it now!

Semicolons




Just a thought about semicolons, spurred on by a hacker news post I read here this morning.

I used to hate semicolons. I openly admit my first major programming experience was Visual Basic 5. As far I was concerned, up until that moment semicolons were only useful to me for joining items in a list where there was punctuation within the items. Then I got interested in JavaScript, and mostly ignored them. They got used when adding them seemed to ‘fix’ code, which generally resulted in a lot of sloppy code and poor practice. At university I was finally exposed to PHP and Java. Semicolons at the end of almost every statement, it took a little bit of discipline, but I finally got there. It eventually became force of habit that almost every time I hit the return key, the humble semicolon preceded it.

Fast-forward to 2012. I ‘m starting to get into Django, and at least every other time I save a file and hit F5, I receive an error because I’ve added a semicolon at the end of a line… The interesting kicker is – for those of you unfamiliar with Python – that the lines in Java/PHP/C you typically *wouldn’t* end with a semicolon, for example opening a for statement, or an if statement, you now end with a colon.

Python

for i in range(10):

print i

PHP

for($i = 0; $i <= 10; $i++) {

echo $i;

}

Clever, eh?

Also, in case anyone is writing Django in Sublime Text 2 (the best text editor, EVAR!), there is a great plugin for it here:- https://github.com/squ1b3r/Djaneiro.

favicon.ico




Woop! Finally made a favicon for my site (little icon in ze browser bar). Marvel in it’s simple pixeley-ness. That is all! :-)