A New Beginning
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
You might notice a big gap between the last post and this… that’s because I managed to dredge up the archives from my old (rather neglected) blog and import them here. (It was a nasty process… I had been using b2evolution v1.1, and for some reason, the b2evo team thinks nobody would EVER want to export… ended up having to hack a MovableType exporter to fit… got there in the end though!).
Hoping to make a bit of a fresh start. Still not too sure about this theme, but we’ll see what happens!
Thanks for visiting.
OS Upgrade
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve just been having a fun day… backing up my entire VPS into 3 separate places: my official backup allocation (separate server provided by my hosting company), onto another separate server to which I have access, and also down onto my own machine. Backed-up in a different way for each one too, just to be sure.
After that was done, I upgraded the server OS from Fedora Core 4 (old, dusty, and a slightly broken OS image to boot!), up to Fedora Core 6 (w00t!).
When I first went with FC4, it was the best my host could offer. (The alternative was an almost unusably broken OpenSUSE 9.something). It had PHP 5.0.23 installed, which sucked beyond belief (seriously PHP guys, not a cool release), so I had to temporarily downgrade to PHP4. I then had to spend ages figuring my way MANUALLY round various RPM repositories, until I could find YUM (YellowDog Update Manager) which, for whatever reason, was not on the FC4 OS image! Gah.
After that bundle of joy, I had to then find appropriate repositories which were still actively hosting FC4 material for the x86_64 architecture. After days of hunting, I eventually found the life-saving (and excellently named) “Atomic Rocket Turtle”, which had what I needed, so I got my crusty FC4 updated to the latest and greatest in AMP technology. Woohoo!
Now that I’ve upgraded to FC6, I was worried that I’d have to do the whole thing ALLLLL over again. Thankfully, YUM is already installed, and Apache and MySQL are pretty-much up to date. PHP is only version 5.1, which ain’t great (although it’s workable)… but thankfully, people are still making RPM’s for FC6 x86_64.
The restoration process of all my data seeeeems OK so far… had to nip into the restoration ‘map’ file (thingy created by Plesk - my control panel software) to correct something it didn’t like (it was insistent on a shared IP instead of exclusive… not that it makes much different, since I’ve only got 1 address and I’m the only client!).
Now I’ve got to update Plesk and make sure the firewall is OK in Virtuozzo (server virtualization software). Last few times I tried on FC4, it complained of a misconfiguration… probably some buried setting gone wrong… and I had no idea how to fix. Hopefully it’s all good now.
The rise of casual gaming
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
While sitting here playing Scrabble with my dad (and nearly winning!), I noticed that the BBC has an interesting article about the rise in casual gaming, and the often surprising statistics involved:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7301374.stm
Some of the statistics from Popcap are quite impressive. First is gender… 65% female! (I guess the male gamers are off playing something more hardcore). Then the age, with a surprising number over 30. (Once again, the young ‘uns are probably into less casual stuff). Perhaps most shocking of all is the hours racked up on Popcap alone… up 600 million per year! That’s the equivalent of nearly 70,000 people playing the games literally non-stop for the whole year. Insane!
Casual games are definitely here to stay, and worth money! Thankfully, there’s plenty of programmers and artists willing to make the stuff.
A plague on Vista’s house!
Posted by Peter | Filed under Uncategorized
WARNING: rant ahead. If you love Microsoft and think Windows is the best OS ever, then aside from that fact that you probably don’t even know what “OS” stands for, just don’t bother reading this post.
I am steadily growing ever more hateful of Microsoft’s latest OS… Windows Vista. I got a Dell XPS 420 (which only runs Vista) in work last October, and I’ve never done anything overly nasty with it. I do some web-development, so I run a WAMP server, and I run the Second Life clients (main release, and the beta versions). By and large, those things shouldn’t cause any major problems… maybe a few one or two, but nothing serious.
Therefore, my Vista experience should be a joyous one, surely? Aye right…
