So… What’s new?

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I’ll go first.

  • I work at a cool web development/design/digital/media company in Norwich, Selesti. I make websites and stuff and work with some really cool people. I’ve learnt a lot there over the year and 4 months I’ve been there, and my coding’s really improved. Plus, free breakfast on Fridays.
  • My car is still running despite not yet passing an MOT first time. Welding needs doing and some (often original) parts need replacing every now and then, but it’s at 117K miles and is still going well, if you overlook some rust (it is 24 years old though). Testament to German engineering. Had some fun recently when the head gasket almost blew; engine overheated badly, turned out they’d missed a split radiator hose; we replaced it, all good, and it’s run better since.
  • I went to New York last year. Great place, recommend you go if you get the opportunity. Went to all the usual attractions and very much enjoyed it. We were there when Hurricane Irene hit. It was rubbish. What they call a hurricane, we call a summer’s day.
  • Still don’t have a girlfriend but the less said about that the better #foreveralone In fairness I haven’t really tried.
  • I’ve aged. I’m 21 now. Twenty-fucking-one.
  • I still spend too much of my time sat in front of a computer.
  • I still haven’t had time to get into iPhone app development.
  • I still use Twitter too much.

That’s a brief overview of me since 2011.

So… Uh… Yeah…

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So, 1 year, 7 months, and 10 days ago I posted saying I’d post more.

I think I did well.

So I’ll say it again, I’ll try and post more. Well, not more, just post. Anything would be more.

Eventually I’ll replace this site with something custom (e.t.a. for that, mid 2018) but until then I’ll just spend my time deleting over 1000 spam comments that have accumulated during my neglecting of this site.
:)

Inception – my views and theories

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I wrote this ages ago, totally forgot it was still in my drafts folder. May as well post it now.

Inception is probably the best film I’ve ever seen; I’ve already seen it three times. I love films with this sort of plot and storyline and I think it was executed perfectly, plus the music was top class. There were a few things that confused me though; after some thought I’ve figured them out and these are the conclusions I’ve come to.

Continue reading →

MyBB Support Team Lead

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Damn, didn’t I post this here??

At the end of March I was promoted to Support Team lead, replacing Dennis Tsang who had been doing it for years. This was totally awesome, something I’d been hoping would happen at some point but wasn’t expecting to happen yet. I still remember when I first started using MyBB and knew nothing, but picked it up and worked my way to where I am now. I’ll now be in charge of hiring new support staff, as well as overseeing support for the new 1.6 release when it’s out. Rather looking forward to that.

Should be great.

Buy hosting you actually need, not 'unlimited'

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Hosting is obviously an essential part of running a site. There are millions of different hosts with different price plans and offers. Often the vast array of choices can be rather daunting, but make sure you don’t get suckered in to common traps, namely ‘unlimited’ claims.

It is not physically possible for a hard drive to be able to hold an unlimited amount of data. What they really mean by this is they just don’t limit how much you use, but this is a problem. To make sure you don’t ever hit a limit, when a server is reaching critical mass, the hosting company will just buy more hardware. However this means that servers are being strained until bursting point until new hardware is added in. This is overselling. They know you’ll never need much space so they say you have unlimited space, and if they need to, they buy more space to make sure everything works. There is no way it’s financially viable for hosters to manage decent servers whilst giving you all these high limits, if they were actually accurate. They may have a 1 TB server and say you have unlimited storage, but clearly, it can only hold 1 TB. Or, they may have a 1 TB server and say you have 100 GB. Logically, you’d only be able to have 10 accounts on there, but they’d probably add far more, 50 or more, because they know you’ll never actually use any more than 1 GB or so, so they can squeeze more people onto the server.

In my time on the MyBB Support Team I’ve come across countless threads complaining of slow hosts, sites always going down, MySQL saying too many people are connected, extremely slow queries, etc etc, and a lot of them are on free or cheap hosts that offer ‘unlimited’ plans. You are far better off using a host that has more realistic price plans.

I pay £12 per month for my hosting. That’s about $18 USD. For that I get 500 MB storage and 10 GB bandwidth. Part of the reason it’s so expensive is because I wanted UK based hosting, and even though I know I could get ‘more’ for a lot less with US based hosting, I’d never go back to it. Funnily enough, I don’t need 100 GB of space and 1 TB of bandwidth or whatever nonsense people offer. I know that what I am being offered is what I get. My server is not being oversold. And guess what; it’s extremely quick, I’ve not had one MySQL error about too many connections or anything, it hardly ever goes down, and when it does, it’s either fixed again or people are working on it before I’ve even enquired about it. I have a reseller account and manage 5 sites off this account, and I manage fine. If I need a bit more storage or bandwidth, I pay a bit more to get a bit more, but I know the server has plenty of free space to manage.

Bottom line with hosts is that if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t get drawn in to unlimited claims. Don’t even fall for plans offering hundreds of GBs. Go for something far more realistic and I can pretty much guarantee you will have a better, faster, more reliable hosting experience.