Steve's blog

A blog about what's going on in Analysis UK...

Just how is it that computers know

It seams like every time I set up some new advertising something on the server knows and decides to throw a wobbly. I recently set up two new adverts for BookSwap.ws and as I submitted them, the server decided to fall over. Before you even think it, they hadn’t even gone live, so it wasn’t due to a sudden rush of traffic!

Fortunately the host providers did a great job of detecting an issue and sorting it out without me having to do anything, apparently there was a network issue that caused the server to fall over and resist attempts at rebooting. This appears now to be fixed.

As I write this and logged into my EV1 Servers account I see an announcement of some outages apparently caused by a linux worm exploiting a php issue. I guess this is probably what happened to my server.

Then the day after that, one of the configuration files for BookSwap.ws’ web server appears to have been corrupted which caused the default server page to be loaded as if the site was off line.

I do wonder if this was caused by an issue with automated backups because it only happened to one site on that server, the one I had a few hours before configured automated backups for!, or, perhaps it was just because it was Friday 13th.

I don’t usually run the automated backups provided by the web server application as this takes the site off line and is a real pain to configure - everything about the site is data driven so the database gets backed up regularly to a different server and the rest is code that doesn’t need backing up anyway.


Apologies to anybody effected by the recent server problems, hopefully these are now sorted out, I will be keeping a close eye on the situation.


As you’ve probably noticed I’m not all that good at posting, you have to wonder why when this short entry has taken me about three hours, and with some of it’s original content missing, mind you, it nearly didn’t get posted at all.

All I wanted to do was paste some simple text into the word processor I’m using (no prizes for guessing which famous one I’m using!). Because the text was from a certain web browser the word processor decided to connect to the internet – why I don’t know, so I naturally blocked it when Zone Alarm told me it was accessing the internet. So that locked it up for ages, I was hoping it would time out, but an hour latter I had to end task it, fortunately the auto save had saved much of my work, but I had still lost more than I wanted.

I have to say I really hate the way paste works in most of the Office product now days, all I wanted was a simple bit of text, no formatting etc, I wanted the data with MY format, not the format from the web page, Ahhh – and don’t get me started about the way a certain spreadsheet handles cut/copy and paste, when I copy something I want it to stay on the clipboard - it’s almost as bad as it’s graphs, come back Q-Pro all is forgiven – well, I actually liked that app so not to much to forgive!.

Being the webmaster of a book site I decided I should share what I’m currently reading with you in my posts.

At present I am reading Vincent Maraia’s The Build Master, I’m only about 2-3 chapters in, although I have cheated a little and read a few bits at random. Basically it’s about the Windows NT build team at Microsoft, it’s very interesting and I would certainly recommend it, especially if you are remotely involved in the build process for software products, managing source code or managing a software department. Being dyslexic I really have to like a book to keep reading it and this is certainly one of those, who knows, when I finally finish it I may well write some more about it – don’t hold your breath though as I’m a very slow reader.

Steve.