Plesk-based hosting can often suffer from a resilience problem: failure of the DNS for sites it hosts if the server goes down for any reason. Ideally a zone should have a number of domain name servers located in different places. A zone is basically a domain and all its sub-domains. The zone record tells other servers where to find everything for that domain – where the websites are, the main servers etc. Plesk run on a server or virtual server …
Blog: General Blogging
Jetlagged
Am I on Melbourne time? Am I on UK time? No idea, all I know is I’m not getting any sleep. Still it does mean that I can fit lots into my days. We’ve had 4 days in Melbourne following our 27 hour flight (1 hour’s sleep), and although it’s winter, it feels very mild. The sun is incredibly strong, given that it’s the equivalent of the end of January. We’ve visited some museums, including the MCG where we had …
Woo hoo we have a shiny new office sign!
Not a moment too soon, here’s our shiny new brushed aluminium office sign
Taking off in a 777
Longest plane to fly into Newcastle Airport… … and I’ll be on it when it takes off again. I’m flying Emirates to Dubai (then on to Melbourne) on Monday 26 July and it just happens to be Newcastle Airport’s 75th birthday. As part of the celebrations, Emirates are flying a 777 into the airport – the longest plane to land at Newcastle, and 50% bigger than the Airbus A330 which normally flies the Newcastle-Dubai route. This means that I will …
Losing my keyboard input
This is something that has been bothering me on the odd occasion for years. It is intermittent, so is something I have been able to live with, but it would be nice to get to the bottom of it. Basically, there is a key combination – somewhere around the “A” on my keyboard, probably involving the control and perhaps the shift keys, and is so easy to accidentally press when not being careful, that locks up all my keyboard input. …
DIBI 2010
Had a great day yesterday at the DIBI (Design It, Build it) conference in The Sage Gateshead. It’s a new conference, with – as the name may suggest –two tracks; design and development. I was in the design camp, while Phill went for the development (standing in for Jason after he had a nasty bike accident a week or so ago – get better soon Jason!). Great selection of speakers including (in reverse chronological order, for no good reason!) Andy …
Faxing from your desktop
Occasionally there is a need to send a fax, but it can be such a rare occurrence that it is hardly worth keeping a fax permanently set up, or even keeping track of where you last put the fax modem cable for your laptop. I took a look at free or cheap online fax sending services in the UK, and many offer lots of promise in the Google search results, but few deliver once you go through their long registration …
Cleaning UTF-8 Streams for XML Parsing
Many applications I work on require the reading and parsing of third-party XML streams. These streams often originate with user-entered data and subsequently end up with invalid characters in. Of course, this should never happen, but it does and when it does, you need to be ready for it. It surprised me to learn that not all valid UTF-8 characters are in fact valid in well-formed XML. So with a combination of this fact, and with remote applications allowing user-entered …
Designers now boarding at gate … err…
The latest craze for designers seems to be redesigning airline boarding cards (and/or websites). Dustin Curtis started this off a little while ago, after wondering why American Airlines’ website is so difficult to use. Being proactive, Dustin redesigned the site and sent it (with an impassioned letter) to AA. This started a conversation with their web developer which is quite revealing about large organisations and their difficulties in bringing about change. This inspired Tyler Thompson to have go at redesigning …
International Classification for Standards (ICS)
The International Classification for Standards (ICS) categories are used to serve as a structure for catalogues of international, regional and national standards and other normative documents, and as a basis for standing-order systems for international, regional and national standards. It may also be used for classifying standards and normative documents in databases, libraries, etc. The classifications can be downloaded here for free as a PDF document (intro page here). This document lists the main categories first, and then a full …