The gallery’s had a face lift as well now :)

Comments welcome!

My main site – alexlomas.com – has undergone a bit of a face lift.

It looks much fluffier and has undergone some under-the-bonnet changes that make it easier to look after, including some nice custome server side Perl stuff.

There are some more tweaks to come with the look of the gallery and maybe the blog.

This would be it:

[From Engadget]

I currently host my server on the end of an ADSL line (provided by Be*) whilst I look for some new hosting for it.

The ADSL service has been a bit, well, rubbish to put it lightly of late hence the lack of availability of sites every now and then.

You can check my server’s external connectivity at L8NC – if there are any red bits, that’s bad :)

Well, I’ve sold my Fuji on ebay and just bought a great Nikon D50. My favourite thing I’ve come across so far, is that it records what orientation the camera was in (portrait / landscape) with each picture, and when you open it up in Photoshop or Nikon’s own software, it’s automatically rotated for you. Neat.

I’ll shout when my first proper photos are up

Sorry for the rubbish availability of the site today – just for once it’s not Be*, but a DDoS against my nameservers.

Bollocks.

Yesterday was the singularly worst service I think I’ve ever had from an ISP.

Be’s network started suffering from very high packet loss around midday – it carried on until late evening (9 or 10pm).

In all this time, it was impossible to get through to their call centre – not surprising given the scale of the problem. There was no acknowledgement of there even being a problem until midafternoon when something was posted on their forum.

We all know that it’s only human to suffer problems – it is bleeding edge technology after all. What riles me above all other is the total lack of communication to customers.

So, how about it Be, maybe you could put up a status page like every other ISP?

Now, I don’t normally do these online petition things very often, but this is different.

AOL are proposing to start charging (large corporations who send large amount of email) to email AOL subscribers. This is all being done in the name of an anti-spam measure, but it will only end up creating a two tier email system.

Some may argue that this is all that AOL subscribers deserve, but it does set a dangerous precedent.

Add your name!

As from today, Mailbox Internet, now have none of their original technical staff at their colo centre in Parson’s Green. Their new owners, 186k, have plans to close it and move all the servers up to Leeds, although there’s been no official notification of this.

Because of this, I’ve moved my server out of a nice cold dedicated data centre and into my study at home. It has a fairly healthy upload speed, so performance won’t be affected.

It has also unfortunately coincided with same major problems on my new ISP’s network – mostly involving DNS it seems. I’m now running my own internal DNS to work around these issues; it also solves the problem I had with port forwarding on my router (it would redirect any HTTP requests to the public WAN IP to the internal router configuration page).

So, I’m now signed up with BE for their ADSL2+ service. Although it can go up to 24Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up, I’m currently getting 7Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

This isn’t too shabby considering that a friend who lives another 100m further down the road is right on the verge of 2Mbps "normal" ADSL.

All in all, service is good so far, everything was working to schedule (in fact earlier than promised); so if you fancy signing up and want a month’s free BE service, contact me (you can do that via the comments) and I’ll send you the relevant refer-a-friend email address to add to your order.