Bank Holiday 2

Aug Bank Holiday here in the UK as I write this at 8 in the morning the weather doesn't look good e.g its wet and there is wall to wall grey sky why?

Mediawiki

I have just got the 2 wiki's that I want on my websites working, lots of fine tuning to go but at least I have them working,

Domain Names

As I have said in this Blog earlier this month, or may be even earlier I have changed my hosting company.

Now that was not entirely a painless switch over from the old to the new, for some reason the new host took longer than I thought it would to move my old domain to their DNS system, not that I am an expert in these matters.

I also brought a new domain called www.citrusdreams.info, which at one stage was working well, now for reasons that I can't fathom it has stopped working.

According to one look up service eg whois there is no record on the hosts DNS servers of my domain that I have brought from them and what them to host ect..

So it appears that I will have to have a moan again.

Oh by the way did I tell you that I hate Cpanel?

Reading Now pt whatever 1

Still reading Ark by Stephen Baxter, and I must say that so far the story is great, as I have only just read Flood which is Part 1 of this series its nice to be able to see some of the events in Flood from other viewpoints in Ark!

I am not sure if that makes complete sense but I hope you get the idea as to what I am trying to say.

The entertainment quotient is I think high, I would love for this to be made into a radio series as I think it would work great.

600 not Out

So this is my 600th blog and has taken some time to get too, but there you go these things happen.

I came back from a very intense training course on Friday. Now the trip according to the GPS should take 4.15 hours to travel 241 miles. As you can tell from what I have written above that is not what happened.

Their was 2 hours before I started to travel a truck fire on the M1 near junction 28. The result the M1 was cream knackered from junction 32 to 25!

This added over 2 hours to the trip!

I count myself very lucky as the M25 was okay the way I was travelling and so was the M3!

Folks on the M5 had it much worse with a 28 mile tail back!

Reading Now pt whatever

Now reading Ark by Stephen Baxter, which is good as I have only just completed book one in the series the other week, and the idea of having to wait a year to find out what happens is not some thing I would like to do.

As I have only just started to read the book, eg I am on page 12 of 465 odd pages I can't say much as the first few pages set up things for later.

I did look to see what Stephen Baxter has got next in the pipeline, but nothing is listed.

Books reading

I have completed the Charles Stross book Iron sunrise, and like I said in an earlier blog the book bounces around in viewpoint and time.

You know what it works!

On completing the story it is the only way the story could have been told and for it to work the way that it does.

Well worth the money and the time a great little story.

Changing Hosts pt5

The last update for a while.

The main site www.dirkmaggs.dswilliams.co.uk is working okay
The James Follett site www.jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk is working okay

The flash intro to the Dirk Maggs site still does not work even though all the files and links are all in the right places, why? not a clue

The new web domain www.citrusdreams.info works but from cpanel I can't access it, why? not a clue

Changing Hosts pt4

Well just an update to say what I have got working and what is not working.

The subdomains are working now, and I am being to hate cpanel so www.jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk and www.dirkmaggs.dswilliams.co.uk are now mostly okay.

www.citrusdreams.info I have a holding page on as I have to decide just what I want to do with it.

What is not working is the flash page I had as the into to the Dirk Maggs website its all there all the files and all the correct links it just does not play, why? not a clue.

So apart from that the new host do give some great toys so that you can look real easy at what pages on the website are most popular.

Changing Hosts pt3

Things have got better I think!

My domain www.dswilliams.co.uk has been transferred to the new hosting company and appears to be working well.

My new domain www.citrusdreams.info also appears to be working well.

The only problem that I have is setting my subdomains on www.dswilliams.co.uk mainly www.dirkmagggs.dswilliams.co.uk and www.jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk

Have now tried all sorts and have decided that cpanel is not very friendly to idiots like me

New website

As I said the other day I am in the process of transferring my websites from one hosting company to another.

Now it's been some 7 years since I had to do this and so far the experaince has been poor and as each day goes by it's getting to be poo.

You would think that by now this sort of thing would be straight forward and well painless. But so far my experaince has not been like that, I have the feeling that one of the causes of the hassle I am having is caused by money.

Yes I said money the reason as far as I see it is companies don't want to loose customers even if one of the reasons the customer is moving on is because the company fail to provide what the customer need or wants.

So the company make it difficult, without doing anything illegal for you to chop and change.

So the result is that my Dirk Maggs site and my James Follett websites have for the first time in 7 years disappeared from the web.

To say that I am upset about this would be an understatement, but that is what has happened.

Both the above sites are or were on my website www.dswilliams.co.uk and for some unknown reason the transfer of this domain from one hosting company to another has so far taken 3 days and there appears at this time to be no end in site as to when this domain will once again be on the internet.

I don't know if it's because of something I have or have not done, as the process of moving a domain is a secret, why?

My new domain which I have got is up and running, the new domain being www.citrusdreams.info the only snag with it so far is that I have to learn how to use cpanel, which is something that is completely new to me.

So tonight I am going to plead stupidity and as the new hosting company why the domain transfer has appeared to have disappeared into a black hole, so wish me luck

Changing Hosts pt2

Things are at this time not looking to good.

According to the sites I have looked at my domain should be transferred in 72 hours or less. So far its not happened so all my websites are gone..

The new isp has also not made my new domain citrusdreams.info live yet so I have no sites at all in over 7 years on the net.

What I should have done was had the new site live for a while and then transferred content later.

The just to make me twitch a bit I have now read some very bad reviews on the isp I have just signed up with so not good.

Changing Hosts

Well in an effort to save some money on the running of my websites, I have decided to change to a web host that is some 60% cheaper offers more and has won lots of awards.

But the thing that has got me just a bit worried is the transferring of my domain name from the old host to the new, and all these things called TAGS and ULM's.

If all goes will I should be on the new host in 72 hours or so I am told, if it all goes wrong I suppose my websites will disappear from the web.

Pod Cast or not?

I have reported here before that I have a pod cast which is the audio version or part of my static websites.

As of Jan(2009) this year it had got to 16 episodes and then for some reasons that I can't quite grasp I have stopped, not because I have run out of things to say, it must be said that it did not help with the pod host company going through a bad patch, which also included loosing all my pod casts! luckily they had backups, which I have also, but its the fact that the lost the lot for more than a week, and then there have been problems with uploading and downloading from there site.

I know that I could do it all myself on my own web space, but I don't have the time to learn all about feeds and all that sort of stuff so hence why I went to a pod host.

yes I know that it is a free host so that I should not expect it to be anything special but I think not being able to download the pod casts is some what of a large problem in the grand scheme of things.

I could pay for a pod host, but and this is the big but what if I don't like pod casting it's a lot of money to throw away on something you don't like!

I suppose what I could do and this is a thought that I have had more than once is to just keep recording the episodes and then find another pod host and upload them and see if any one else likes them and the if I go with the host I am thinking of I can then convert the free hosting to a pro package which gives me more space and bandwidth.

Reading Pt 4

I am still reading the Charles Stross book and having got into the book, some 200 pages in I have to say that the multi view point and also flexitime line approach appears to be working and that for the story to work Charles had to employ something like it for it all to work.

I am also pleased that the story is not predicable and that's good, I want to be entertained and not get the feeling that I have been ripped off because the another has gone formulaic or predicable.

So far I have had a good read and have also been entertained, thanks you Charles.

Meteor Shower

Well it has to be said that the weather in the UK is such that you can all most guarantee that if there is anything almost interesting going on in the sky at night that it will be cloudy, and that was just so for where I live in the UK last night.

For you see last night the 12.08.09 was supposed to be a great time to see a Meteor shower, one of the better ones in the year, and the predictions where for a go show, some 100 meteors an hour or so, which is something that I would just love to see, I think the most meteors that I have ever seen has been some 4 or 5!

So you can imagine my disappontment last night when having a look at the night sky at 10.30 pm that not only was it cloudy but it looked like it was going to rain!

I am told that the next meteor shower is going to be in November, so I shall make the effort then to have a look, that's assuming that the weather for once gives us a chance to see what is going on up in the night sky.

Reading Pt 3

Iron Sunrise is going well so far not to sure about the several viewpoints and the switching between them and also going backwards and forwards in time but apart from that the story is good and I believe that the author Charles Stross is proving good entertainment and value for money.

I am at one level glad that it is not his first book that I have read of his, as I don't think so far that it shows just what he can and does do.

As a side note to the above the first book of Charles's that I read is one that he has released into the creative commons and that was called Accelerado, if you ever get chance to read do so it will really stretch your mind, it did mine.

New Book

I have a new book that I am reading yeah, it's by Charles Stross and it's called Iron Sunrise, as I have only read some 20 pages I can't tell you what I think about it as I have not got into it yet.

Odd Thought

I was reading somewhere, not to sure where it was now, but anyway I was reading about how in the late 1890's London's streets had a real problem with the waste material from all the thousands of horses that used the London streets back then.

Now my odd thought was where did all that horse manure go to, and who moved it all and when cars and buses started to come in and started to take over the jobs of the horses, what did the people who cleaned up after the horses do?

I know lots of questions, and when I did a Google it was not very good at giving me the sort of answers I wanted, for some reason it was far more interested in giving me results that lead me to stuff to buy, which not what I wanted, this is not the first time that I have been let down by Google, if this sort of thing carrys on I shall have to look at using a differant search engine.

Sunshine

For the first time in a while the sun is out and I can see Blue sky yeh!

Flood Pt 4

Just been thinking over the last day or so, since completing the the reading of Flood by Stephen Baxter could Dirk Maggs do an audio production of it?, how long would the show or shows be, who would be cast in the principle characters?

I think that yes, it could be done as an audio production, there would have to be some clever adaptation, but I think there is great scope for a fertile mind like Dirk's to get over to the listener just what is going on, since one of the best characters in the book is the flood itself, I am sure that someone of Dirk's talent could find a away to get this character across to the listener in interesting ways without going over the top on sound effects.

The duration of the production? that's a difficult one as the book covers a lot of ground, even with some adapting it will not I think fit into anything less than say 120-180 minutes, of course the big problem would be the cost of production and finding a market for it.

But it is nice to dream, well isn't it.

Flood Pt 3

So at long last I have completed reading this book. I got the feeling that the end of the book was some how a bit rushed? not sure why I think this but that's the impression that I got, I have since read other peoples thoughts on this book and they do not make this comment on its finish, so its just me I suppose.

Overall I did enjoy the book so much so that I even had a look on the internet at a couple of sites that let you see what the area you live in would look like if the water level started to get higher. I am safe at the 10 to 30 Meter mark but after that will Ben Nevis is looking real good.

As entertainment I think I had my money's worth, so I say thank you Stephen for some great hours of entertainment.

Flood Pt 2

Still reading this book by Stephen Baxter, and it has not got any happier, so it would make a great story line for EastEnders?

Flood

Still reading the Flood by Stephen Baxter, it's starting to get a bit ...well depressing with all the bad stuff that just keeps on happing. I am beginning to wonder what book 2 in the series called Ark is going to be like.

Otherwise it's a book to make you think..even if only a little bit

Books read

So just had some days off, and as is normal had the chance to do some reading, like you do. I some how read 2 books they were

Plague Ship by Clive Cussler

and

The Borgia Ring by Michael White

both were very easy books to get into and did there job in proving some great entertainment, I read them as a way of whiling away a few hours and that's what they did, neither of the books are presented as anything but a form of entertianmaent and for that they both delivered.