It seems that lots of people were keen to try out iTunes 4.9 and the sheer volume of downloads was why a number of the podcasts were timing out. I tried them today and they all updated fine however there is an intermittent issue where iTunes complains that the podcast isn’t a valid URL, but then an hour or two later it works ok again. Now if I can just figure out how to add some unlisted podcasts to the subscription page, I’ll be sorted.
Author: Simon
Don’t play with your food!
Got sent this link earlier… http://www.octodog.net/
It’s a thoroughly strange product but I guess it makes hotdogs more interesting for kids.
iTunes 4.9 released
The long awaited (well, since the world wide developers conference earlier this month) iTunes 4.9 release is out! The main new feature is support for podcasts through the iTunes music store.
I subscribed through iTunes to a bunch of podcasts that I currently download using iPodder and it timed out fetching half of the files.
Not impressed with Orange
Ok, tried to sort out the online account feature on Orange’s website. Password doesn’t work so I click on the “I’ve forgotten my password” link. Now most places will just email you a new password or a link to a reset your password page, even a bank will send you online banking details in the post for free… but not Orange, you have to phone them.
Faster, faster. Slow.
Having recently been upgraded by NTL to a reasonable 3Mbps cable modem and enjoyed a hefty speed increase, we decided to sign up for one of those 8Mbps Bulldog ADSL accounts at the end of last week. After a week of waiting for the results of the line test, I got a phonecall from them tonight.
New mobile phone
I just recently switched my old Orange number back from a pay-as-you-go to a contract and got a free new phone into the bargain. Having tried a load of phones out in various shops, I finally settled on the Nokia 6822.
Nothing special you might think, it’s just a phone.. but then..
Perl module woes
I tried installing IPTables::IPv4 so that I can manage firewall rules from a perl script but unfortunately the ‘make test’ stage failed in such a way that it setup some rules that blocked all traffic to and from the server! To be honest, that’s a pretty bad module if there’s a chance it might lock you out during the install process!
Some 35 minutes later and everything was working ok again thanks to some swift ticket responses from PoundHost tech support.
Rule #1 (along with all the other #1’s), never do anything firewall related on a remote server unless you have a way to back it out if something goes wrong.
Server gone
I finally decommissioned my old server today. Everything is on the new one which is behaving fine (probably jinxed it now!) I brought the old one home as it’s just a little desktop machine and just right for the kids to use.
Migration of sites
Well, on the whole the migration of the sites from the old server to the new server went relatively smoothly. Just a few minor hiccups with missing Perl modules and permissions on files. I’ve got some pretty looking bandwidth graphs using rrdtool but nothing’s appearing on the mail stats graphs yet.
New server
Due to various reasons, I ordered a dedicated server today from PoundHost. Quite a good spec, plenty of disk space, and 850GB of data transfer per month. Compare that with the current server – limited disk space, was a good spec 2 years ago, and 30GB of data transfer.
The only thing is the 850GB of data includes both inbound and outbound traffic unlike the previous hosting company that only counts outbound traffic.
So far, I’ve been quite impressed by the speed at which the server was setup and how helpful the guys at PoundHost have been. I suspect it’ll be a while before I’m done setting the server up as I’m intending to do things right this time.