I’ve been trying out a few things in mod_perl just recently, getting together a small basic framework that handles sessions and generates an entire site (apart from images) from a bunch of Perl modules. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be but I’ve got the basic code working now.
Next step is security of session data.
urbandead -> server dead
Kevan’s new site http://www.urbandead.com/ was mentioned on Metafilter and as such has managed to bring the server to a crawl for the last couple of nights. Seems Apache running suexec, running perl, running the main script on the site isn’t so helpful.
Server upgrade
Decided to upgrade the server this site runs on to 2GB of RAM today. Kevan (who writes some interesting things) launched a new game at http://www.urbandead.com/ in the last week or so and the server was creaking a little under the weight of all the hits but mainly due to the amount of memory allocated to buffers in MySQL.
The RSS feed – the what?
RSS – Real Simple Syndication. It’s a way for me to publish my blog entries (but it could be anything really) that can be read by another site for inclusion into their pages. One example might be a news site that publishes an RSS feed so that you can include the latest headlines in a small box on the side of your main page.
Lori’s Graduation Ceremony
It’s official. Lori now has a degree – a B.A. (Hons) Fine Arts. The graduation ceremony was today and it took less time than I thought it would. It was held in the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham city centre and inside it was absolutely packed with all the students in the bottom level and everyone else upstairs.
Harry Potter (again)
Well, the latest book in the Harry Potter series has been out for a few days. I actually heard about it in a podcast I was listening to on Saturday morning (16th July) whilst on my way to Tesco for some groceries. I went into Tesco and right in front of the entrance was a huge pallet full of copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince being sold for a mere £7.97. I was going to order a copy from Amazon but figured since I was there anyway and it was quite a reasonable price I might as well get it from Tesco.
Targetted advertising
Thought I’d put my Google Adsense code into a couple of my old web games to see what they come up with…
Rock, Paper, Scissors – a web version of the classic game.
Throw a snowball – Seasonal script that lets you throw snowballs at people over email.
The adverts on the rock paper scissors page were for wrapping paper and the snowball ads appear to be for a C/C++ programming service and an online shoe shop.
Comment spam
It’s been a few weeks now since the last comment was posted. Either the changes I made to the comment system have broken the whole lot, or else it’s defeated the spammers finally. Hopefully it’s the latter option!
Wish I could remember what I did to the comment system!
Mobile phone listing on eBay
Andy sent me this link earlier via instant messaging…
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6410585172
A very amusing eBay item listing.
Trip to Skegness
We decided, rather spur of the moment, to go to the beach on Sunday afternoon and ended up going to Skegness since we’d never been there before.
Not a bad beach really – it was quite quiet considering it was a pleasant Sunday afternoon. I was expecting there to be more kids around.