I was looking at some of my old bookmarks today and came across Technorati. Normally when I bookmark something, I rarely revisit it, and yet the sites I don’t bookmark are normally the ones I want to go back to several weeks later.
Anyway, the next post (after this one) is the one that should help me claim my blog within Technorati.
What is a “Ding dong server” ?
I was checking the pages on Shartak tonight having recently added some new functionality (a Pirate class) and came across the most bizarre google advert.
Greasemonkey
Up until now I’ve normally used Safari when browsing the web on my mac, but today I decided to try something new and installed the latest version of Firefox and an extension called Greasemonkey from http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/. Greasemonkey allows you to run javascript on certain pages (or all pages) to allow for user interface alterations and processing of page content.
Hard disks
I’m utterly amazed at how much hard disk prices have dropped in the last year or two. I was just browsing dabs.com and noticed a 500GB hard disk. I’ve seen disks of that capacity before but the price caught my eye – £195 inc VAT!
Maxtor 500GB disk
MediaWiki database compression
Recently I’ve been taking daily backups of a 4.2GB mediawiki (v1.5.6) database, about 3.9GB of which was in the ‘text’ table. It was all the previous versions of pages that were taking up the space so having looked at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Reduce_size_of_the_database I decided to give deleteOldRevisions.php a go.
Harry and his scooter
We finally managed to find somewhere (JJB Sports) that had the right sized helmet and knee/elbow pads for Harry that didn’t look too childish so today we went to the local park and let him ride on his scooter that he had for Christmas.
Shartak revisited
Following some recent advertising on Urban Dead and the removal of the 300 player limit, Shartak now has over 650 players and things are starting to get interesting.
Shartak
For the last few months I’ve been working on a web-based multiplayer game set on an island where you have to explore, fight animals, and watch out for strangers. It’s an MMORPG similar in style to Urban Dead but with a different theme.
The name of both the game and the island, is Shartak and it can be found at http://www.shartak.com/
NTL 10 meg hiccups
Since we were upgraded to the 10 meg service, there have been a number of problems with the connection freezing. Reset the cable modem by pulling out the power cable, and it starts working again fine immediately. Having jumped through the hoops held by NTL’s broadband tech support such as swapping the ethernet cable, trying it with a single PC instead of the small home network, and insisting that it only started happening since the upgrade, we finally managed to get an engineer out.
Christmas has come early
Thanks to NTL, we’re now enjoying the wonders of 10Mbps broadband. There was some doubt as to whether it would actually get upgraded before Christmas as various sites (such as BBC News and The Register) had reported earlier in the year but NTL came through as promised.