steven-dowd.co.uk

But…

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Saturday evening we went to a family party, It was a Dunbar event, a surprise party for my wife’s Uncle Peter Dunbar, who is visiting from Australia, had a really good time, and the music was provided by Peters brother, Terry Dunbar, Singing and playing guitar with his pal Colin Guthrie on guitar.

I will put some more of the video clips of them onto my youtube account later, there a tremendously musical family, and really know how-to have a family party.

I am not normally superstitious, I have never been someone to worry that its Friday 13th, but yesterday, it was that day, and yesterday I had loads of hassle and bad luck, so maybe there is something in this superstition lark after all..

1. One of my canon lenses seems to have failed, the internal motor which does the auto focus, just buzz’s and doesnt do anything else, seems to have stripped a gear or slipped somehow internally, this is really annoying, as I just checked Sigma’s website, and they charge 39 quid, just to take a look at a lens, then for work on the motor another 40 quid, and then add any parts onto that.   I bought the bloody lens second-hand for 100 quid over a year ago, so the cost to fix is almost the same as looking for another one,,,  but i don’t have the money for one, so that’s that.
2. Recently I upgraded one of my failing hard drives, bad sectors on a 120 gig drive, with a brand new 400 gig drive, and yes, you guessed it, yesterday it started knocking, it also has bad sectors, and it seems to be just ‘trying to die’ .     It does have a guarantee, so at least I know it will get replaced FOC, but, what’s more annoying is, this ‘new’ drive is where I placed all my stitched panorama’s from the recent Lady Hill excavation, I did write DVD copies of the images, and gave copies to Bob and Mark Olly, .. now it looks like I am going to have to ask for copies back of my own DVD’s, because the bad sectors seem to be right across the section that hold the images, and most simply do not open anymore… so that’s that.
3. My web server decided to have a white page day, it ran out of resources, with little or no allocation of memory left it just started to display white pages, I spent around 3 hours attempting to solve the problems, restarting services, killing connections from yahoo and Google’s search bots, watching error logs etc, nothing I did seemed to help, the memory situation just got worse, I eventually got the support staff at the host involved, thinking I had missed something, or started some stupid looped process, but it turned out it was someone else, who has a VPS hosting account in the same shared server, who had major configuration issues, which was pulling the resources from all the other shared accounts, and effecting everyone, not just myself.  

   The problem is the Shared resources, I am on a shared server, I would love to upgrade to a dedicated server, but cannot afford it, I got a quote yesterday afternoon of 150 dollars per month for a dedicated server, 1800 dollars per year, at the moment i only pay 599 dollars per year, and at the moment, i don’t even have half that saved for next years hosting bill, so 1800, or 1200 more, is just out of reach… think i need to start begging

So Friday 13th was a crap day, maybe i should have seen it coming, maybe its time to take more notice of superstition

I really do not know why, but Yahoo’s search bots have been hammering my server for the last 24 hours, so much so, pointlessly, and taking no notice at all of the robot.txt that i have just added the who class c to iptable’s and banned the lot of them.

Why the hell Yahoo seem to ignore the robot text file when every other crawl bot seems to work ok, totally defeats me

Anyway, it was less hassle to just ban them, if it means getting f=dropped from the yahoo search system, then that’s no big deal, because most of the sites I have on the server get 95% of their hits from Google searched results

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Well, its taken me years to get round to putting anything at all on this domain, and even now, I still do not know what’s going to be here. I made some categories, Blog Stuff, LOcal Stuff, Web Stuff and Pano Stuff, anything I write must fit into one. .. maybe I should add Family Stuff. Lets see how it turns out, and work on it ‘as it appens’. Steven Dowd

Fot the last week my server seems to have been hassled by hackers, they most always seem to be using the same system, cross site scripting, and luckily they havn’t managed to get into the system, but what a waste of time it is for me, having to keep everything upto-date just to stop these dickheads getting in. it’s a hassle I don’t need.

Its been ages since I last posted anything, no real reason why, just didnt think to.

I did manage to transfer the whole of my Newton-le-Willows website into Joomla, lost a few things but otherwise the whole thing went ok

At first I setup the forums as smf joomlaboard forums, but they just never seemed to work correctly, so after a few days struggling, i decided to plump for a change to phpbb, the change of the forums from Xforum to pnForum then through to Joomlaboard and ending with phpbb had its moment, but eventually 3500+ posts were all working well.

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Today has been one of those days, firstly i didnt feel too great, so that wasn’t good, but then just as I sat at the keyboard to do my morning email check, i felt a drip of water on the keys, looked up to see that we have developed a leak in the roof overnight, and the constant driving rain which seems to have been a feature of the last few days, has managed somehow to get through the roof, to drip exactly on my keyboard. With help from a good friend, Mark Vardy, and from my Father, the roof was taken out, and the roof space made available, all that has to be done now is to trace the wet spots back to wherever the water is first getting in and to seal the spot. Hopefully this will be sooner rather than later..