matthewkenny.com

So, I thought I’d ease into what will (hopefully) be another flurry of posting activity with a quick update on what’s been going on here recently.  If you’ve read through earlier posts on this blog then you may well know that I started working at bit10 in September 2007.  I’ve had a fantastic time working at bit10; I’ve learned a great deal and met many people with whom I’m hoping to keep in contact.  However, as with all things, I think that it’s become time to move on.

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I figured that it’s about time I put some more stuff on here; the poor blog has been stagnating since September, which just isn’t good.  I’ve been telling myself that it’s because work keeps me so busy, but that’s a lie because I always find time to play on Mario Kart.

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I know I mentioned this in an earlier article, but I really thought that it merited its own post.

bit10 arranged to have a “Team Building” day at Alton Towers. Fortunately for me, I started early enough to get a ticket. The plan was to have everybody meet at the front gates by 9.30am, so I managed to arrange to get a lift with fellow developers Craig and Gareth at around 8am. Unfortunately, events conspired against us, and we didn’t make it to the park until about 10.30 (among the conspiratorial events was the failure of Craig’s satnav thingie, so we had to rely upon my directions until we started seeing road signs).

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I really am terrible with keeping track of my passwords. I decided that it was high time I get back to updating my little corner of the internet, and lo and behold, I couldn’t remember either my username or my password to get into the admin section of WordPress. Not to be beaten, I decided to go and manually alter the database record for my user (don’t worry, my dear registered users, the passwords are stored as MD5 hashes, so you don’t need to worry about me finding out your passwords… unless anyone would like to give me a nice eight Xeon behemoth?). Anyhow, I got to the login page for that and realised that I’d forgotten -those- as well. Feeling terribly embarrassed, I had to go to the DreamHost control panel (which I could remember my login details for, fortunately) and reset things from there.

The moral of the story: update my blog more frequently so this sort of thing doesn’t happen. :)

As you may already know if you checked the site in the last few weeks, I recently changed web hosts. My old host (portugalnetworks.com) wasn’t too bad, it was incredibly cheap ($12 [~£6] for a whole year), but the server performance reflected the price, unfortunately – downtime was high, along with the various other problems. So, I changed. I moved to DreamHost, which is admittedly significantly more expensive, but provides much more in terms of features – see for yourself

I can’t resist my inbuilt student moneygrabbing tendencies, so I’ll just say: if you do find yourself thinking about signing up, put me as your referrer :D. I’ll leave it at that.

Anyways, I decided to go with WordPress this time, rather than b2Evo, because it offers much better anti-spam facilities, as that was becoming a nuisance toward the end of January. So, now that I’ve got something up, I may even find myself updating a bit more often than I did in my site’s previous incarnation.