D4D Performance
Posted: Fri 25 December, 2015 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology 1 Comment »This year, D4D’s performance as a site hasn’t been that great. I’d noticed a lot of times when pages timed out, or seemed to get lost along the way, but couldn’t find what was causing it, despite looking hard on several occasions.
Last week, I finally found what the problem was – and it wasn’t in something I’d done, which was nice. More importantly, it also wasn’t something that was showing up in code or settings – because it was a plugin that wasn’t doing what it had been told to, for whatever reason.
I’ve got a security plugin on D4D that’s supposed to take automatic backups, to add some safety and recovery to the site. That was set to take a backup every week, and to only store three backups, then overwriting the oldest.
Except that wasn’t what was happening. Somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong, and it turned out that it was taking a full database backup (with a different filename each time, so no over-writing etc.) every fifteen minutes. Then storing them in a folder that was hidden away in a non-obvious location, with a non-helpful filename.
Even on a server that says it’s got unlimited space, that was taking the piss. It was making the server work extra-hard for no good reason, and causing a whole load of problems.
I finally found it all, and ended up both deleting the old files, as well as killing off the backup task completely. (I’ve written my own automated job now which is working fine, and not causing any problems. The moral of the story? Don’t trust other people’s code.)
Since doing that, I haven’t seen the site crash. I’m hoping that the problems are now fixed, the stability will improve, and that 2016 will be a much better year for D4D™
Fingers crossed.
An Organised Christmas
Posted: Thu 24 December, 2015 Filed under: Domestic, Festering Season, Getting Organised, People, Shopping, Shopping Leave a comment »
It’s well-known that I’m not the greatest fan of the Festering Season. I do observe it and sort things out for family and closest friends, but still tend to avoid the overboard hysteria of the entire season. There’s a whole number of reasons for being this way, and I can’t be arsed with going into them on this. It’s a subject that’s been pretty much done to death anyway.
This year,the run-up to the Festering Season has all been remarkably organised and gone very smoothly, which is a thing of joy.
Everything possible was done, bought, organised, and (where necessary) posted or delivered a couple of weeks ago. The only thing that remained – albeit in two stages – was food-based, getting the week’s food order in, and then today collecting the final pre-ordered bits, which was all done at Antisocial O’clock this morning, when the roads and shops were still blissfully empty.
I hate food shopping in the week before Christmas – the shops are just full of tosspots going mad because the shops are going to be closed for a whole 30 hours. I never understood why there always seem to be more people at Christmas, all of whom are buying more. Surely if it’s all about entertaining and having guests, there’d be half the number of people but buying twice as much? Only it doesn’t work out that way.
Internet-based shopping (and delivery thereof) has made this whole process as painless as possible. So long as you’re organised, you can book a slot in the week up to Christmas, order everything you know you want, and that’s it. Yes, there’s the slight roulette of out-of-stock items and so on, but that’s more about luck and timing than anything else. In my case, I got the delivery on Monday and everything I’d ordered was in stock and all was easy and fine. Indeed, the worst thing about it was that I had to lock the cats out of the living room while everything was delivered, which disturbed them quite a lot – I don’t think they’d actually realised the door could be closed, let alone be closed with them on The Other Side.
Collecting the final pre-ordered bits today was also painless – in and out, no hassles.
It really is a most civilised way to do things.
Time Commitments
Posted: Wed 23 December, 2015 Filed under: Domestic, Single Life, Television, Thoughts Leave a comment »Every year, there’s a couple of TV programmes I end up committing way too much time to. I do watch/record a number of things, but they’re not what I mean.
In both cases, the series are on every day, which takes time away from doing other stuff. Most of the other things I watch are an hour a week, but when they’re an hour a day it takes away from everything else. And of course it would be a shedload easier if it weren’t the case that both series tend to be on at the same time of year.
This year it’s been two Masterchef programmes – the Australian version, and the one for UK Professionals.
I love the Aussie one – someone else I know described it as “If you want to know everything about Australia in one programme, watch that“, and it’s absolutely true. Totally different to the UK version, much more fun, and a far, far nicer programme. But dear God, it’s a commitment – this most recent series has had no less than 62 programmes. Five days a week, for nearly three months. That’s a long haul.
The UK Professionals one is also interesting, for different reasons. It’s also less of a bind, as it’s only five or six weeks, but still three days a week. I find the different levels of professional cooking etc. to be fascinating, as well as the restaurants, chefs and challenges.
Both programmes have come to a close this week, and while I’m sad that they’ve finished, I can’t help but also think “Yay, I get more time!”
School Internet Tracking
Posted: Tue 22 December, 2015 Filed under: Cynicism, Education, News, Politics, Thoughts Leave a comment »Interesting to see today that there are new proposals to monitor the internet usage of all school pupils, ‘to prevent radicalisation’. (Because yeah, of course that’ll work)
It’s interesting to me, because I’d thought that was in place already – certainly at least twenty years ago, Research Machines did a whole internet-monitoring and dubious-link-blocking system, and I’d kind-of assumed that was the de-facto standard for schools even now. Apparently not.
It was certainly one of the strangest temp/contract jobs I’ve ever had – I worked for RM for three months, and the job description was to spend that time finding dodgy sites, so they could be added to the blacklist, and RM’s firewalls would then block those sites from being seen. So yes, the job was basically to look for porn. It was a challenge, honest. *cough* (Having looked, RM do still do ‘online safety’ stuff for schools, so I wonder why it’s not the standard. Maybe they’re priced themselves out of the market, or there’s just more companies that do it, and their market-share has shrunk. I dunno)
However, I don’t think it’ll be easy to do anything that will block the access now. There are too many routes – and any vaguely tech-savvy child will be able to go outside the school-enforced network on their own devices etc. Sure, you can lock a school-owned device (computer, iPad etc.) to the school network – but you can’t do the same for their own devices. On those, there’s always public wi-fi, and even ‘just’ the usual 3G/4G connection. And whatever internet access is available at home, and anywhere else.
Also, as with so much of this ‘monitoring’ crap, I’m sure it’ll only be of use once something has happened. There’s nothing that can proactively monitor these things, or flag up significant warnings beforehand. All the monitoring can do is provide a record, to say “This is what they looked at before they did something that brought them to our attention”, in true “locking the stable-door once the horse has bolted” style. As usual.
A Christmas Lunch
Posted: Tue 22 December, 2015 Filed under: Festering Season, Work-related Leave a comment »Weirdly, today I’m going to a Christmas Lunch with my current client company. It was completely unexpected – I’ve heard them talking about it on the days I’ve been in their office for the last month, but hadn’t been invited. Fine by me, it’s hardly something I’m going to take offence at.
But last week the boss invited me, and changed my day in the office in order for me to be there. At which point it’s kind of churlish to refuse. (Even by my standards)
So there we go – my fourth work-based Christmas thing ever. At least it’s only a lunch thing.
Solsticial
Posted: Mon 21 December, 2015 Filed under: Depression, Festering Season, Health, SAD, Weather Leave a comment »Happily, today is the Winter Solstice for 2015 – the shortest day, the longest night. (technically it’s tomorrow at 4.20am, but traditionally it’s today, the 21st, so I’m sticking with that)
From here, the days get longer – and that’s always a good thing. I suspect the impact of it will be lessened this year, as we’ve had such a stunningly warm December anyway, whereas the impact is always greater when November and December have been consistently grey and crap.
The day’s won’t feel longer it for a while – the increase is only seconds until at least the new year – but just knowing that it’s happening is A Good Thing.
And once the Festering Season is over and done with, it’s all improvements from there.
Lists
Posted: Mon 21 December, 2015 Filed under: 2015/16, D4D™, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Introspective Leave a comment »As we come to the end of 2015, I’m spending some time making notes, lists, and plans for what I want to get done in 2016. It’s not resolutions or anything similar, but I’ve found over the last couple of years that having lists for things helps me to keep it all straight in my head over the year.
The lists aren’t hard-and-fast structures, more like reminders and ‘this is the stuff you wanted to do’ – but it’s a method that I’ve found to be working pretty well for me. I never used to think it would, that I’m not that organised and so on, but it’s been a surprise.
I don’t know if it’s usual, but I have two formats for the lists – my day-to-day ones sit on the mobile, but the bigger plans for the year tend to sit in my Notebook Of Doom.
A lot of the difference is in how things get crossed off, if I’m honest. Day-to-day “what I’m doing this week” works with just a tick gesture on the phone list, and that’s fine. But there’s more of an emotional and mental ‘achievement’ when it comes to physically crossing things off on a piece of paper, in a notebook, it’s a gesture of finality, of “done that”, which I really like.
Even though I don’t necessarily write about everything on here any more (and there’s some thoughts about that, which I’ll probably write and update over the Festering Season) and I certainly won’t list everything here, there’s a lot of stuff on the lists for 2016, which needs some thought and prioritising a bit.
I tend to over-load the lists too, give myself more on the plans than I’m likely to actually manage. But I’d rather have items as a backup for if I get everything done, or when a planned thing turns out to be unattainable and it’s time for Plan B/C/D.
Regardless, I’m looking forward to crossing off a lot of those items.