Sometimes I check out other hosting and VPS providers, mostly as some kind of procrastination. The latest company I looked at had some alarming claims, contradicted by their Acceptable Use Policy. I’m going to take the opportunity to outline these for you. They’re fairly common amongst hosting and VPS providers and proof that you need [...]

Once again I was checking StatCounter – it’s my source for knowing which browsers I must test in. On that note, Woo hoo! Internet Explorer 6 is about 1% in the UK! RIP, please. The point however, is Opera. There are a few trends on the statistics and popular sites such as ZDNet: It’s all [...]

Well, it’s happened. An extremely stupid, incompetent and mis-informed judge has ordered BT to block Newzbin via their CleanFeed system. CleanFeed was there for a reason and he’s just, not legitimised as such, but given those for whom CleanFeed was intended, plausible deniability for their reasons to bypass the block. I’m simply aghast at the [...]

I’m a bit late with this one, because I’ve had to collect my thoughts. Firstly, let me say that I… I am sorry for his family and friends, and their suffering and loss. His demise is a loss to the IT community, to some degree, and I would not have wished him dead. Ultimately he [...]

I’ve just been reading ZDNet, as I often do. It’s a pretty good source for technology news. The bias is extreme, but it’s extreme in all camps which balances itself. Infact, not one to recommend news sources in general, if you haven’t subscribed to their daily news, you should. Thanks to ZDNet, I’ve been notified [...]

DigiNotar are a Dutch certificate authority that were hacked recently. Their role in the grand scheme of the internet is to provide certificates allowing secure connections to websites (SSL/HTTPS as used on shopping websites etc). The hackers generated a number of fraudulent certificates and used them as part of an elaborate hack against Iranian Gmail [...]

Yesterday, the Amazon EC2 Europe service suffered a major outage due to lightning. Yes, lightning is a terrible thing, but isn’t the point of the cloud based services “reliability”? Surely they wouldn’t have all their metaphorical European eggs in one basket? Surely the loss of ONE major data centre wouldn’t cause an issue at all. [...]

This isn’t really about Java. Yes, it’s the most popular language in the world, but I still dislike bytecode languages. The irony that I’m an expert PHP developer does not apply, as it’s an interpreted language which is a different level. Besides, I’m also an experienced x86 assembler programmer too. The main issue in this [...]

Do you live in the USA and want to get a Spotify Free invite? I have 9 available and will send them on a first-come-first-served basis. If you want an invite, leave a comment on this blog entry and make sure your email address is correct.