dave-smith.co.uk

but also perhaps what you enjoy.

So things changed, in my career, you start out doing one job, you’re perceived as being better than someone else in the business at their job (which whilst related to your job, isn’t what you normally do) so to help out the business and ease personal frustration you take the job and do a sideways shift / shimmy / move.

And while you enjoy the job, it’s not quite the same, not as creative, not as fulfilling.  Now I’m back doing what I used to do, with greater knowledge, a better perspective and enhanced ability, Dave++ if you like.

But importantly it is challenging, and I enjoy it

It’s funny how life works out, at the start of the year I had a vision in my mind of what Wirewool would be, and what it could do, but then as time progressed things changed and the needs and wants of my few clients and my various attempts at networking changed things, instead of becoming some kind of loose collection of talented digital and marketing savvy individuals working for a common goal, it became me. The work I do now is all about me, all about applying the skills I’ve learnt over the years, and I found that my initial thoughts on what I wanted Wirewool to be made me make some stupid decisions. I almost invented time travel to go back in time to 1999 and also forgot to trust my gut feelings, silly. However various discussions with other people and some interesting projects along the way and things are working better, I’ve managed to step back from the problems caused by the earlier choices I made and I’ve stopped my time travelling ways.

Now I’m ensuring that everything I do uses my existing experience, but more importantly builds on it for the better, best of all at the moment I’m back doing some coding (on one of my contracts) and so I’m creating, rather than just getting grumpy and stressed at people.

Wirewool looks like it is all about me, but still is about working with other talented digital and marketing savvy individuals so as Today I Should and Wicked Wolf oh and maybe just maybe I’ll get the Wirewool site sorted soon!

So every 60 seconds on the internet….

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

So I’m doing some interesting stuff at the moment which among other things has me reading up on Open Social which meant installing Shindig which before that (as the implementation I’ll be needing is Java based meant installing Tomcat.

And at this point I realised that nothing had really moved on in terms of servers / technology and setup, I know there is the argument that if you make it simple to do anyone can do it, but it should be a bit easier by now to have Apache / Tomcat running on OSX in harmony without resorting to Google and config file hacking, as it is I’ve just gone for a basic config with Tomcat running on a separate port (as per standard install) and after some memory leak issues (seemingly) have reverted back to running Tomcat as and when needed (to be fair this is more likely to have been as a result of a dodgy build of the site I was testing.

(written ages ago, but never posted)

So after a lot of doing nothing I’ve finally moved my site, nothing wrong with the old hosting company I’ve been using for the last 10 years, just that the level of complexity they offer is no longer needed by me and I’ve been using Rackspace Cloud Sites now for a year for other bits and pieces and so with a large number of bounced emails due to an IP address being blocked it was time to change.

Simples…..
1) Grab the DB from the old server, do some DNS jiggery pokery and then on to a new site build.
2) Into the Rackspace control panel
2.1) add a new domain
2.2) build a MySQL DB (add a user)
2.3) create an email address

We’re now ready for the site build.

I downloaded the latest version of WordPress, uploaded the DB and ran the WP installer, filled in all 4 fields and job done, my site was back, but on new hosting. I decided to grab the plugin’s I wanted and as ever I’m still tinkering with the theme to use.

Oh and I found some useful Word Press tweaks to get the built in updating feature to work.

I added the following to my .htaccess to go above the mod_rewrite stuff

php_value post_max_size 128M
php_value upload_max_filesize 128M
php_value memory_limit 128M
php_value max_execution_time 6000000


Less than an hour to migrate the site including the DNS changes and email setup, happy days.

So is it just me, or is having access to BT Openzone with my iPhone as useful as a chocolate fireguard, I’ve never managed to get a working connection using BT Openzone, in fact the first thing I do when having connection problems on my iPhone is turn off the WiFi as invariably it is connection to Openzone, and can’t do anything, maybe “we” need to create a new version of the UK Snowmap and use it to log BT Openzone #FAILs ?

Oh and on a related subject BT Openzone is not always BT Openzone when it is a BT Fon zone. I must admit I had come across this and never managed to get BT Fon to work either.

People fall for this shit ???

From: UK National Lottery HQ
Subject: Notice!! Form the National Lottery HQ. UK
Date: 7 April 2010 09:33:33 GMT+01:00
Reply-To: diliverycompany@gmail.com
Return-Path:
Envelope-To:
Delivery-Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:33:36 +0100
Received: from mail17.svc.cra.dublin.eircom.net ([159.134.118.216]) by server1.kdaws.net with smtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from
) id 1NzQhc-0004f4-0D for ; Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:33:36 +0100
Received: (qmail 25221 messnum 4285939 invoked from network[86.43.60.104/webmail04.webmail.cra.eircom.net]); 7 Apr 2010 08:33:33 -0000
Received: from webmail04.webmail.cra.eircom.net (HELO webmailclassic.eircom.net) (86.43.60.104) by mail17.svc.cra.dublin.eircom.net (qp 25221) with SMTP; 7 Apr 2010 08:33:33 -0000
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Originating-Ip: 189.3.50.34
X-Mailer: Eircom Net CRC Webmail (http://www.eircom.net/)
Organization: Eircom Net (http://www.eircom.net/)

Office of the UK National Lottery London
Reference Number: UK/910/16454-Official
First Quarter Year Bonanza Notification Mail

The UK National Lottery Online Promotion Board wishes to inform you that your e-mail address have won you the 2010 Award promo lottery prize of 800,000,00 pounds, kindly contact your claims agent Mr. Carton Cole.with details below
1)Your Names:
2)Address:
3)Age:
4)Occupation:
5)Phone no:
6)Country:
7)Amount Won :
8)Reference Number:
9)Sex:

for more details and for due processing email processingunit2010@gmail.com Congrats..

MR. SAMUEL PHILIP.
CLEARING DEPT

So this blog, if not dead is certainly on its knees watching its own blood seeping into the ground… and I’ve been meaning to post stuff up, there is certainly plenty going on, but there is also plenty that I don’t feel I can write about for various reasons… and for this last reason I’ve just taken the easier option of doing fuck all.

So I’ve blamed the blogging tool, tumblr is easier, they certainly have a nice iPhonie app, but then I also use a combination of twitter / facebook to ensure I keep up with my daily quota of inane internet drivel (both of which also have nice iPhone apps) oh and of course my photos are on flickr (there’s an app for that) and then this blog is based on word press (there’s an app for that too)

And so what to do? I want to post (something) once and have it appear on appropriate sites, I want also to the win the lottery.

Oh and seeing as I forgot to mention it here just after it happened I’m dad again, Nell was born on the 30th November 2009

Blimey, I really have been shit.

Ok going from 6.0.2 -> 6.0.5 NE on RHEL 4.x (Yes I know that the next major version won’t support 4.x) and I was hoping for a nice smooth upgrade, the previous SSL Comercial cert problems now showing as fixed in the bugtracker, however at the end of the process and I’m getting the same “Expired Cert” warning messages from email clients and the like….

So as root

cd /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr deploycrt comm commercial.6.0.2/commercial/commercial.crt commercial.6.0.2/commercial/commercial_ca.crt

Restart the services using ZMProv and all is good.

So quickly found a new theme which is fairly customisable, need to track down some nice header images now and maybe play with the colouring… progress (sort of)