h4x   The useless ramblings of a web developer.

I’ve just completed a move to new hosting on www.bit-tech.net. The site was previously hosted in Texas, USA but since we all work in the UK we’ve moved the site to servers just down the road from the office. The powerful quad core servers are also structured slightly differently than the previous setup. Instead of having separate apache/php web servers for the forums and site we now have one powerful apache/php server running the site, forums and shopping with a separate lighttpd server for images. The hope is that dynamic pages will still load promptly whilst we’re getting dugg or slashdotted as previously the apache connections were being blocked up with image downloads.

I’ve also moved my blog and hosting for h4x.co.uk to the same UK hosting company and I’ve just updated my wordpress install to the latest version which is very fancy.

Not only that but we’ve also moved offices. Since TrustedReviews was acquired by IPC media bit-tech has found new offices and we moved in on Monday 1st April 2008. You will find images and words on the topic here.

That’s all for now!

Google has now updated and bit is now being indexed on google.co.uk (pages from the UK) despite being hosted in the United States. It remains to see whether this increases the percentage of UK readers on the website, but logic dictates that it should.

For a while now we’ve been banging about the office the problem of getting our website listed on google.co.uk with the ‘pages from the uk’ option ticked. The rough aim is to increase the UK traffic to www.bit-tech.net. So we bit the bullet last friday and switched the geographic target to United Kingdom in Google webmaster tools. Results will follow…  

I previously posted that I was working on bit’s new price comparison website and I can now report that it’s ready for you to use to track down the best prices.

Price comparison seems to be a popular web exercise these days. There are so many people doing it that you almost can’t google a product name without seeing at least 5 different comparison sites.

At bit-tech.net we are no different, we have our own price comparison site built from the PriceGrabber API.

I am currently overhauling the code and look and feel of the site since it looks like ass. Stay tuned for the news when it’s released later this month.

Download Hiren’s BootCD to fix your computer.

I’ve decided to make a list of all the things I don’t like about Leopard or features that I feel are missing.

1. You can’t stack or grid a saved search if you put it in the dock.
2. You can’t drag items from the sidebar to the dock.
3. Resizing finder windows when in coverflow view expands coverflow and not the dir listing

The BBC have written an article about video game driving simulators and realism. Now this would be fine had they actually featured a game that was slightly realistic rather than PGR4 which never claims to be realistic. They don’t even mention Forza Motorsport 2 (I’ll give them a point for getting GT5 in there though).

Terrible journalism.

OMG THERE IS NOT A BUG!!

The FOV is the same on widescreen for a reason!

Memcache has been a core part of my web programming lately and it’s one of the most flexible and useful systems ever come across.

Think for a second about the process when two people request the same dynamic page on a website. The code rendering one request has no idea that there is another request for the same page so effectively you do the whole process twice. Let’s also imagine that this request pulls a huge list of data out of a massive table that takes a while to query. In an ideal world the dbms should cache the query and the second request should be faster. In reality, and with a simple dbms both sets of data are returned in the same time. Now say one hundred other people also request that same page over the next few minutes, are we going to keep calling that data out of the database from the hard disk or is there a better way?

This is where memcache comes into it’s own. If, after pulling the data out of the database, it is placed in memory and not destroyed after the page is rendered it can be retrieved next time we want the same data. Hey presto, we can now serve thousands more requests per second as we are no longer asking for data from the database, we have exactly what we want waiting in memory.

Memcache isn’t without it’s problems, what if we change what’s in the database. Our version in memcache is now out of date. Thankfully we have set an expiry time on things that we give to memcache, so it falls out of memory after a period of time. What if your data is time sensitive? As with many things I am working on it is important that things happen at certain times rather than just waiting for things to fall out of memory. This is one problem I am currently working on and something I will cover in future.