h4x   The useless ramblings of a web developer.

The path of optimised code can lead in the opposite direction to that of reusable code.

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!