Archive for the ‘Website’ Category

A Timely Update

As usual, I’ve been very slack in updating this site. This is more of a general catchup post detailing what’s happened between the last post and now.

epic.LAN

With 5 larger events, including our first with over 200 attendees, and 5 smaller events under our belts, epic.LAN is going great and is getting better each time. at epic.FIVE we brought back competitive tournaments with £2,000 prize money on offer.

It was the first outing of the epic.Tournament system which manages almost every aspect of running a tournament. There were some minor problems but overall it worked well. The next event is epic.SIX which has even more money on offer and should be a great summer event!

Work

I’m still working in the Web Development team at Fasthosts, bringing some great products to market. Some of the projects I’ve worked on include Virtual Servers, updated Broadband offering, hosted networks and I’m currently working on a large project that will take me through to the Summer. It’s great place to work with excellent co-workers, fully outfitted break rooms with soft drinks on-tap and a proper coffee machine.

Most of the time I’m writing PHP with the large codebase that makes up our Control Panel being my primary focus. There’s some other internal systems that are PHP based and plenty of Python used as well, so lots of opportunity to learn new things.

Web Development

The past two years have been hectic with epic.LAN taking up most of my own personal time, with the bulk of the development work done for now, I’m looking into getting involved in some open-source projects and some interesting web development for my own amusement. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the likes of BarCamp London 8 and HackCamp and aim to attend a few of these events this year. In the meantime, I’ve set up a projects website for any small and random projects I decide to write.

I’ve also updated my GPS tracking website for the third time in about 5 years. This takes GPS data from an Android phone and plots it on a map alongside Google Latitude and also draws a trail of my position. There’s more details on the website for it.

Upcoming Events

It’s looking to be a busy summer for events, with the following already lined up:

22nd April – Multiplay insomnia42
28th April – DunceLAN 3
6th May – StratLAN
27th May – epic.lite 4
3rd June – LAN 42 1
10th June – Florida Holiday
30th June – StratLAN Summer Party
7th July – British Grand Prix
28th July – epic.SIX
26th August – Multiplay insomnia43

Twitter

As with everyone else in the world, I can be found on Twitter @MurrayMintUK. I tend to tweet irregularly as I’m not partial to blogging or micro-blogging. Feel free to follow and I’ll probably reciprocate.

I’m currently finding Twitter most useful for SMS alerts. Anytime anyone pays for an epic.LAN event, the website automatically tweets to a private Twitter account followed by myself and other members of the epic.TEAM. It’s a really cheap way of mass notifications and was a great place to test Twitter API integration.

That’s it for this post, but stay tuned for I have some good content lined up including some analysis of web development in the year 2011, a defence of PHP against critics and some articles covering the technical side of epic.LAN and what goes on behind the scenes.

GPS Tracker and Ruby on Rails

I’ve finally managed to get Ruby on Rails working in a development environment under Windows using FastCGI. It seems quite responsive with no problems yet. The first task I’ve put it to, is a new section of the site for GPS Tracking.

Insipired by Igloo in #slack and the work-in-progress tracker by Foxdie – trackmygps.co.uk, I have made my own version for this website. It’s just for a single user and only displays the current position and the previous 12 hours of data, but it appears to work quite well on a test trip I made to Uttoxeter and back.

It’s currently a bit clunky, using a laptop, 3G USB adapter and a Bluetooth GPS receiver; but hopefully next month when I get a 3G iPhone I’ll find some software that will work on it!

In the meantime, you can check out the tracker here: http://rails.spaff.co.uk

Downtime and reliability

Well it seems that Prometheus, the colocated server I share with WiseWashu is on it’s last legs. I think the IDE controller is beginning to die in it, which is somewhat of a problem, as it has IDE hard drives. Anyhow, I’ve reformatted it, which is the reason the downtime recently and it seems to have restored some life to the server.

We are planning to get a replacement called ‘Aurora’. It will be a quad-core Xeon with 4GB RAM. A slight upgrade from Prometheus! More updates on this as it comes!

A new look

So it’s about 5 years since my original site was created, and in that time it hasn’t changed much. Social networking has come about, the MyFaceTube generation have arrived and it’s all blogging, tagging and sharing.

I’ve finally given in and switched to WordPress for my website (It is STILL a website) and I’m just in the process of transferring all the old content across. The gallery has also been updated and is now running on zenphoto with LensPic integration. I’ll be adding album titles soon. The theme is modified from the publically available Techmania theme.

The old site is still available at http://dev.murray-mint.co.uk so if you do want to check out the old articles, etc. then they are still there.

Murray-Mint.co.uk

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