Phill Sacre

Category: Techy Stuff

Stuff to do with computers or the website – most of you probably won’t be interested…

  • Before the Storm…

    The last three weekends have been pretty busy for us – we’ve been up in Colchester (or thereabouts) for various reasons! We had a great time seeing friends and family and generally catching up with people.

    However, as of yesterday Mrs Phil is 37 weeks pregnant – which means that, if the baby is born any time from now on, it will be considered full term. We have now acquired everything we need for the baby (thanks in large part to the generosity of friends) – just one or two non-essentials we need to get for the hospital bag and we’re all set. It’s a weird feeling to say to people “the next time we see you… we’ll have a baby!”

    Add to this the fact that the first term of my final year at Oak Hill starts next week, and you’ll understand that I may not have very much time for blogging in the coming weeks and months!

    So this is an advance warning that things may get pretty quiet around here for a while, but for good reasons 🙂 I’ll at least try to post up when the baby is born and occasional progress updates, with maybe something more controversial now and then…

  • Site Update: Comments

    Apologies for site-related updates! I have decided to close comments automatically on posts which are older than 30 days old. In general this is because the only comments I get on old blog posts are spam, and this is an attempt to try and curtail that. Akismet is pretty good at catching most spam comments, but one or two still slip through the net.

    If you do happen to want to comment on an old blog post… I’m sorry. If I’m honest, I’m less convinced that comments are a good thing than I used to be. Anyway, feedback is still good, but it just has to be within 30 days unless there’s a particular reason!

    If you want to contact me, there’s always the contact page…

  • Quick Review: Samsung Galaxy S Advance

    On Friday I arrived back home to find my new phone had been delivered (well, it had been delivered next door and I had to pick it up, but still.): a Samsung Galaxy S Advance. This is to replace my HTC Wildfire, which I’ve had for the past couple of years. I bought it on the strength of reading an excellent review of it a couple of weeks ago.

    Although I’ve only had the phone for a couple of days now, I decided to post up a quick review, given the pace with which mobiles seem to change and develop (it’s no use me posting a review after using the phone for a few months!). As such, this isn’t really a “how well does the phone cope over time” kind of review, but just my first impressions as well as a comparison with my experiences of an HTC Android for two years.

    I’ll look at the pros and cons, starting with the cons:

    (more…)

  • Is Twitter making us dumb and angry?

    Every few years, it seems to be an unwritten rule that the newspapers have to have a scare about dumbing down, e.g. GCSE results now don’t mean as much as they used to back in the good old days. Now, whether they have a point or not I can’t say, but it does seem to me that a lot of it is alarmism: things aren’t really as bad as all that, the “good old days” were never that good, etc.

    That said, I have been thinking a bit about Twitter recently, and how it affects communication. Twitter, if you’ve never got into the craze (and have had your head buried under a rock for the past few years – in which case, how are you even reading this?!) is a social media service where you can send messages to your ‘followers’, people who subscribe to your updates, as long as the messages are 140 characters or less.

    In many respects this has been an absolute revolution – but, frankly, lots of people have written about it far more eloquently and intelligently than I ever could. What I’d like to look at is one aspect of Twitter usage which I’ve become more and more disturbed by over the past few months (and years – it’s been building for a long time).

    (more…)

  • Coding and Lyric Display

    Well, it’s that time of year again. I’ve started a little coding project, this time to do with Lyric Display. In Java. *sigh* Why do I do this to myself?!

    To be fair, I started it last year – I’ve just picked it up again and refactored it a fair bit. I checked my Google Code repository, and according to the Subversion logs I first started on the project in October 2010. The interesting thing is, I’ve started a new project every single October for about the past four years (since I’ve had my Google Code repository):

    • 2008: A short-lived project using ExtJS to basically create a Javascript / PHP version of an Outlook-style email client;
    • 2009: jMonopoly – a short-lived Java version of a Monopoly game.
    • 2010: This short-lived lyric display project…

    Spot a bit of a pattern going on there? I tend to work on them for a few weeks and then give up. (Probably getting into the Christmas rush at that time, also losing interest…)

    Interspersed with all these things is a Java desktop app I wrote to upload sermons to the Fordham website (a script I blogged about when it was merely a Python script) – although to be fair I only imported that to Subversion in the summer so I don’t know exactly when that was started.

    I don’t know what it is about this time of year which drives me to the keyboard… I wonder whether (in the past) it’s been to do with the post-summer slump at work, or something like that. I think this year it was more because the chapel computer at Oak Hill broke down and we currently have no lyric projection software, which made me think of what I’d done last year. If it gets anywhere I might release it as Open Source, because there aren’t enough open source lyric projection packages knocking around already… (to be fair, I don’t think there are any in Java).

    Anyway, I thought this might give you an insight into my mind. Or not. Either way, I’m not sure I like it, and I’m not sure I really want to post it on my blog… *clicks ‘Publish’*

  • Website admin complete

    Just wanted to say that all the website admin stuff I mentioned in my previous post is now complete. In case you’re curious about what I’ve done, here’s a quick post with an explanation. Maybe it will help someone who was in a similar situation to me (i.e., paying for hosting you don’t need).

    Previously I’ve hosted my site on a hosting package provided by Prime Hosting. This was costing me about £60 per year (I don’t think the same package is available now, I originally set it up in about 2005 and haven’t updated it since). I was also paying about £12 every two years for the phillsacre.me.uk domain name.

    I’ve been questioning whether this is entirely necessary of late – I think I even blogged about this but can’t find it where… the problem is, what is the point of paying around £60 per year for hosting what is basically a blog when you can get a free blog on WordPress.com? I couldn’t really answer that question satisfactorily – in the past I’d used my site to host things such as DJ mixes, but these days there are loads of free services which can do stuff like that and there are also what seem like hundreds of free blogging services. In other words, I was paying out for stuff I didn’t really need.

    So, the key question is, what have I done, and how much am I now paying? Well, I’ve done a few things:

    • Transferred the domain name over to 123-reg.co.uk, who are usually fairly good at domain name pricing. But the main thing is, with 123-reg you get flexibility – I now own the domain separately to the hosting, so I can choose to do as I like with it.
    • I’ve set up a new blog with WordPress (free account) – I was using WordPress before, so it was dead easy to export and then import my site over. Hence, I transferred about eight years worth of blog posts to this site without much effort!
    • I’ve bought an addon for my WordPress account which lets you use your own domain name – this is costing around £8 per year (USD 12).
    • Finally, to be able to handle e-mail I’ve created an account with Google Apps (free for personal use), which means I get the benefits of GMail with my @phillsacre.me.uk e-mail address.
    Pretty nifty, huh? So there you go, that’s how I moved from traditional web-hosting to “the cloud”, or whatever you call it 😉