I’ve been running wordpress to power my blog now for around 2 years. I’ve found the platform to be stable, reliable, extensible and easy to maintain. For my hosting I’ve stuck with 1&1 for this time, but after price rise after price rise, and watching the competition cutting costs and increasing space, I’ve had enough. Hosting is costing me at the moment over £10 ppm, and with competitors such as goDaddy offering much more in the way of features I”ve decided I’m ready to jump ship, in fact, I’m standing with a leg on each ship at this very moment.
Sheddan.info is bought up and sitting on 150GB of godaddy space, with 1.5TB a month of transfer, and I’m starting the long task of migrating over. I’ll be honest, in terms of technolgy I’ve done a bit of everything, but I’ve never migrated a domain. I want to keep continuity for the site, but I need to have everything running over on goDaddy within 6 months (I’ve just paid the last bill im going to to 1&1 :-) So I’ve started the planning. I’ll be stripping the site a little, removing the plugins and such, in 2-3 weeks I’m going to start mirroring articles at sheddan.info, and shortly after will hope that sheddan.co.uk repoints to the new space. When that’s done, I’ll run the sites in tandem, until once I have learned how I’ll copy the database accross to the new space, and shut down the 1&1 webspace. I’ll keep you posted
I’ve been working for Alcatel-Lucent (through NCR) training for the opening of their new NOC facility for the EMEA market. The desk is based in Glasgow (well just outside- but close enough) and goes online sometime in April. I am currently undertaking my ACSE (Alcatel Certified Systems Engineer) qualification directly from Alcatel and will be fully certified by August of this year. Sorry for the short post but I’ve been swamped and want to keep things up to date without taking an age.
Well after a couple of soft launches - the BBC has finally launched the iPlayer service to the general public- and I must say I’m very impressed. It launched poorly earlier in the year but that was quickly called off but second time lucky as they say.
The service launched over the Christmas period, which I think is a really clever time to do such a thing. People are drunk, visiting at parties- and all the good TV for Christmas will encourage these users to use the service. There was quite a heavy promo campaign on over the festive period and beyond, and with the numbers being reported by theregister and the BBC themselves it looks like at last one red brinks media institution has gotten the TV on demand thing cracked.
The interesting thing for me, is that being a Mac user I am left out of the downloading goodness - that is, I can only stream the video off the iplayer website thanks to the wonder of H264 in flash. What’s actually really impressive about the streaming service - is that even if the downloads were available on the OSX platform - I doubt I’d use them. The video quality is more than acceptable, and for the moment I think we have to look at this as the first stake in the ground on a product/arena that is going to get better the more people use it (its a P2P system so more users = better experience.
I’ve now become quite accustomed to watching Masterchef (wierd I know but entertaining), original drama like Messiah or Only an Excuse (Scottish Humour) whenever I want, and the more the iPlayer grows on me, the less time I spend watching TV.
FF>> 3 years, and I don’t think it will be unbelievable if a lot of TV’s come with the iPlayer built in. I understand that BBC, ITV, C4 and Five are working on a combined download service. I could see the day when a lot of people watch TV when they like, and services such as these replace VOD and Cable system for viewing.
Here’s the latest of Holby City to try out the player
As the title says an intesting side effect of blogging is the guilt that one feels when you don’t write a post for a month or so. It’s genuinely not laziness that has prevented me from writing since the middle of october, but life getting in the way of living.
I’ve started my studies into the CCNP, I’m studying for the brand new advanced CCNP which really seems to have cranked up in difficulty, both from the CCNA and the old CCNP. The first module of study is BSCI, building Scalable Cisco Internetworks, which focuses on routing protocols, IIN, Multicasting, IPv6, BGP and future networking standards. I’m just getting into the swing of things, and have imposed a deadline of January 2008 for sitting this first module.
Leopard
It will come as no suprise to most of you who know me that I’ve been playing away with the Brand new OS X version 10.5- Leopard. I’ve got it running on a Mac Pro (Quad 2.66/5GB/1.7TB) and a Macbook (Dual 2.16/1GB/120GB) and it runs beautifully on both. It really is a sneaking upgrade, it’s not immediately apparent how much has been added, but in terms of performance and optimsation it really is a cut above Tiger.
Will not leave it as long to blog as before. Keep tuned
I passed my CCNA last week. Kinda not even had the chance to blog it until now I start my CCNP course this week at Glasgow Caledonian University - looking forward to it. If you are a Cisco employer in the Glasgow area and are looking for a highly motivated CCNA with practical applied lab knowledge then give me a shout £28k and a smile and I’m all yours
Went to see the Fratellis the other night at the SECC in Glasgow. Emma had got a couple of tickets, and as a result of getting yet more tickets to Franz Ferdiand on Skye, couldn’t make it. Canada and I went along and it was a really good show. I’m not the world’s biggest fan, I think they have some good tunes (singalongs especially) but I enjoyed the show a lot.
The support band were a bit more my musical taste- they were called Figure5 and I was struck how like the Jam/Paul Weller some of the songs sounded. I like a rocky drum driven band so they were awesome- going to be buying their EP of the Itunes Wireless Store later on, but check them out at their website or at their myspace page- you won’t be disappointed.
New album - Stunning - heard it on an internet radio station The title song - The World Is Yours is an epic, quite possibly one of the most perfect songs I’ve ever heard.
His new single is worth a listen too, only a couple days till album is out - but go buy the monkeyman’s single : Illegal Attacks from iTunes.
Funny sometimes how the easiest of things came replace something that took so long and so much effort to accomplish. What do you get it you take one nerd, a RAZR V8 with 2Mpixel Cam, 2 Macbooks, an iPod Touch, an iPod Nano, a Cinema display, a Mac Pro, an iSight and a new style keyboard???? Thats right £6000 of kit- to make a mess, but quite a nice looking mess i think
I’ve started my studies into the CCNP, I’m studying for the brand new advanced CCNP which really seems to have cranked up in difficulty, both from the CCNA and the old CCNP. The first module of study is BSCI, building Scalable Cisco Internetworks, which focuses on routing protocols, IIN, Multicasting, IPv6, BGP and future networking standards. I’m just getting into the swing of things, and have imposed a deadline of January 2008 for sitting this first module.
Leopard
The support band were a bit more my musical taste- they were called 
