Defending our cars from the greenies

I stumbled across this article the other day, it sums up quite well the hypocricy and idiocy of our "do-gooder" anti-car brigade.
We need to tell these green hippy idiots to shove it, build some decent roads and ban those stupid bus lanes that hold everyone up.
If we can't trust the government to keep law and order, and we can't trust them to use out taxes wisely, I'm buggered if I'm going to trust them to transport me around. We only have to look at the safety standards of Sydney busses and recent rail disasters, which aren't even investigated properly.
I'm keeping my car (actually I'm getting a bigger, faster more powerful one).

Here is the article:

Defending the Car Against Greens

HostHead.com - These Guys Rock

Well, we're a few weeks into our hosting with HostHead.com, after giving SkilledHost.com and their poor service and monumental incompetence the flick.
All I can say is that these guy are real pros. The service is working just as well as it was when I first set it up, and hasn't gone down, at all.
Anyone looking for a cheap host without cheap service should try these guys. They are adult friendly too.

Well, it's now November 2006, and all I can say about HostHead is that they still rock. Not a single glitch in their service, and I recommend them to everyone. And no, I don't have any affiliation with them. I just found them one day. My level of enthusiam for them as a hosting company is probably amplified by the woeful performance of the original hosting company we used for this project: skilledhost.com. As it turned out, they were anything but skilled.

WinMerge - A useful tool for tracking changes in files

I have just had a big blitz on security on my main site. Some securtiy breaches can involve a hacker subtley adding or changing file on your server, resulting in an open back door. In a large site, this can be difficult to detect. The hackers sometimes make the filenames follow the same conventions as the other thousands of files in the site so they blend in.
I found a free tool which is great for this kind of work. You simply point it at the two sets of files that you want to compare, and it presents you with a list of pairs and results. You can then click on any pair of documents to analyse the differences.

WinMerge can be found at: http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

Switched to HostHead.com Today

After a bit of looking around and reading this funny thread, I decided to go with HostHead.com. They have been around since 2001, and seem to be respected among members of the boards. So far the support has been great. I am fully up and running, all questions answered, and I only submitted my details 2 hours ago.
Their service and load times seem much better that SkilledHost, and I get the impression that the guy knows what he's doing and has been doing it a long time. The cost is a little more, but if they can keep my sites up, it's more than worth it.

RoadSpy - A new service for Australian motorists

A brilliant new service called RoadSpy has just arrived in Sydney. This service sends SMS messages to your mobile phone, notifying you of speed traps, accidents and other traffic hazards. They were going to include RBTs, but I heard that has been stopped because of requests from the Police.
That's probably not a bad thing, RBTs probably do actually save lives, unlike speed traps.
They will be recieving my payment on Monday. What a brilliant initative. It should prove especially handy when I get my 5.7 litre V8 later this year:)
Here's the site.

The Matrix ScreenSaver

I found this great matrix screensaver the other day. It is like the one on the first Matrix movie. If you look closely at the code in the movie, the characters are not English. This screensaver uses pretty close to the original matrix characters. It is the most authentic one I could find. Best of all, it's free.

Get it from this page on the Kelly Software site. Here is a screenshot, The picture is optional, I remove it for a simple authentic look:

And if you are a real Matrix fan like me, the official Matrix site definitely worth a look.

Don't Use SkilledHost.com

I've finally come to the end of what I am willing to accept from our new webhosts. A while ago I posted that we went with a new host, SkilledHost.com. It turns out that they are anything but skilled.
We set up our accounts, uploaded our sites, and paid $100 to have a dedicated SSL certificate installed on one of the sites.
Shortly after, the whole lot fell over for three days, including SkilledHost's main site. When it came up again all data and settings were lost. They apologised, and I said okay, and proceeded to upload my files again.
The dedicated SSL certificate was lost with the server settings, and after two months and repeated requests, emails and support tickets, we are still to have the service re-instated. At first they replied to a couple of messages, saying that everything was lost and that they would have to set it up again. Now they don't even reply to them. Although the sites are up, without the SSL we cannot use them for their intended purpose.
I know two months is way too long to be patient for something like this, but I have had other things to do, and I was hoping they would sort it out, because their service and price was just right for us.
Having read a bit on the forums, it would appear that I am not the only one having problems with SkilledHost. You can read more about how they run their business here, here, another one here, another one from DigitalPoint forums here, and here's a review.
I just wish I read those threads before I signed up with them, but they weren't ranking in Google at the time.
So, this weekend, I am researching new hosts and I am going to be giving SkilledHost the flick on Monday. We will also demanding a refund for the SSL.