When I have a mind block programming, Photoshop is usually just around the corner. I put together a quick wallpaper based on the mascot from Grab A Mascot for my iPhone. It makes a nice change from the earth or some leaves. Apple should really think about releasing some new wallpapers for their iphone as standard, and maybe a few GOOD ring tones wouldn’t go a miss. I guess its to make you pay for ringtones on iTunes. The iphone seems to come with nothing these days, I even had to buy a new Dock becuase they conveniently rounded the back of the phone to ensure the new phone does not fit in the old dock. Now they either have some evil marketing guys or don’t think about their users when developing new devices. Talking about the compatibility issues, my in-car-charger which worked perfectly with my original iPhone is now unsupported. A CHARGER! Do they actually think about anything?
Anyway, my wallpaper:
iPhone wallpaper
Sorry for getting side tracked.
In short, it really doesn’t matter. After watching a MySQL web conference by Jay Pipes, I was gutted when I found out that they are actually exactly the same. I know im not alone in thinking that it affected the size of the data field. An unsigned int has the max value of 4294967295 no matter if its INT(1) or int(10) and will use 4 bytes of data.
So, what does the number in the brackets mean? It pretty much comes down to display, its called the display-width. The display width is a number from 1 to 255. You can set the display width if you want all of your integer values to “appear”. If you enable zerofill on the row, the field will have a default value of 0 for int(1) and 0000000000 for int(10).
There are 5 main numeric data types, and you should choose each one on its own merits. Based on the data you expect (or in some cases hope) to hold, you should use the correct data type. If you dont ever expect to use a value of above 127 and below -128, you should use a tinyint. This will only use 1 byte of data, which may not seem like much of a difference between the 4 used by an int, but as soon as you start to store more and more data, the effect on speed and space will be noticable.
Anyway, I thought I should share my new found knowledge of the display width with everyone, because it will save me thinking its optimising stuff changing from 10 to 5, haha.
After putting off the Intellichat migration last week due to issues with the load balancer (we had to order up a new more powerful one), we are finally in the last stages of testing. I had a little chat with Dan Ushman at Singlehop today and asked him to pop over to the data center to get some pics of all our servers. Singlehop used to have a great photographer, but he has moved over to London now, so I appologise for Dan’s photography skills but its pretty cool to see the servers for the first time.
We are set to go live within the next 14 hours, so testing is coming to an end and we will be up early in the morning to migrate everything over. With any luck we are planning for 0% downtime, apart from the 15 minute drop in chats.
I hope you enjoy the pics 
After adding the status.justuptime.com feature last week, we in the JDI office have taken full advantage of the system and have it on our main development screen and I even have it on my docked iPhone (sorta like a third screen ).
Everyone in the office is able to keep an eye on all of our servers and someone can quickly jump onto fix any problems that come up. One of our servers was seen to be down earlier so I took a photo, the server was back up and running within 2 minutes of going down thanks to the quick response system we have setup at Just Host so all is good .
Why not get your website or servers into JustUptime.com and make life easy for yourself. Automate the way you monitor your uptime and get the reports you need to keep your eye on the ball.
Being the first friday in the month, I thought I should introduct a new item to the development room. We now have the ‘Friday Feature’ where we work on a ‘nice to have’ feature for one of our products. These features will generally be quick bits which add some ‘cool’ to our products.
Just Uptime was the first product to have the JDIFF, and I thought an iPhone site to check the status of all your checks within the system would be pretty cool. Any Just Uptime user is able to login to the new service which can be found at http://status.justuptime.com, this page can be viewed from any mobile device as well as your web browser, however, it was designed for the iPhone.
The service puts all checks found to be down at the top of the list making it easier for you to spot any problems as and when they come up and the page auto refreshes every 60 seconds.
I took some screenshots of the system so you can see it in action just below.
Last night I thought it would be a good idea to check out OpenSuse, so I downloaded the DVD and burned the only DVD I had with the image. As soon as I got home, my vulnerable laptop was begging to keep windows at its heart, but in the end, after putting the OpenSuse DVD into the drive, it took complete control of the laptop and started the installation process.
The OpenSuse installation was very easy and did almost everything for me, apart from filling out my name etc. It shrank my windows partition, and created a load more to use itself. When I booted my laptop up in the morning, I got straight into my new operating system and started playing. When I realised my wireless card was not installed by default, I thought I should switch over to windows and get any drivers I needed. I restarted my machine and got the boot loader, and selected Vista. Much to my horror, I was thrown straight back into the OpenSuse installation.
After hunting around online for solutions, I finally found the app bcdedit.exe stored in the system32 directory on my windows install (I was running repair mode off the Vista CD). Running this, I could see all of my boot options and the paths they were using. I noticed that the path for windows was still “\grldr.mbr” instead of the windows default “\windows\system32\winload.exe”.
Using the following command in command prompt, I managed to restore my Windows Boot Sequence.
bcdedit /set {default} path “\windows\system32\Winload.exe”
{default} should be replaced with the Guid of the loader you need, however {default} should work for most windows installs.
Intellibear is the official cuddly toy for Intellichat Software Ltd. I have attached some pictures of him on my drive up to London.
I have the wordpress app installed on my phone so thought I should use it to write a post about the iPhone. It may be the best phone ever made but apple being apple have taken it upon themselves to release updates (maybe I should say complete reinstalls when it’s 250meg to download each time) which just make the phone less and less reliable each time.
I have read posts about how the new update made apps more reliable and less call drops. Before I upgraded to 2.0 and 2.1 I didn’t have any of those problems. But now I do. Great one apple. It’s really no wonder that I don’t trust them with my day to day issues I know I can do on a pc.
The best “feature” of all was when my phone decided that it thought I should have a little longer to sleep. The alarm failed to go off to wake me up, I should probably point out that the iPhone was obviously jealous of me sleeping so it took it upon itself to turn itself to sleep (crash).
If you want reliability or usability. Apple products are obviously not your best option. However I will admit they do look good. When it comes down to it, I can live with my phone breaking once a week, but a computer? Ill stick to pc thanks.
So, the day has finally come where we are upgrading all of our hardware and switching data centers. We finally got logins to all 7 of our production servers at Singlehop and the long nights are starting, to make sure everything migrates without any problems.
All 7 servers have Intel Xeon 5410 2.3 Ghz Processors and a minimum of 8GB ram, with our databases servers running 16GB. Its a great step up from our existing hardware, and we are working around the clock to make sure there is no single point of failure with any service.
The tag clouds below were made for me by Goose a friend who I met in the early years of business when I was still living in Torquay.
The image was made in Illustrator and content from with a script, the cloud has been automated from site content > graphic. Looks pretty cool I think, much better than anything that can be done in CSS
BAJB Tag Cloud
