Recent Blogs Posts

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm probably fairly typical in the male stakes in that I don't really like shopping for clothes and the like. If I could reliably find what I need online I'd never go into a clothes shop ever again. I'm a big (BIG) guy so I can't even scrounge for stuff readily in charidee shops and the like.

Anyway, those things that I do enjoy buying, cultural products or what have you, are all now readily digitisable. The MP3 swept away physical music

is no fun at all

CSS can get fucked.

I should use this instead of twitter.

Well things seem to have improved a bit, unfortunately at the cost of search frequency. I've increased the delay between multiple searches by one user to 45 seconds, which has seriously reduced the frequency of table locking (read-locking shouldn't be happening anyway, but I'm not asking too many questions - I'll take what I can get)

Just as well really, since certain real world developments today mean there's no way in hell I could afford a bigger / second server.

Anyone visiting during peak activity times will have noticed that the site has been performing pretty badly. This isn't the first time this has happened, but I had hoped that the new server the site moved to last September would have sorted this out. When it didn't, I put the problems down to my cackhanded Apache & MySQL configuration on the new server, but it looks like I'm not (totally) to blame.

I've played around with configuration settings for months now, trying to squeeze ...