Most of my web sites, including this blog, and various experiments have been hosted on Rails Playground that I migrated to 6 years ago. On the whole things have gone well with only one short outage in the first 5 years, but sadly over the last year there have been a lot of problems including outages, data loss, and security issues. This post is a quick summery of the problems. I will be posting about some other related changes in the very near future.

It all started when another of their customers started relaying spam email, perhaps because of a security floor, or perhaps they were just a spammer. Because of this all outgoing email was blocked without notice. I have to say I am not at all happy about the way this was done and it stopped all my services that use email dead without any prior notice or notification. I was also not best pleased at the attitude that this was not a critical part of the service and I was initially expected to adapt my services to another email system.

After this happened for a second time and a lot of moaning my sites were migrated to a new server. They did all the migration for me although it would have been easer to do myself. They inconsistently screwed up the dates when porting the databases. Being a US focused company with technicians in Asia migrating UK sites between servers in goodness knows where I can see how it happened, but it is not an excuse for the error.

Another problem is this new server was running the security mod called suEXEC that will allow email to be blocked per user, but unless some effort is put in it opens up a gaping great security hole. The way suEXEC was set up, and in fairness this is becoming quite common with the lower end hosting companies, will allow someone who can find a small exploit in any code to completely take over my sites. I like to think my production code is secure, but no one can 100% promise this, and holes in WordPress and PHPBB are being found all the time.

My general advice is if your ISP uses suEXEC, and the account you use to upload files is the same account that the web server uses to access the files, then just go to another ISP. If you have a separate user account for the upload and the server then this is the prefect setup, but if not you are better without suEXEC at all.

Anyway, the new server was also resulting in a huge percentage of cron jobs failing and I can not login using SSL most of the time. After a few more significant outages things got a little out of control and I decided I had to move away.

I have now moved everything that I am not culling to a new virtual machine hosted with Digital Ocean (and that is a referral link so if you are thinking of signing up then please use the link). Although I am a fan of managed shared hosting (despite it not being popular in some circles) I am having trouble finding a good and reliable ISP at a decent price. As a result I have had to go the self hosted route that will take a little more effort than I would like, but having done it before I feel I have the sys admin skills to keep things secure, efficient and a lot more stable than things have been recently.

I am truly am sad to have to be moving away from Rails Playground as they really have been good in the past and I have been happy to say so, but I need an ISP I can rely on and sadly I can not do this any more. :-(

This is a sad time for those who have fond memories for the good old BBC Television Centre. BBC News moved out last week, the last broadcast from the building happening as I write this, and the building closing at the end of the month. I am one of those people with fond memories.

When I was young my father, formally an electrician in the the theatre, became a broadcast engineer for the BBC and this is why we moved to the south of the country when I was at school. The coincidence of this is I gained access to one of the most interesting places in the world, that being TVC.

At first I thought I must have only been to the building half a dozen times, but writing this I realised just how many more times I have been there and how many memories I have. I have seriously lost count and have seen so much to look back on.

I have been on the Top of the Pop set (in TC2 I think), in the 1980’s Tardis, and watched the (slow) filming of many random programmes from the viewing galleries. I remember walking through the sets of Johnny Briggs, Rolland Rat, and the back of the Noels House Party (that at the time was more of a doughnut than the binding it was contained in).

I have sat in the old news studio when the automated cameras were new and subtitling was done from the corridor. I have seen the turntable the christmas penguins rotated on, I have played with the old COW (Computer Originated World). I was even the first to see the Kenny Everett title sequence when VT was in the basement.

I have walked the corridors and past so may doors. I have eaten in the canteen, drunk the tea, chatted in the BBC club. I have explored the old OB units. I have relaxed in the Blue Peter garden. I have played with the galleries and must be one of the few people who can use a vision mixer that were self tort. I have visited three generations of network control and discovered how stupid all the security keys expiring on new year is.

I have even helped with the TV7 refit in the 90s. I have also briefly been on kids TV but not filmed at TVC. There are so many other memories but if I keep going I will not stop for months.

The most amazing thing is I never got lost in the building. Well, yes, okay, that last fact is a complete lie.

One odd thing is most of my experiences of the place were as a child. Even in the 2000s it was starting to feel a bit foreign and like the next generation had taken over. The atmosphere was still there but I was no longer part of it.

I have not been back since the great Manchester exodus started to drain the life out of the building. I don’t really want to because now there is just a building. The life has gone. I guess the memories will still be there but the atmosphere and the community is what the BBC has really lost, and I think it has gone because I can not find is elsewhere.

So that is it. Goodbye Television Centre. I have some fond memories. They are old and at times they feel like I was a different person, and in many ways I was, but I treasure them never the less.

Just in case you were wondering anything I did within TV was pure nepotism, but my radio career was all my own work.

This weekend gone I was in Leeds for LeedsHack3, a 2 day hack day that took place in Leeds City Museum where I created SportStarting.

It was a great weekend although I spent half of it searching through plant rooms and climbing in roof voids replacing parts of the network that were just not capable of supporting the event. Thanks you [not] BT.

Anyway, the deadline for submitting hacks was 10am Sunday, so at about 9:45am I though I better submit something and then start working on it if I was to have something ready for the midday deadline, and that hack was SportStarting.

The idea was born from the large number of channels that the BBC have of Olympics on satellite and not knowing what was on what channel when. My idea was to do the same things as I did for OnFilm4 (and borrow half the code) and tweet when a sport was about to start.

Getting the listings was not as easy as I had hoped as the BBC Backstage feeds have quietly been turned off and services like Digiguide want silly money for the listings (£2,880 to be exact). I had a plan, but because I was starting the hack a day late I needed to revert to the backup plan, and that was to use the Guardian open data schedule. The down side of this is I did not have the channel numbers, but the up side is I could get it finished before the deadline.

Reusing so much code and having the data in a spreadsheet turned the day log hack in to a data manipulation and a simple code tweaking job that, despite a few interruptions, I had complete within the 2 hours available.

Finally I should add that the hack is legal and not infringed any copyright or other laws, but I might have called the team name “The London 2012 Olympic Games Summer Gold Silver Bronze Winning Team (sponsored by Burger King and Mastercard)” as a bit of a satirical joke. Sorry about that.