Francis' Weblog » Uncategorized http://www.mantissa.net/blog A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:25:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 en hourly 1 BBC News Offline again! http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2009/02/19/bbc-news-offline-again/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2009/02/19/bbc-news-offline-again/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:29:30 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/?p=204 Looks like BBC News has been knocked offline again due to performace changes… this is what I’m seeing at the moment..

bbcnews

It’s happened before:

October 11th 2007:

The BBC News web-site has been suffering outages today while its hosting location fluctuated between BBC Internet Services and the Akamai web application acceleration and performance management service.

For many users this afternoon, the front page of the BBC News site has been slow to respond, often displaying error messages such as “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request” and “an error occurred while processing this directive”. Other users found that requests to news.bbc.co.uk caused the server to continually redirect their request back to news.bbc.co.uk, causing an infinite redirection loop which would have added to the load on the servers.

Today’s performance problems coincide with apparent moves to and from the Akamai content distribution network. Prior to today, the news.bbc.co.uk site had been self-hosted by BBC Internet Services in Docklands, London.

For some periods today, the BBC News website had resolved to IP addresses belonging to Akamai, while other times it had either been pointed back to BBC Internet Services at Docklands, or did not resolve at all, thus leaving the site completely inaccessible.

Akamai transparently mirrors content stored on web servers and users then access the content from these instead of the origin server. By automatically picking a mirror server that is near to the user, performance is generally increased while decreasing the load on the origin server.

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, has published a blog article about the site problems.

]]> http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2009/02/19/bbc-news-offline-again/feed/ 0 Learn 3D VFX for FREE! (and get paid!) http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/06/23/learn-3d-vfx-for-free-and-get-paid/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/06/23/learn-3d-vfx-for-free-and-get-paid/#comments Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:06:59 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/?p=197

Escape have announced a 100% free course funded by SkillSet. Not only that you get paid UK minimum wage through the period of the training, you get 4 weeks work experience at a post production house (oh and you get paid for that as well)! I think you’d be stupid not to apply. The course runs from 11th August for 18 weeks and then the 4 weeks in industry. More info can be found on Escapes website.

They have also just launched a competition to win £10k worth of free 3D/CG VFX training! Its in conjunction with Channel 4 and you can find more information at the 4Talent website. All you have to do is write in 50 words or less why you love 3D animation, what you aspire to do in the future and how the Escape course will help you get there!

]]> http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/06/23/learn-3d-vfx-for-free-and-get-paid/feed/ 0 Optimus Keyboard http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/03/24/optimus-keyboard/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/03/24/optimus-keyboard/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:28:59 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/03/24/optimus-keyboard/ Ok now this is one hell of a neat keyboard! and I want one! (see if I can persuade my boss!) . The basic concept is that you can change the keyboard keys and say what image or video you want to display on each key. Its been released next month! they have been promising it for.. well forever but now they are shipping it. They have three versions depending on how many active keys you want. The most expensive being ALL 102 active keys which is around £976. But what you can do is buy the keyboard with just one active key and then buy the extra active keys over time. So you can buy the keyboard for £288, with the spacebar being active… and thats about it.
Maybe a bit expensive for me, but very cool!

Optimus Keyboard Optimus Keyboard Config software

More info http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

]]> http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2008/03/24/optimus-keyboard/feed/ 0 Mount Ruapehu early bird lift passes available! http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2007/04/09/mount-ruapehu-early-bird-lift-passes-available/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2007/04/09/mount-ruapehu-early-bird-lift-passes-available/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2007 05:22:05 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2007/04/09/mount-ruapehu-early-bird-lift-passes-available/ They’ve gone on sale!!! yupiee! You can now buy early bird Mt Ruapehu lift passes at $399, for both sides of the mountain Whakapapa (which is new zealands largest developed ski field) and Turoa. Its interesting to see the price difference to europe :) nearly 4.5x more to get a 3 valleys season pass, but hey its a bigger skiable area :)

Off to snow planet tonight for some snowboarding. Its open 365 days a year. I asked them how many people came on christmas day and they said it was totally packed out! Bizzare!

Oh in tech news McAfee FAILED the 100% virus scan at VB. Virus Bulletin tests a load of virus scanners for “100% virus detection”. They failed to detect viruses running on Vista, ironically enough Microsofts’ OneCare also failed.

]]> http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2007/04/09/mount-ruapehu-early-bird-lift-passes-available/feed/ 0 The GT Vid http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/12/14/the-gt-vid/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/12/14/the-gt-vid/#comments Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:31:12 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/12/14/the-gt-vid/ Well has promissed I have uploaded the GT Vid you can get it from:

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.mp4 – Mpeg4

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.wmv – Windows Media Player

Its only a very rough cut, and it goes on a bit. But you get the general idea. For all those who want to know I ran the footage through a de-interlacer and then colour corrected it to give it a little bit of a filmatic look.

]]> http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/12/14/the-gt-vid/feed/ 0 Apple Music filenames! http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/18/apple-music-filenames/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/18/apple-music-filenames/#comments Mon, 18 Sep 2006 10:15:54 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/18/apple-music-filenames/ Ok well as some of you know my laptop hard disk died some months back and i’ve eventually got round to pulling off all my music off my iPod onto my computer. Easy! well all except Apple decide to create 100s of directories on the ipod and put 5 or so music files in them and rename the files so you have no idea what they are… nice! Anyway rather than going through my entire CD collection re-burning the MP3s I thought I’d hunt the web for a util. Well I must say there is a LOT of junk relating to MP3/4 management… anyway in the end I found this great MP3/4 manager called “The GodFather“… and it really is! and best of all its Free!

]]> http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/18/apple-music-filenames/feed/ 0 Roosters new album is out! http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/02/roosters-new-album-is-out/ http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/02/roosters-new-album-is-out/#comments Sat, 02 Sep 2006 14:20:42 +0000 Francis http://www.mantissa.net/blog/2006/09/02/roosters-new-album-is-out/ A mate of mines brother has just released a new album. Ok it was released last month but I didn’t know then :) . Ben Smyth is the bassist in Rooster... its quite good you can hear some snippets from their website. They have quite a big following in Japan but I don’t know about in the UK and elsewhere but it looks like they are doing quite well, go buy the music!! :)

Ok this is cool, its visual look of flight paths going over the US, using US flight data over a 24hr period.. over 19000 planes in the air at a peak time!!

I’ve re-found pimpthatsnack.com a great website with recipes’ for “pimping up your snack” … I think a mate created a huge cookie using a recipe on the site. I am going to make the kitkat bar! so watch out supermarket, here I come!! :)

Synthetica is a great easy to use look and feel framework for Java; AT LAST java doesn’t look square, blocky and horrible.

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