Chris Meistre

So often we as humans try and find ways around a problem instead of solving it. Drive around South Africa’s roads, and you’ll quickly notice a lot of Beware of Pothole signs. To me this is very strange, rather put up a sign to say there are potholes, than fixing them. I know there are money and other issues to consider, but it just makes it more obviously we’ll rather tackle the symptom than the cause.

What happens when the government fails by not being able to control driving on beaches? They ban the vehicles on there obviously, rather than trying to educate and police people. Once again, I know there are other issues involved like money and man power, but it’s just sad that we cannot work towards curing the problem, rather than just making the symptoms go away.

Another example here in Port Elizabeth, is that the municipality now wants to ban all dogs on beaches. They believe that the dogs are dirtying the beaches, and want to avoid all the attacks by dogs on the beaches lately. I also believe this is a problem, but surely why can they not start enforcing the rules that are always there? Only dogs with leashes allowed on the beach? Rather than try and get this done, they want to ban the dogs from the beaches completely. This is very sad, because our poor dogs love walking on the beach.

I want to applaud the DA party and give them 10 out of 10 for their recent efforts. They took it upon themselves to go down to the beaches with doggie poop bags and hand them out while speaking to the dog owners. This is awesome, try and educate the people. It might not have solved the problem, but at least they’re trying to get to the problem, instead of just the symptoms of it.

I have always promoted Dreamhost and the great support we receive from them.  I use them to host a few personal sites.  Over the last 2 months there has been a lot of down time, but it normally gets resolved in a few hours.

On Sunday, 26 July 2009, at around 13:00 (GMT +2) I noticed an error.  I checked a few of the domain and it seemed that the server was acting wacky.  I immediately submitted a support ticket.

At 15:34 I got a reply saying that they had sorted out the problem.  I checked and it was still not working.  In fact, it was worse now affecting more of my domains.  I immediately emailed back saying that it was still not working.

At 23:07 I got an email back saying that they simply refreshed the HTTP service and it is working.  I checked, and again it was not working.  I once again emailed them back and said that it is still not working.

When I didn’t receive feedback from them by 10:00 the next morning, I logged another ticket.  I only got a response on previous message at 18:11 on the Monday evening.  That is 18 hours later.  I got an explanation that the IP address on my server had changed, and for some reason the DNS settings didn’t update correctly.  I was told it might take up to 72 hours for the problem to be rectified because of DNS propagation times.  I checked up on the DNS settings on a few of the domains, and their IP addresses.  Now, if they had changed the IP address, surely it was the IP addresses I was looking at.  So I wanted to see if it propagated yet, by sheer luck perhaps.  I did a dig of the domain name against my PC’s dns server, and it was resolving to the correct IP address according to the IP address in their setup.  I tried to access the domain, and it didn’t work.  I emailed them back at just before 19:00 asking them to explain this.   In the meanwhile I continued testing various domains, and to me it looked like the IP addresses didn’t change and/or they had already propagated.  BUT THE DOMAINS WERE STILL NOT WORKING.

During the next 24 hours I read about several people having Dreamhost issues on Twitter – http://purl.co.za/LAxLH.  There was one consistent thing, everyone was having trouble with getting hold of Dreamhost or have had the same issues that I’ve been having over the last couple of months.  I tried getting hold of Dreamhost by their support email address, via Twitter and by submitting more tickets.  For almost 24 hours I heard NOTHING from them.  And the support staff must’ve been at their office, because in that time their website that shows the status of some of the machines were being manually updated.

So at 18:50 tonight, Tuesday 28 July 2009, I got a reply saying that they had now moved my domains over to the new Private Server I had ordered.  This is something I ordered about a week ago.  Gone is the story now that it was IP issues I was having.  I emailed them back immediately asking what is up with that, and will probably get a reply tomorrow evening this time, if at all.  I checked, and all but 1 of the domains are now working.  I also emailed them about that.  Hopefully, sometime soon, that will also be sorted out.

I am extremely disappointed in Dreamhost.  I host websites with other companies, and the support I get from them is excellent.  The most I’ve ever waited for response was probably 2 hours.  They also make use of a live support system where you can chat to a technician while they are busy sorting out your problem.

I cannot understand that I can receive an email from Dreamhost, respond to them immediately, and then have to wait up to 24 hours for a response.  What makes it worse is I am not the only one to experience this type of service from them.

I really like coding in the PHP language.

I’ve done quite a bit of programming in my life.  I started in primary school when I found a book on the BASIC programming language.  It was a book with a lot of snippets of code in.  I copied the stuff, ran it, saw how it worked, changed it a bit, ran it again, and so on.  Little did I know, but that would be the start of a journey that is still carrying on 20 years later.

From then I got hold of any book I could on any programming language and just started playing around.  A language that I really got into in high school was Pascal.  It was due to the fact that I had to use this for the Computer Science course I was taking, but it didn’t bother me.  There was so much that it had to offer.  By this time we had gotten Internet at home as well, and I was just downloading Pascal guides and code snippets.  I made various stupid little things, but it all helped build a valuable understanding of development structures and best coding practises.

When I got to University, they were using C++ as the language of preference. By this time though I had long ago found C and C++ to be very powerful languages.  I’d be using Linux for 4 years at this point so C was well known to me.  In those days you still have to alter code for it to work on your Linux system, so I was forced to learn about it.

Around the 3rd year of University as the first time they had started with object orientated programming.  They chose Java as the language of choice.  OOP was old news to me by this point, so some of the lectures were really really boring, and for most of the time I couldn’t understand why we were doing what we were doing.  Looking back now, I am glad I had that experience.  I don’t think they were really honing the development skills of the people, but rather trying to hone your problem solving skills.  To this day, I think that gives me an advantage when it comes to software development, and even understanding how other software packages work.

Anyway, so during this time I got a guide on PHP development, because I was really interested in web application.  And because there is so much PHP information out on the Internet, it was a very easy learning curve, and I’ve been using that since then.  At the same time I was learning to use Delphi.  Delphi was awesome for Windows application developments.

It’s been about 8 years now that I’ve been using PHP, and every day I still learning something new.  I take on projects that I find interesting and that will challenge my capabilities, and in my spare time I write little projects just to see if I can.  If I see something on the web, or read about something, I always try to see if I can replicate it, or at least develop the algorithm in my head, just to know I can

I almost exclusively use PHP these days, because I do a lot of web application development. The scope of what you can do with PHP is limitless.  The fact that you’ve got so many content management systems out there that also use PHP, makes it even more powerful.  You can take an already powerful system like Drupal, and add on modules that you’ve written to make it even more powerful.

Now after all you’ve read about the above, back to my point.  I started a PHP Development Blog, not because I think I will be able to give you ground breaking techniques of using PHP, but rather to share my ideas, and get input about it from other people.  So head on over there if you’re a PHP developer, and let me know what you think.

We set out this day intending to sleep over somewhere between here and PE.  After breakfast we set off to Durban.  We take it easy on the roads, and are amazed the amount of traffic officers we see along the road.

As we drive into Durban, the first thing we see as we go over a little hill is the ocean.  It’s amazing when we realize how much we’ve missed the ocean that we last saw 8 days ago.  We’re so used to seeing it everyday.

At around 12pm we stop at Ushaka Marine World.  When we planned on going through Durban on the way back to PE, it was decided that we will definitely need to stop off at Ushaka.  We’ve heard so many wonderful things about it.

First we struggled to find our way to the actually marine world entrance.  After walking through the shopping mall we spot it, and go get our tickets.  We’re about 10 minutes late for the dolphin show, but we go anyways as the next one is hours later.  We’re used to PE’s little marine world, so when we come around the corner and spot the massive pavilion that is almost packed we’re a little shocked.

We watch for about the last 15 minutes before it’s over.  Bernadette got some nice photos.

Ushaka

Dolphins

After the show we walked around and saw a handful of the other things the park had to offer.  I was getting a bit annoyed because I was looking around and thinking why did we just pay so much to come in here, and there is so little?!  Another while of walking around and we eventually found the entrance to the aquarium.  Thank goodness for this, because I was really thinking we’d just wasted money.  I’ve been in the PE aquarium, as well in the Cape Town one, but this one in Durban is truly awesome.  The displays and everything that they’ve done there is just amazing.  So many different types of fish and creatures.

We spent quite a while walking through there, forgetting that we still need to find a place 2-3 hours out of Durban to sleep for the evening.

Aquarium

We headed back out to the mall to grab something to eat.  Although it was our initial plan to to sleep over somewhere this evening, and then do the final stretch back home the next morning, we decided we were missing our puppies too much.

Even though we’d have to travel through Umtata and the Transkei at night, which is always very dangerous, we decided to just do it.  So at around 16:00 we left Durban and start the 8-9 hours drive to PE.

It’s funny how quickly the sun sets once the sun gets close to the horizon.  The driving was a bit slower as there were a lot of cars on the road.  At one point I turned off the main road and took a side road.  This went a bit quicker.

Once we hit the Eastern Cape’s border, you could immediately see the lack in traffic officers and traffic rules not being obeyed.  Strange how it can be so different between provinces.  The roads through the Transkei has been done over, but there’s no marking on the roads.  So a road that would for instance cater for 2 cars into 1 direction and 1 car into another direction was now transformed into 2 cars in 1 direction and 2 cars in another direction.  All this while dodging cows and goats and people in the roads at 22:00 at night turned out to be an adventure on it’s own.

As we approached the last fuel stop we would have before getting into PE, I estimated we would have enough fuel to reach home.  Hah!  I forgot I wasn’t in my own vehicle, and the needle dropped faster than a stripper’s pants.  Luckily I had filled up our jerry can with an extra 10L of petrol the 5 days before, so we were in luck.  I pulled off the side of the road, and quickly put in the last 10L of petrol before doing our last 10km to stop at home at 01:30 in the morning.

Our puppies were so excited to see us!  And we were glad to be home after a glorious holiday!

18 July 2009

We got up this morning with lazily.  It was cloudy and the sun was struggling to come through the clouds.

After breakfast we lounged around our cabin reading a bit more.  Over us was hanging the sad feeling of having to go home the next day, but we were missing our puppies very much so it was a bitter sweet feeling.

The most exciting thing to happen today was the awesome lunch we had which was WAAAAYYYY more than we expected to get when we ordered it.  We washed it down with a few beers before walking around the reserve.  I also took a short drive to see where the rest of the cabins are.  I ended up driving quite a distance because the roads were too narrow to turn around.  I wondered if those people came and ate at the same place we did, because they would have a long way to walk to eat.

We had a nice dinner and then watched a movie before heading to bed to sleep there for the last evening.  When we get to the cabin though, I decide to quickly pack everything so that we have the minimum left for the next morning.  So we pack as much as we could onto the bakkie, leaving only 2 bags left to pack in the morning.

Around the Reserve

Around the Reserve