Last Monday, exactly one week ago, I attended my final class at uni - and it feels sweet. I have two exams to go which I haven't started studying for yet. I'm sitting on 44.5% with a 50% exam to come for Multimedia Systems and 54.2% with a 40% exam to come for Information Technology Management. I think I'll start studying next weekend.

Last week I signed up with a new hosting provider which was a totally fun experience. I'm yet to migrate this site and that should happen today¹. The only downside I've found so far is that Dreamhost doesn't seem to accept connections to it's database servers from outside IP addresses. So I can't do one of the things I wanted to do, which is run a script on my home web server that will store data in the hosted MySQL database. But apart from that it's been great so far.

One of the things I'm liking is the ability to host multiple domains. I have already set-up http://www.techtalkwiki.net in place of http://www.elvery.net/ttwiki/ ². I'm enjoying playing with a Linux based server for a change. Finally I have access to mod_rewrite (hence the lovely, clean, new URLs on the wiki).

Another thing I've been fiddling with for the past week or so is making a database and index of all the posts on TechTalk. One of the big drawbacks to the ABC forums has always been the lack of ability to search - we had to rely on Google's indexing. I started by using Sphider which is very good for a small site but didn't suit TechTalk for a number of reasons. Not wanting to write my own crawler and indexer from scratch I have adapted Sphider to be more suited to indexing TechTalk. It's now storing the post author, subject, time and number in separate fields in the database which will be very useful for both searching and generating some statistics which people are always interested in. The indexing script has been running for around three days and the database is currently indexing 96,670 and adding another every second or so. The database still a little bit messy as I've been adding functionality along the way so there is a little bit of inconsistency in the database but that can be fixed reasonably easily. The preliminary search interface is here.

This weekend was a great weekend. Tony had his traditional fancy dress birthday party, the theme being a celebrity you hate. High on my list of possibilities were most people on Blurbomat's list of Whores. Unfortunately, in the end none of them quite suited. Dressing up as a broadband provider or a Linksys router would have been tough³, I didn't want to cross dress⁴, and some I just don't agree with. In the end I went as Ice-T who is (almost) single-handedly making Law and Order into a completely crap show.

Tarlee and Brad came down to see the Ben Lee / Missy Higgins concert at River Stage on Saturday night and took up our offer of accommodation. As always it was great to see them and we hung out with them on Sunday morning. Then I went to play soccer, and Nathan came along and played in the mixed game which was great (even though we lost). We finally had our first win for the season in the men's game, which was totally a result of our new Aston Villa jerseys. There were two attempts made to destroy my chances of having children. The first using a cricket ball ⁵ and the second using a very will kicked soccer ball.

The weekend was nicely closed with an impromptu family barbecue⁶ with (almost) all the important people - Mum, Dad, Laura, Laura's Parents, Hannah and Nathan. A good weekend finished well.

1. I'm expecting a small amount of down time. [↩]
2. Thanks again to JungleNut for the domain name. [↩]
3. And I probably couldn't call them celebrities. [↩]
4. But well done to Laura for being the only cross dresser at the party. [↩]
5. Thanks Tony - I know you haven't got it yet, but the Birthday present is coming and that kind of payback is just uncalled for. [↩]
6. Using our nice new (hand me down) Beefmaster - thanks Peter and Lenore. [↩]