Now that I have made my mam­moth 5000 word Greece holi­day post, which has been wai­ting around for a month or so to type up, I can move onward to new blog posts in this new and impro­ved MrFofR​.com blog, hap­pily within Wordpress.

Impor­ting 5 years worth of posts from Blog­ger and then cate­go­ri­zing them was not a pretty task. Though I did notice a gra­dual des­cent into imma­tu­rity as I wor­ked back­wards. In cele­bra­tion of this achie­ve­ment, and brin­ging this blog inline with my other pro­jects, the site has chan­ged hosts and lives on its own domain as a sepa­rate out­let for unpro­fes­sio­nal blurbs, rants and what­not; www​.mrfofr​.com. The Mr. bit is new, I’d be pretty lucky to bag a four let­ter domain name.

After 5 years, my AMD Ath­lon 2700 XP with 1.5gb of RAM and LG 17″ screen was gro­wing weary. Time for an upgrade, and the new 24″ iMac model took my fancy — I grab­bed one from John Lewis in July and its now sit­ting pretty as the focus of my front room, coin­ci­ding with a big rea­rran­ge­ment of furniture.

Good timing really, con­si­de­ring that I had mul­ti­ple and simul­ta­neous hard drive fai­lu­res on my PC shortly the­reaf­ter as I tried to trans­fer 40gb or so to the mac.

Having been through the old posts, I noted that, in hind­sight, screenshots of my pro­jects are very help­ful for when the ori­gi­nal source mate­rial has since vapo­ri­zed into the mists of some inter­net pur­ga­tory. And on that note:

And onto my new online pro­ject, I wel­come you all to The Movie Chro­nic­les.

• Gears of War Movie
• Metal Gear Solid Movie
• Warc­raft Movie

I’ve recently been wor­king on chur­ning out some dyna­mi­cally gene­ra­ted PHP ima­ges using my per­so­nal movies data­base. This of course has been com­ple­ted in-between watching Zach John­son win the Mas­ters (I had my fin­gers cros­sed for Jus­tin Rose right up until hole 17) and Manches­ter Uni­ted losing to Ports­mouth on Satur­day. In fact, the majo­rity of time over this Eas­ter period has been spent watching sports — cric­ket world cup, golf and foot­ball — still more to come with Cham­pions Lea­gue matches tomo­rrow — what fun! My work can once again be fue­lled by cho­co­late as I have cere­mo­niously ended lent after having suc­cess­fully given up cho­co­late, crois­sants, pas­ties, crisps and those tasty iced buns. 

Any­way — back to the case in point; the gene­ra­ted ima­ges have three modes: a) Show the details for a given IMDB num­ber b) Show details for the top item in a key­word search c) Show my most recently rated film. Upon gene­ra­tion these files get cached, the cache upda­tes once a week for film details and one a day for the rated film. So, here are some fun fun dyna­mic images: 

http://​movies​.tri​vial​being​.org/​m​y​/​r​a​t​e​d​/​r​a​t​e​d​.​png

http://​movies​.tri​vial​being​.org/​p​i​c​/​l​ost in translation.png

I was meant to make this blog post last night but I ended up watching Scrubs ins­tead. Then I couldn’t make it this mor­ning because I had an oh-so fun direc­ted rea­ding dis­ser­ta­tion write-up to con­ti­nue with and a pains­ta­kingly mono­to­nous test pro­ce­dure to carry out on some newly made sam­ple blocks for my pro­ject. Yes­ter­day the results made no sense, today the sen­sor broke half­way through. 

Howe­ver, I have writ­ten my 1800 words today and I am ready to take some time off. So, in-between work and more work I squee­zed a little bit of MySQL PHP coding into a new site spe­ci­fi­cally for my movie collec­tions. The site lists my owned movies and my rated movies (grabs my per­so­nal ratings from IMDB — all 400 of them), using the IMDB cata­lo­gue num­ber it fetches data such as title, year, direc­tor, run­time, rating, plot and pos­ter image auto­ma­ti­cally. I guess I am brin­ging the site out of beta by inc­lu­ding the link here, check it out:

http://​movies​.tri​vial​being​.org/

I seem to have fai­led to note to ever­yone peru­sing this site for its foobar-ness that all foo­bar rela­ted posts have now been moved to my new site, Fooblog200000. I’ll no lon­ger be pos­ting upda­tes to my con­fi­gu­ra­tions here, which are now up to ver­sion 0.6 with some very nice new fea­tu­res such as ratings panels and a sin­gles SCPL mode. 

With that said, the inte­rim period for the site, i.e. its ope­ning month, has come to an end with quite a razzle dazzle; v0.6 of my con­fi­gu­ra­tion made it to the front page of Digg and foo­blog con­se­quently suc­cum­bed to the effects of lots of visi­tors. Foo­blog uses Dreamhost as its pro­vi­der which offers 2Tb of band­width a month; I had plenty of pre­pa­ra­tion for such an attack, or at least I thought I did. What I was not pre­pa­red for was a catas­trophic fai­lure of Word­press 2.1.2. To save the MySQL data­ba­ses from too much stress I tur­ned on the advan­ced WP caching sys­tem, howe­ver when 2000 peo­ple arri­ved in an hour or so something went wrong and all WP pages fai­led to load. Due to the stres­ses of such high traf­fic volu­mes I assu­med the pro­blem was cau­sed by traf­fic alone and that it would rec­tify itself when things cal­med down, I put up a tem­po­rary page and let it be. Howe­ver seve­ral hours later it was still pla­ying up, it took me a while to track down the pro­blem but in the end dele­ting the cache fixed everything. It’s a shame this hap­pe­ned because the down period of the site occu­rred during the period the site was on the front page of Digg. Oh well, I will know the fix for next time.