Category: Miscellaneous

This is just a test article to check PHP 8.4 compatibility of publishing an article.

Just sayin'

Apple today released the biggest update to macOS in recent years.

It’s so big in fact, it no longer carries the OS X (version 10) moniker it has carried since the early 2000s. No sur; Big Sur carries an all-new version 11.

The OS update clocks in at 12.1GB on my 2016 MacBook Pro – a hefty update that appears to have broken Apple’s update servers shortly after it was released. Not a great look for Apple.

My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week:

• 16th October, 22:00 – 02:00
• 17th October, 00:00 – 00:30

The first window specifically targets the VPS platform, and will see my server powered down and migrated to new infrastructure.

The second window will see an upgrade to the core network adding additional capacity and DDOS protection.

This outage will affect:

Earlier this month, myself and James went to see Take That play the opening night of their Wonderland tour in Birmingham, and I learnt an important lesson when posting to social media.

It was a a great gig and I took lots of photos for my gallery. Like most people, I used the power of social media to quickly share the joy and the buzz I felt.

A reported 19 concert-goers attending an Ariana Grande gig in Manchester have been killed following an explosion in a foyer area within the arena.

Greater Manchester Police are treating the incident as terrorism.

My hosting company, Memset Ltd., have advised me they will be performing important maintenance work on their Miniserver platform.

This maintenance is to apply critical security patches to the Linux kernel of the physical servers that host the virtual servers like mine – that power this website.

It is taking place between 22:00 GMT on 1st November and 04:00 GMT on 2nd November. My server will be down for 15-30 minutes during this period.

This affects my:

• personal website/blog (this site)
• software web store
• photo gallery

Sky – who provide broadband and digital TV services to UK residents and businesses – have recently enabled IPv6 to their consumer broadband customers. I believe they are the first UK ISP to do so, and I hope others follow very soon.

IPv6 is a replacement addressing scheme for all computers connected to the Internet. The current scheme – IPv4, which uses dotted numerals like 127.0.0.1, is fast running out of available addresses.

Fellow software developers will understand the meaning behind the title of this post.

“Hello, world!” is the typical statement used in programming tutorials when learning to write software – and it’s usually the first words someone entering the wonderful world of software development will teach a computer application to say.

It’s therefore fitting that the title of the first post on the brand-new website of a software developer should be these hallowed words.