Our Weblog

The new 'About Us' page

Hi guys, It’s been a while since we posted an update in the blog.  It was my turn to post something back in August, but unfortunately, these past few weeks have been a bit hectic; I’ve had to put on a number of different hats to combat a variety of issues which left little time to work on a blog post.

Server and power issues

There were several non-design-and-development hiccups late last month that led to me having to pull a few all-nighters.

First, there were the power outages; there were three in a row, with each lasting several hours.  When the power would come back on, our Internet connection would go down.  There’s really no solution for the power issue; it’s a fact of life in this part of the world, but we ended up investing in a UPS unit to mitigate damages to electrical equipment.  The Internet issue turned out to be due to our network router being too outdated to deal with our recently upgraded 4MBPS ADSL line.

Next there was the issue of a buggy piece of code in a software that runs on our webserver that was spawning mysql processes in their hundreds while it blocked and waited for a locked table to get unlocked.  It took a while to figure out how to permanently fix the defect as opposed to firehosing it.  my.cnf underwent a modest makeover as cache sizes and max limits were upped.

There was also the issue of emails taking hours, sometimes even days, to get delivered.  Thousands of emails, the overwhelming majority of which were spam, were getting stuck in the pipeline and simply being annoying little twits.  Cleaning the qmail queue and reducing the defined ‘queuelifetime’ from 7 days to 2 sorted that out; it ultimately brought down the number of emails from over 5,000 to just under 300.  If you’re interested in knowing exactly how all of the above was tackled, just let me know and I can go ahead and post further details.

The server has been doing a pretty decent job of handling the number of requests that it receives, and so I tend to cut it some slack whenever it decides to time out for a couple of hours and catch its breath.  Though our relationship is laid back and we’ve had few fits during the past 7 years, it certainly isn’t a sustainable one in light of our aspirations to grow, nor is the constant “context-switching” that reminds me of my days as a generalist (shivers).  The very near future will therefore almost certainly have to involve us getting a more powerful machine to house our webserver, hopefully with a dedicated system administrator to take care of it.

Goal.com updates

It’s been really great working with Goal.com during these past few weeks on tweaking their logo and making it ready for its final unveiling real soon.  There’s another surprise too that will hopefully be revealed along with the logo once it goes live, so be sure to look out for it.

‘About Us’ page

We had been meaning to update the ‘About Us’ page for quite some time.  Our new one goes nicely with the general theme of the website and thankfully, does away with the somewhat hideous icons that we were using before.  The new page now also contains a list of some of the awards and honors that we’ve received over the years.

I finally got around to taking the issue of PNG transparency in IE6 seriously after ignoring it all my life because we now had a PNG that needed to be positioned on top of everything else, which meant that the issue could no longer be hand-waived.  Thankfully, ifixpng proved to be a really easy solution that was much less hassle than the CSS workarounds that I had come across.

Some parts of the code still need cleaning up, but they’ll have to wait until tomorrow.  For now, hope you like the new design.  Please feel free to let us know if you have any comments.

Tags: about us