Recently I’ve been having a few problems with the web hosting provider I use used to use for this site and others. After a couple of years of solid service the last couple of months have proved to be anything but reliable. Performance was never anything to write home about but lately has become unacceptably poor. Couple that with intermittent down time over the last few weeks and the fact they managed to lose the contents of my home directory at the back end of last week and it was time to find a better solution!

After an unhelpful exchange with their support team it became apparent they couldn’t restore any of the lost content and had no backup procedure in place, luckily I have copies of anything that’s important. They seemed to have little interest in helping me and continued to reply with a generic message blaming a hardware fault, requesting that I re upload my files and offering a month’s free hosting for the inconvenience. Instead I chose to look elsewhere.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using a VPS for some time now and this offered the perfect excuse to move. After a little searching I settled on a solution with 256MB ram and the possibility of an easy upgrade in the future. A couple of days of setting-up/tweaking to get everything running nicely and here we are, andatche.com is back up at a new home! I’ve still got a few things to fine tune before I’ll be completely happy with everything but so far all is well.

I’ve been suffering lots of comment spam from spambots of late and decided to do something about it. Using Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam plugin for wordpress I’ve implemented a captcha on the comments form. The slight inconvenience this adds for users is more than worth the time saved removing spam comments.

This is a spam email a collegue at work recieved, Dr. Seuss style. Made me chuckle.

That’s great you’ve found a gal that’s hot You wanna hump her juicy tw*t.
She’s so attractive, she’s so nice!
But would your penile size suffice?
Not sure she will long for more?
You need a wang she would adore!
But how to raise it long and thick?
Your only chance is MegaDik!
You’ll get so wanted super-size
And see great pleasure in her eyes!
Your shaft will slam her pink so deep,
Tonight you’ll hardly fall asleep!

So try today this wonder-pi’ll
And change your life at your own will!

I found a pretty awesome extension for Mozilla Firefox today called It’s all text! It allows you to edit HTML textareas using an external editor (Such as Vim) from Firefox. This is really handy for writing long forum posts, blog posts, bug reports etc as I much prefer using Vim than any of the integrated text editors from stuff like VBulliten and Wordpress.

Using MidpSSH I have managed to get SSH access to my boxen from my phone (a Samsung D600) with publickey authentication. MidpSSH will run on tons of mobile devices that support Java with MIDP version 1.0 and 2.0. If you need SSH access while out and about, I’d recommend giving it a go.

My PGP public key is available here. It is also listed on subkeys.pgp.net. Please use it to verify PGP signed messages from me, and to encrypt messages you wish to send to me. I welcome encrypted email.