Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

Again with the lateness, I’ve finally gone and bought some external hosting — the new server is at least 10x better than my self-hosted one in all respects, over 1000x in others. It’s shared with a hundred odd other people, but so long as nobody wants all the power at once, it’s hardly noticable~

Not only do they not suck, which puts them above most web hosts, they’re also actively good — their web based control panel actually makes a lot of things easier than going to the shell and doing it all by hand. Things that other hosts don’t have at all (Subversion, Jabber, raw log access, unlimited subdomains, multiple shell / mail / ftp users, per-site bandwidth throttling, etc), they make no more than a couple of clicks away \o/

They also installed rrdtool at my whim (I do make extensive use of it, but they don’t know that…), using what appears to be the ideal management system (Custom APT repository + bulk server-management tools). They also cite a couple of moral reasons amongst the many technical ones for being a linux-only host, and will match any customer’s donations to their charities of the month :O

And last but not least, they have a sense of humour which matches mine <3

A few days late on this… Anywho, the BIO was full of awesome — I was literally surrounded by smart people, not once in the three days did I want to stab someone for being unbelievably stupid ^_^ Terms like P and NP were used in regular conversation, a soviet russia joke that made sense was made, numerous card games were played and the maths behind them discussed~ Even the evening out for pizza was full of smart, with discussion over the best way of eating a pizza, and the physics behind wine glass playing ^_^

I had the poshest meal ever, with a suite of incredibly well dressed waiters~ It was typically dull English food, but the best dull English food I’ve ever had /o/ And a pudding of cream-filled things covered in chocolate sauce from dedicated chocolate sauce bowls. It was also then that I found the first person I’ve ever met who used vim, and I’d met in person before online~ (still never met any emacs users…)

Also, there were a variety of games played in spare time, most notably munchkin, and a 3d block puzzle which I’ve been recreating digitally. The card game Mao was also mentioned, but we never got round to playing it — looking it up on google, it does seem good, if I can find some people smart enough to play against…

There was also a tour of Cambridge, which seems like a very nice place generally~

As prizes I’ve ended up with a 1GB USB stick, a 2 inch “introduction to algorithms” book, a copy of black & white 2 (which my PC can’t handle…), and the hint that the odds of me getting a summer job at Lionhead are one in a million, compared the the zero in a million that most people have \o/