Since complaining of a lack of work a few weeks back I've been thrown a life-line and now find myself with a spring back in my step and enough work to see me through the year - if not longer. In a year where it feels like every prospect I was given fell through (my annus horribilis), one of the bigger ones finally came off.

It's crazy how a lack of work affects me. Financial worries and stress aside, it makes me lose almost all interest in my chosen career.

Whenever I'm really busy and have no time to spare I always say to myself that when I'm next in a quiet spell I'll use the time wisely and learn new skills. But then, when I'm the quiet spell, I lose my mojo and any interest in learning new IT skills. Then when work picks up I kick myself for feeling like that and wasting the chance.

Never thought I'd use such an obvious cliché but I think I "strive under pressure". Now that I'm back in a position of having lots of work on I find myself with a new thirst for anything and everything IT.

Last week was one of those weeks that makes glad I do the job I do. During the week I worked on two new websites as well as fixing the odd bug and making amendments to existing apps.

Languages I Used Last Week:

PHP, HTML, CSS, C#, SQL, JavaScript, SSH, FTP, RDC, MXML, ActionScript, LotusScript.

Tools I Used Last Week:

Fireworks, Textpad, Zend Studio, FileZilla, HeidiSQL, SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio 2010, RDC, PuTTY, Vi, Flex Builder, Lotus Domino Designer.

This list just about sums-up why I love my job. I love having to know so much stuff and being able to delve in to a many and varied pot of skills. Variety is the spice of life, as they say.

Back To My Roots

As we speak I'm working on a traditional website. It's LAMP-based and has a backend CMS, but, in essence, it's just a plain old website. This is normally the kind of work I shun, thinking of it as "below me" and not real work. But I've now realised that (assuming the customer is willing to pay a reasonable amount) it's just as rewarding as any other work - if not more so. I've really enjoyed it and think I'll stop telling people "I'm a web developer" only to later say "I don't really do websites" if they happen to mention knowing somebody who needs one. What kind of business practice is that!

It's been nice to get back to basics. No XML. No Flex. No Web Services. Just good ol' fashioned HTML and CSS. That's where it's at.

I'll talk some more about the website I'm working on at some point as it makes an interesting case-study. I might even add it to Rockall's dire-looking portfolio page.

After a morning spent ironing-out browser-specific CSS bugs on a new website I went inside for a cup of tea. While there I thought I'd check it on the iPad - despite already having tested it in Safari on a Mac.

To my dismay the previously-plain text of the phone number had become a link, as you can see below (right hand side about 1/3 way down).

My instinct was that I'd left an <a> tag unclosed, so I went back to the office, double-checked and came back to the house to try again (no wifi in office). The link was still there, so, in desperation, I clicked it to see what it was linking to and this is what I saw:

At this point I realised the iPad had made the phone number in to a link. A link that lets me create a contact from it. Clever?

This is behaviour I'd expect on a phone and have found useful in the past when I've Googled for a company and then rang them directly from their website.

Is it something I'd expect on something that isn't a phone? No. I can't see any use to having this feature on the iPad. Smells to me like the iPad just uses the exact same browser build as the iPhone, perhaps?

If only I could work out why the iPad browser is adding the thin white lines down the sides of the magenta header area. Wishing I'd never looked at it on the iPad now. I was feeling quite happy with it until then.

BTW: Wondering how I took screen-grabs from the iPad? Quinn showed a trick whereby you press the power button and "thingy" button on its face at the same time to print screen. No idea how she worked that out. To get them to my PC I then added them to my Dropbox folder using the iPad app.

I've got a dedicated Linux server with Fasthosts and - despite vowing to leave them a couple of times - have had it for years now. The server hosts various LAMP-based websites that I've knocked up for people over the years on a get-what-you-pay-for support basis (none, that is).

Now that I'm starting to charge for these websites (and contemplating offering pure web design/hosting as a service) I need to take the support of the sites a little more seriously. For a start I need to consider backups. As it stands the server isn't backed up. At all. It's just a single-disk server disaster in waiting.

So I'm thinking of moving to a newer, bigger, better server. What I'm unsure of is whether a server with RAID 1 are as good as having daily backups? I know it's not the same thing -- if you want to restore to a previous version or something then RAID won't help, but all I care about really is never losing everything. Is a server with RAID 1 going to help me sleep better at night?

Update: Out of curiosity I looked at the spec of the current server and was shocked to see it only has 500MB of RAM.

Not sure why I was shocked though. This is testament to the beauty of LAMP servers that it will happily chug away endlessly with such little resource. Would increasing it to 2 or 4GBs really make that much difference to what are already fairly fast websites?