webvictim.net

I really like sun. I really like Fridays. I really like drinking Diet Pepsi.

That is all for the moment. Today is a good day. :)

It’s been a lovely weekend. My best friend Matt and I held a bit of a barbecue and gaming evening at his house on Saturday which was great fun - Sarah, Louise and Jo came round and we played Monopoly, baseball on the Wii and Guitar Hero. We also got rather drunk which was fun, until such time as I got a phone call from my brother saying that he’d had a car crash. It turned out that my parents couldn’t drive and neither could I, but I got a lift down to go and see him as he sounded a bit shaken up on the phone.

When I got there, it turned out that the car that hit him had driven off with a broken radiator - my brother’s car was in a pretty bad way, so they must have hit him pretty hard. I just let the police do their job and gave my brother a comforting arm round the shoulders - not a lot else I could do really. I’m unsure if they’ve caught the people who did it yet or whether that’s still in progress.

I watched the European Cup final last night, thought it was a brilliant game - Spain totally deserved to win as they were all over Germany from about 15 minutes in until right at the end of the game. Torres scored a lovely goal, and Spain were unlucky not to get two or three more.

It’s rather hot today. Work is going alright, but it’s a bit loud thanks to the 3 HP DL140s running by my feet. Configuring servers is a noisy process!

One of the main aspects of my job is being a PHP developer for an online e-commerce platform which sells flights, hotels and holidays. As most online merchants will tell you, selling stuff online and allowing electronic payments can be a risky business, as there are lots of people out there who will try to put expensive transactions through on stolen credit cards, hoping that the goods will be dispatched and they’ll be able to do a runner before the card is reported stolen and blocked by the bank.

Selling flights is no different - there are a lot of people who will try and put expensive flights through your system and pay with a stolen credit card. You can usually spot these fraudsters a mile off - they try to make bookings to dodgy lawless places (Lagos, Accra, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Nairobi etc) that usually depart with the next few days, invariably with a card registered under the name of a third party. We’ve been selling flights online for a long time under various different platforms, and as such we have a fraud checking system that highlights bookings that might be fraudulent for review.

A little while ago we got what I think is probably the moodiest, dodgiest and most obviously fraudulent booking we’ve ever had on our system:
- The route is Dubai to Accra via Addis Ababa and Lagos
- It’s due to depart in three days’ time (20th April)
- The flight is with Ethopian Airlines
- The email address is registered in Ireland, despite the card being registered in England
- The name on the card is entirely different to the name of the person booking

I wonder who on earth thought they could get away with it?!

I’m now on Wordpress 2.5 - it’s very, very shiny indeed. I approve!

Work is busy, life is busy etc. Can’t complain at all :)

It’s Tuesday, and this is awesome!

(Yes, I’m a little bit bored in the last half-hour of work, and I don’t have a lot to write about.)

Tuesdays are actually my favourite day of the week. I go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and so I don’t get home until later on, and then have to make dinner and don’t usually get to sit down and relax until about 8pm, which is nasty. On Tuesdays, however, I get home at about 6pm and I can immediately start my relaxation. Win!

I am listening to my recommended radio station on last.fm, and it’s actually pretty good - I’ve heard a few things that I shall be following up on. If you fancy listening too… click!

It’s blog o’clock.

After having made myself ache by playing with my powerball so much, I decided to learn to start it by hand (as this is apparently what the pros do). It was quite easy once I worked out how, with the help of an excellent YouTube video. Don’t mind the dude’s cheesy voiceover, just watch exactly how he holds it and what he does and copy it. You’ll get there soon enough.

Unfortunately, I bottled out of deleting my Myspace account last week. I never use the thing to edit or do anything with my profile, but I’ve realised that I’m far too nosy to get rid of one of the only methods I have of looking at photos of old friends. I am sorry to have to admit this, but it seems that Myspace has beaten me. Perhaps in the future I will be able to break the hold it has over me!

I have been working at home a lot more recently, I have to say that it’s absolutely awesome. I also got a substantial pay rise from my boss, which I was very pleased about. To celebrate, I bought myself a nice shiny new 22″ monitor to put on my desk at home, so I now have an awesome dual desktop setup going on. I also paid substantially less than the price Amazon are currently quoting - something more in the region of £150, which was very, very reasonable. The monitor itself is fantastic - picture quality is superb (particularly in World of Warcraft, which is absolutely stunning at 1680×1050), it looks brilliant on the desk and it makes doing all my work a whole lot more pleasurable.

I transferred my level 61 alliance rogue over to Kloopy’s server recently, after he got back into playing WoW regularly. I’m just about to ding level 65, and it’s all going very well so far. I’m using Jame’s Alliance Levelling Guide, which has got mixed reviews from people in the past, but I have to say that I find it very easy to follow, and I’ve managed to get four whole levels in not a great deal of time. I’ve not played an Alliance character in ages but it’s all slowly coming back to me. Playing on a PvE server is also very different to the PvP servers I’m used to, and I find being able to level without the threat of being ganked to be a dream come true.

I also ordered myself an 8-bit tie the other day. They look great - see for yourself! (Kloopy and I realised afterwards that we probably should have taken the photo while not staring directly at the sun, however)

First of all, I hope that all of my readers had a brilliant Christmas, and I wish you all a very happy New Year. I’ve got a few resolutions, but a few of them are personal and so I won’t be bombarding you all with details of them.

One resolution I can tell you about though is my desire to get to work on time from now onwards. Ever since I started this job, I’ve had a persistent problem with getting here on time. I was OK at first as I wanted to make a good impression, but after a couple of months I started to lapse a bit, usually in pursuit of ten minutes more sleep in the mornings. Nobody said anything, so I never gave myself the psychological kick up the arse to actually sort myself out.

The reality was that although people noticed that I was always 5-10 minutes late, nobody ever said anything about it. There were a few jokes made about it but always for a laugh, and management never told me off for it. I’ve always known that my lateness was fairly unacceptable, but I think I was just content with allowing it to happen, provided I could get my extra time in bed in the mornings.

This is not going to happen any more. I have now decided that I will get to work and be at my desk at 9am every day from now on. It can’t do any harm, and getting up earlier will also enable me to have breakfast in the mornings and function a bit better during the day. Here’s to the future!

I got an interesting phone call last week at work. An colleague at one of our offices couldn’t get into a certain website (http://www.lime-management.co.uk) to make bookings. They could see the front page, but whenever they tried to log in, the site would just “stop” and then eventually time out with a “Page cannot be displayed” message.

I tried the site in my office, as well as at home and on a couple of other IP addresses, and there was no problem with it at all. Using different browsers created no problem at all, and even different operating systems (I tried from both Linux and Windows) weren’t a problem. The only issue that the boss and I could come up with that it was some kind of bizarre group policy setting, because the colleague’s office all runs on a Windows domain, whereas my office does not. However, this theory was disproved when I tried a PC at the remote office that wasn’t a member of the domain and the problem persisted.

I decided to try a different internet gateway in the hope that there was some issue with the primary router at my colleague’s office. Obviously this would still be a major issue, but at least it might offer some explanation as to why this problem was manifesting itself. We have multiple internet connections to each office, not just for redundancy but due to historical reasons, so this was a good time to test one out. Unfortunately the problem was still there.

After scratching my head for a minute or two, I tried out a couple of traceroutes. The first was directly to the website itself (194.154.164.72) and completed without a problem. I’d noticed that the login to the site handed off to booking.lime-management.co.uk (57.66.83.59) and so tried that as well.

This is where the problem became apparent. The traceroute halted on the second hop with a message: “192.168.0.252 reports: destination net unreachable”. This surprised me, as that IP belongs to the router which deals with that office’s connection to the Galileo GDS system. It was here that I realised that a slight oversight had been made with the configuration of the primary router. Galileo servers use IPs in the range 57.8.x.x, and we’d added a static route to the primary router to offload any traffic for 57.x.x.x to 192.168.0.252, without bearing in mind that the entire class A 57.x.x.x range did not belong to Galileo.

I changed the offending route and subnet mask to 57.8.x.x and 255.255.x.x respectively, and the website promptly started working with no problems.

(this entry has mainly been put here in case anyone else ever has a similar problem and searches for it)

The panto has been and gone, and you can see me hoofing about a bit here if you have me added on Facebook and have the “Video” application. I’m the guy who comes on stage after the dog and then dances at the very left-hand side of the video. If you don’t have me added on Facebook, search for “Gus Luxton” in the London network. My picture is of me posing in a mirror in a stripey shirt and pinstripe trousers.

My birthday (last Wednesday, December 12th) was brilliant - many thanks to anyone who sent me birthday wishes by any medium at all! Being 23 is a little scary though. I logged into last.fm a couple of days ago to look at my recommendations and it came up “Male, 23, Hertfordshire” at the side… I actually had to do a double take as I realised that I was old.

I am seriously looking forward to Christmas and having some time off work. I enjoy my job and it’s been very rewarding of late, but I am shattered and just need a week or so off to actually draw breath and get back to feeling human again.

Sorry for the short sentences and the formal style - I’ve just updated Livejournal for the first time in about two months with an absolutely massive post, and I don’t have much wordiness left in me.

It’s the Secret Santa at work tomorrow, and I have to say that some of the people upstairs are absolutely ruining it. They watch the present box like hawks, and as soon as anyone brings a present up, they’ll run over and check who it’s for so that they can make a note of who bought what for who, and hold them accountable at a later date. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Secret Santa, it’s where you put everyone in an office/club/group’s name in a hat and randomly draw one each, so you get someone to buy a Christmas present for. There’s a budget of £5 in our office, and the (unofficial) idea is usually to get embarassing or amusing gifts. The main point of the whole thing is that you don’t tell anyone else who you have, though - that’s why it’s a “secret” Santa and you can get away with buying some very amusing things indeed. I am currently devising a scheme where I will be able to get my gift into the present box without them noticing.

I met up with Xsara this evening for the first time in a while. She’s doing alright and looking well. I thought she’d disappeared off the face of the earth but no, I was wrong. It’s a good job I didn’t eBay the DVDs she left at my house like I was planning to…

http://www.asda-travel.co.uk/

This is what has been consuming my time at work for the last few months. Myself and a couple of colleagues have written the entire booking engine from scratch, and we’re pretty proud of it.

If you’ve got any comments, I’d be interested to hear them :)

It’s come to my attention that recently, I haven’t actually had that much time to spend doing things that are solely for me.

It used to be that I went to work from 9-5:30, then on three days out of five I’d go to the gym, then home, and on the other two days I’d go straight home. When I arrived home, all that time was mine - I could do whatever I liked, usually watch TV, play games and just generally relax.

Lately though, I’ve been so busy with work on our new booking engine that I just haven’t had time for myself. I barely make it to the gym at the moment, because we work late and have deadlines to meet. With rehearsals for the show as well, I often don’t get home until 10:30pm, when I have about an hour and a half to do anything for myself before I really need to be in bed. Of course I rarely make it to bed at this time and end up staying up late to do the things I want to do, and then I end up at work the next day feeling very tired indeed.

I relish the challenge, and I think that these times are a lot of fun, but part of me can’t help but wish for the day that I can go back to my normal routine and actually get some sleep again.

This weekend has been very relaxing - I am sitting at my desk at work at the moment, and despite being very hungry and wanting the bacon man to show up and provide me with a sandwich and a bottle of Coke, I feel rather good. Considering I only got five hours’ sleep last night, that isn’t too bad. I just need to make sure that I kill myself off at the gym after work and then go to bed at about midnight tonight, otherwise I’ll be a total zombie tomorrow morning.

I find that usually, the weekends where you don’t do a lot are the most relaxing of all. A few weeks ago, my best mate moved out of the flat he was sharing with his girlfriend, after some relationship trouble. It’s a long story, and everything between them is fine again now (they’ve been together nearly five years, it would have been a major thing to lose) but the side effect is that we no longer have anywhere to go to chill out, drink and play games of a Friday or Saturday night. This is a shame on some levels because I really quite liked his flat, and it was great to have somewhere we could stay up late and make a bit of noise, then crash out at 4am and sleep until halfway through the next day. It’s also quite a good thing, because it means that my weekends have become a lot more about sleep and sitting around in my boxers and a dressing gown. This is a geeky comment but it’s certainly one I believe in!

Rehearsals for the pantomime are well underway, and after rehearsal on Thursday night, I went into town to meet Matt, Craig, Larman and Jo for a drink. After one pint, it became another, and soon enough I was being badgered into leaving my car in town and going to the Ivory for a load more drinks with them. I hadn’t planned on it, but the best evenings out I’ve had (both at home and university) have been spontaneous ones, and this didn’t disappoint. The only bad part was going to bed at 3am, and then having to get up at 7:45 on Friday morning for Matt to give me a lift to town to collect my car.

Having said that my weekend was relaxing, I did actually go to work on Saturday night. It’s a longish story, but I recently went to watch some kickboxing at the Stevenage leisure centre, which is attached to the Gordon Craig theatre. My old school friend Dave is a full-time deputy chief technician at the theatre and organises lightning, sound and stage management for all the productions they put on - he happened to be doing the lightning and sound for the kickboxing, and when I saw him we both had a chat about things as we hadn’t seen each other in a while.

He mentioned that they had vacancies for casual work - basically doing similar things to him but on a part-time basis - a bit of lighting and sound, rigging lights, follow spotting and the like, and said that there was a job for me if I was interested. I’ve always loved that side of theatre, and despite having got back onto the stage recently, part of me has always preferred being one of the unsung heroes behind the scenes who actually make everything work together. After thinking about it momentarily, I accepted his offer and agreed to get in contact to sort it out.

Saturday night was my first shift, doing what’s known as the “get-out” for Tap Dogs, a loud, high-energy show featuring six tap-dancing Australians, which had been running for the whole of the previous week. The get-out is basically disassembling the entire set, lighting and sound rigs and packing the whole lot back up into a lorry to send it to its next venue. The set is constructed primarily of box-section steel and, as such, is rather heavy. The majority of the sections involved six-man lifts to actually get it to move - to say it was hard work is a bit of an understatement! It was good fun though, and although I didn’t get home until 3am, I earnt a lot of money for it :-)