Brrrrrrrr and Wow !!!

Thursday 2nd December, the 4th day in a row that we are virtually snowed in.This morning the temperature is a balmy - 1.8 ° C and for now at least it has stopped snowing. Yesterday we made an effort to reach the Co-op and stock up on milk and other essentials. It was snowing hard and although the Co-op is only 300 yds from our home, we were both exhausted and very cold by the time we made it back home. After that experience I can empathise with the Police who are telling us all that if we really don't need to go out then stay at home.

On Tuesday, much to my surprise, the engineer from BT arrived to connect me to fibre broadband. He was wet through and frozen solid after working in the box at the end of the road for 30 mins before coming to our house. We wrapped him round a hot mug of coffee and our dogs did their best to cuddle him back to life again. Once he could feel his fingers he tested the line and found that we had indeed achieved the 40 Mbps we had been promised. There was a certain amount of re-running of wires needed to get fiber where I wanted it but it took less than an hour for me to be able to sit down and back up some websites in seconds that before took anything up to half an hour to download on ADSL. Uploads are now a breeze and files loaded into my FTP program just vanish even big ones are transferred in seconds. I have a feeling that my Internet life is going to be a lot richer from now on.

The attacks I wrote about last week are still going on but for the moment at least we seem to be able to catch them. Up to now we have dealt with the attacks by blocking the IP addresses of attackers. However this has lead to a .htaccess file of over 10,000 lines of code which is unmanageable. So we are thinking about a proactive way to cut down on the number of attacks by only allowing people from countries that we want to trade with access to the sites. You would think this would be relatively easy because as this is a UK company and all its products are in the English language then all you have to do is list the English speaking countries and job done. Not so. A lot of the UK's former colonies still follow UK teaching practices and use English language text books so orders can and do arrive from very unexpected places. At least the effort it will need to analyze the order books and see just where orders have been received from will only generate one line of code per country instead of the hundreds of lines needed to block all the individual networks as before (The UK would need 4,254 lines of code to block it properly, I shudder to think what the USA would need).

Given the weather outside I am so glad that I am offically retired. After our expedition to the Co-op I think that if I had to struggle through this weather to work everyday I would be permanently exhausted and my heart goes out to the folks I see on TV trying to carry on in very difficult circumstances. But that's the English - we moan like mad about almost everything but when the chips are down we get stuck in and the job gets done.