Website To Stop Updating For A While

Due to this website seemingly being banned in Thailand now, I have read through the last article I wrote and it looks as though my references to the Austrlian Police Corruption (that is documented and reported) could have been confused with my story about the Thai Police.

In this light it may seem that I was not happy with the Thai Police when this is certainly not the case, the Thai Police handled the episode in question very well in my opinion, and a hell of a lot better than could have been the case with the Australian Police.

For this reason I'll not be updating for a while as I go through and edit the article and check others to make sure my points and opinions are perfectly clear.  The Thai Police are doing a very good job and any quick check of a Thai news service will show that they have a great many problems to deal with, making their job that much more difficult.

Thier quick response and helpfulness the other night that our apartment complex had a break in was much appreciated by all living here. 

Damaged MySQL Table Causes Photos Not To Show

Website Now 2 Years Old

Slow Internet Many Sites Time Out

For the last 4 hours or so my website has been unreachable. The server that I lease is hosted in Atlanta and there were some problems there:

The word we're getting from Atlanta is that a major carrier is working on a bad fiber connection. This is not the data center's fault and is totally unrelated to the emergency router maintenance from a month ago. I'm seeing 1%-3% packet loss from NJ. We'll continue to monitor and provide updates as we receive them. Apologies for any inconvenience. 

This means that 1 to 3% of information was not making the trip, in fact it was much worse than that with major sections of the Internet completely unreachable....

Video Library Problems

Thanks to Tyranez for bringing to my attention some problems with my video library.

If you are a subscriber and are having problems with the video section please email me as the software I am using does have some bugs., by reporting problems I can get them fixed by the programmer.

The last 3 videos I also made typing errors when I made the posts before I went away, this means that the videos were not working and I was not checking them... doh!

Fixed now. 

New VIDEO Section Added

Due to numerous requests by many people to see more videos I have now added a video section that contains all the videos variously stored in differing formats through out the site and also a ton of new content.

As of opening the Video section has 52 videos in 35 articles with more videos added each week.

Next additions will be wrestling and muscle/bodybuilding orientated.

If you have ANY problems please email me and let me know.

Access the video section by clicking the new top menu (below the page title) item strangely called VIDEOS.

:) 

Important Notice - Errors On Website - Fixed

I have added a subscription module for the new Video section on this site.

Everything else is free and can be accessed without  a subscription or membership, if you get a page asking you to login hit the BACK button in your browser and then click on the link to the article again.

I have referred this issue back to the programmer of the module and hopefully this issue will be fixed sooner rather than later. 

FIXED. 

Laptop Broken Website Down for a while

My old laptop kicked the bucket the other day and refused to boot, luckily revenue from this website had just been paid by Google so that went into the funding for a new laptop

All well and good?

No, Compaq in all their shining brilliance since HP took over do not have the drivers for my laptop online - only for the new Microsoft Vista Operating System - yet previous versions had the drivers online

And Compaq no longer list the chipsets in the product nor are they listed in the technical papers, just more low brow marketing blurb, even the manuals are just more sales material

I have the laptop working with internet access and correct viewing resolution but nothing else

Ubuntu Linux is my next step and to move away from Microsofts crappy Operating Systems, since MS could not sell Vista it seems they are now using strong arm tactics (again) to force sellers to not support older versions of MS Windows as no one who uses Vista in a professional sense is too happy with it

Also to note from Saturday I will be in Cambodia for about a week so will not be replying to non-work related emails and the website probably won't be updated.

Cheers, see you next week

DDoS Attack Leaves Website Slow

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Attack against my webhosting company has left my website slow as mud the last few days, in an blog post last night they said that this was now cleared up but according to the speed of this site I guess they were wrong.

A DDoS Attack is the technical name for a hacker leading an army of 'zombie' computers against his chosen foe... 

New Articles coming this afternoon

Apologies for the lack of posts this last couple of weeks - I have been busy on set with Som Tam.

Later today and tomorrow I will be putting up posts on;

1. Onset Ettiquette for Extras
2. How to approach an actor onset
3. Extras - the necessary evil
4. Being onset does not make you a superstar

OK, I am taking it a bit far but I will write up a few opinions and tips on and for Extras in a couple of articles.

Also I have met some very interesting guys that I am sure a few of you will know - WWE pro-wrestlers and I will (hopefully) get some photos with them to put up.

Nathan Jones? Yes I have been working with him - well in fact I have been insulting him and his friends - but only onset - Nathan is a great guy and I am happy to finally work with him.

Muay Thai Grandmasters - yep some info and photos with me and them.

So look out over the next few days for some new info - I'm off to the gym now - Arms day! 

Been Busy Updating The Site

I have not been posting much these last month as I have been very busy updating this site, building another 6 sites, making this site faster... and... and... hmm... that's about it for 16 hours a day in front of the computer. 

Slow Performance Joomla Using Too Many Resources

Joomla slow? Not if you follow the intructions below to speed up Joomla, attract additional visitors and get them to stay longer (more revenue anyone?) 

My webhost took my Joomla site offline due to Joomla using too many resources, they said I was slowing the server and I was going to crash the server. Apparently too many MySQL queries were happening and causing an overload on my account and affecting the speed of other sites hosted on the same server.

So if Joomla PHP is killing your shared webhost account and your Joomla (Mambo) install is getting slow performance issues follow these steps...

Website Now Faster

I have been working the last few days on making the website faster, I think I have succeeded

I will write more tomorrow but suffice to say that I have added a great deal of cahing so that the website now keeps a plain HTML copy of most pages in memory ready to pull up when you visit. This is compared to sending 200 seperate requests to the DataBase and building the web page seperately for each visitor

I have gotten the requests down to 30-40 per page + have static HTML (a small text file) ready to pull up quickly

I am also investigating moving this website over to it's own server and removingthe restrictions that a shared host brings. Notably we will be able to run software that we choose - ie faster stripped down versions and we will have full control over every aspect of the site

I am trying to make the website invulnerable to the "slashdot effect" where a popular website puts you on the front page and thousands of visitors hit your site every minute (or more).

More details tomorrow for anyone else with a slow website that they want to make faster

Top 20 Weird Google Search Terms That Had Visitors Come To My Site

Going through my search logs last night (5 hours worth) I was surprised by some of the search terms people type into Google, Yahoo. MSN and the like. Though I was more surprised that they found my site through those terms.

Here is a list of the top 20....

*UPDATE - Surprise late entry - "why do I pretend to fight with others in front of the mirror" ??? Please tell us when you find out, I for one am interested in why you do this

Super Crap Internet Hinders Articles On www.ConanStevens.com

Yes, you heard it right Super Crap Internet is working furiously against further development of www.conanstevens.com.

Wi-Fi signals that mysteriously waver and drop out, DNS that cannot resolve www.google.com, unable to lease IP addresses and the ever favourite cannot find network...