Review: Ghost Rider

I watched Ghost Rider tonight, and I have to say I’m actually quite impressed.

I didn’t know whether it would be any good, and I have to admit it was somewhat far-fetched in places (but then, it’s a fantasy storyline, based on a Marvel comic, so I guess that’s allowed!), but overall it was very good.

Nicolas Cage put in a rather good performance as the Ghost Rider, alongside the rather aesthetically pleasing Eva Mendes. Continue reading Review: Ghost Rider

Akismet rocks! (and spammers are a pain)

My blog hasn’t been running long, but the excellent Akismet has already caught over 100 spam comments for me – with a 100% success rate – no false positives, and none missed either.

Akismet recently cross the big milestone of one billion spams caught – that’s a whole lot of spam! According to the stats, of all submissions passed through Akismet, 95% were spam. With Akismet seeing about 10 million spam messages per day, it’s a good illustration of the scale of the problem.

Continue reading Akismet rocks! (and spammers are a pain)

Poor site performance

Apologies for the slowness and occasional downtime lately – the server this blog is hosted on is a little VPS (a virtual dedicated server) hosted with Bytemark. It’s been a great little server and great value, but I think we’ve outgrown it now.

It only has 80MB RAM allocated, and watching vmstat shows that it swaps like mad reasonably often. I just had to restart MySQL, as presumably the kernel did an OOM kill overnight.  I’ve asked for an upgrade to give it more RAM, which should keep things going until we can finish refurbing our new server and whack it in a rack somewhere.