It's here!

Finally, after several months waiting for Lincoln to be included in the rollout - to the actual installation day, our 50MB Virgin Media Broadband has arrived! Unfortunately it meant that all the domains hosted here were unavailable for nearly 12 hours yesterday, 5 of which I spent getting it all to work - and to my surprise, a speed test showed that is was running at full capacity.

So far it seems quick but we've been accustomed to 20MB for a while now - which was hardly 56k speeds. The cost is also very reasonable since they dropped the prices on 1st September, so much so that it only cost a few £ more to upgrade. They also throw in a D-Link Wireless-N router and USB adapter to take advantage of the new speed.

You should/may notice an increase in page load times around here, as the servers can provide content over twice as fast as before. There's also headroom as Virgin Media are currently trialling 200MB download speeds and 10MB upload with their new DOCSIS 3.0 system. In the words of Samuel L Jackson, it's the dawn of a new era.

comments Posted: Wednesday 7th October 2009, 13:23pm
Categories: Computers and Technology, Slickhouse, Web
Tags: broadband, virgin-media

media.slickhouse.com

A few months back my (now) sister-in-law was looking through our DVD collection to find a few to rent, when she suggested I should have a list of them all - as it would be easier to find.

So, I decided to make a simple web application that would store all of the DVDs and games within a database, allowing friends and family to browse the catalogue and to 'rent' any they wished. The application itself was easy to create, the time consuming part was entering all 321 items into the database! It took Anneka and I about 8 hours spread over several evenings. The result is:

media.slickhouse.com

Have a look, filter the collection and view the individual DVDs/games. Let me know if you find any issues too - as it's still in development. I plan to add several more features including:

Let me know if you have any suggestions for additional features or if you're interested in the source code. We were a little surprised with the 321 items in total - I had estimated over 400, but if you split out all the box-sets then it's fairly close to the latter!

comments Posted: Thursday 1st October 2009, 13:23pm
Categories: Games, Slickhouse, Video, Web
Tags: dvd, media, slickhouse, xbox-360