Downtime :(
Posted by vultuk
June the 5th 2010 was possibly the longest day I have had in my life since some time back in 1997. Some time around 3:30am I received an alert that my webserver had gone down. This is a very rare occurrence that I have never had to worry about being hosted 'in the cloud' but unfortunately every now and again things do go wrong. I have full control over my cloud servers and usually can stop, start, reboot, re-install and restore in a matter of minutes but a problem with the SAN (Storage Area Network) at the same time as me trying to solve the problem caused conflicts and a lot of hair pulling.
Needless to say with a lot of help from the tech Guru's at vps.net we managed to identify the conflicts, restore from backups and get everything up and running again. I am looking into steps needed to, if not solve but, negate issues like this in the future!
My apologies to all people affected and thank you for your patience while we got this all sorted!
Apple 3D desktop wallpapers
Posted by vultuk
I've been spending a lot of time over Christmas working with some 3D packages increasing my skill with them for, hopefully, some major 3D modelling projects later on this year. But here, as a taster, are a couple of desktop images to show off your macs! Both are done in 1440x900, enjoy! 
Web Development: Natural and Sympathetic – Bespoke Timber Buildings, Garden Maintenance, Property Maintenance
Posted by vultuk
I've just finished work on a web site for a brand new company called "Natural and Sympathetic" and the site is now live. The company specializes in Bespoke Timber Buildings, Garden Maintenance and general Property Maintenance. I wasn't entirely sure where I wanted to go with the design for this and couldn't decide between a standard extendible layout or something more static, but with them wanting a gallery on the site I decided to go for a static layout with a flash rotating gallery as the main page.
The flash gallery was built from the ground up, something I've not done before, so I was very happy with the outcome and I'll probably add a tutorial in the future for this style of gallery as it's not something I actually managed to track down on the interwebz. But finally, if you are after any kind of building work or maintenance I really suggest checking out Natural and Sympathetic. The work they do really does look stunning and the tree house... Well It's gorgeous! Go check out the website and give them a call! 
Site Url : http://naturalandsympathetic.co.uk
Technology Used : HTML, CSS, Flash, AS3
New backgrounds for WordPress Pixeled Skin!
Posted by vultuk
I personally think that the Pixeled Skin for WordPress is one (if not the) best skin available. However I have taken to changing some of the background images to make them a bit different. So I've also decided to release a selection of these backgrounds for all to use if they wish!
To use the backgrounds simply save them to the /wp-content/themes/pixeled/images/ folder as bgbody.jpg then enjoy your new fresh looking blog!
There's currently 2 available for download and these are...
Pinstriped
FunkyBrick
To save them just Right Click on the image and click "Save target as" and tada! Enjoy!
Any linkbacks you wish to put on your site are greatly appreciated but you are free to use the backgrounds as you like!