Khobbits Blog

Any frequent users of any of the services run on the khobbits.co.uk domain might have noticed that a lot of things have begun to forward to khobbits.net. At the beginning of the month I got an email from the people who currently host khobbits.co.uk who have decided to go bust. Basically by the start of April it wont be long before khobbits.co.uk stops being hosted, khobbits.net I have hosted with Dreamhost, as part of the signup deal I got two domains for free, but they refuse to host khobbits.co.uk due to it having been previously hosted with them for a period of a few weeks back when I was scratting around for hosting after I just bought the domain.

I do have a few ideas about how I can keep the khobbits.co.uk domain active but I don’t see any reason not to move everything to khobbits.net which no matter which way I deal with khobbits.co.uk, will be better hosted.

If anyone can find an issue with any of the domains I manage don’t hesitate to drop me an email. I’ve yet to set up khobbits.net for email, so use the old domain for now.

Edit: Oh no I moved host again, but forgot to make a post about it. This time I got sick of Dreamhost and moved to my self managed VPS. This was useful as i was able to merge all my hosts onto one box. Although I’m not sure if it saves me any money, at least I get experience managing a *nix (Ubuntu) server.

Over time I have ran quite a few IRC bots, IRC being Internet Relay Chat for people without the know. An IRC bot, is a bit of script or program that does automated tasks on a chat channel. Now, KHBOT was a creation of mine which stood the torrents of time, that is until I lost my most recent changes to hard drive corruption, after that I gave up on the project, and let a bot called RuneScript or rscript take over the niche that my bot had filled.

On IRC channels, with the invention of chanserv, there is little place for an IRC bot to manage access or ops, so it’s left to automate the more complex tasks, such as maintaining topics, hosting games or trivia. I play an RPG called RuneScape, with the goal of levelling up to become better at different skills, I created a mIRC script that would allow the lookup of your ’score’ in the high score list and return the results in channel. Now as time progressed I began to use this score to produce predictions on what you needed to do to level.

After putting up with rscript for a while, and it’s assorted features I decided it was about time I did something about making a better improved bot with my data. Darwin is the name of the new project, another IRC Runescape statistics bot, but this time it is together with a community I’m part of, called RuneSource, the site and the bot share the same database, a database of exp that we ourselves have gathered and can confirm it’s accuracy, unlike a lot of other sites which tend to share errors.

Darwin is a shared project between me and Filoni, who produces the calcs for RuneSource and also does his own set of statistics logging. Darwin is currently is a sort of eggdrop (TCL) and PHP hybrid, although I will be porting the scripts to mIRC later. The idea is; because most of the processing can be done on php, there only needs one centralised database, where bots can simply act as a relay to pass information. This means a wide span of mIRC and eggdrop bots can all run from one centralised place, so people can run their own bot but have the latest updates without having to do anything.

Btw anyone wanting cheap solid hosting, I would recommend dreamhost, they do nice solid accounts that do all the PHP and SQL stuff you could ever need, unlimited db’s, separate cPanel accounts and all the other nice stuff.  Well anyway, anyone wanting $50 off their hosting here is a promo code for you “KH50″.  Now that will basically waver your $49 setup fee if you set up monthly, which I wouldn’t really recommend as if you pay yearly, that fee is free, and instead your actually getting months of hosting free. The promo code also gives you a free domain for the lifetime of the account. I recently went for the 2 year payment, with the happy host account it is $164.80 (after promo code) which works out to be $6.86 (or about £3.40) a month.

Edit: updated information march 08.

Its rare that I make a post that isn’t related to this site or to the connected people, but today I’ve decided that I will expand on this, from now on, I’m going to start posting random crap into a separate category with some techno-babble and other random web rubbish :p

For people who are interested you can still use the categories down the side to filter out what’s probably worth reading, most of our personal stuff will go in the ‘personal’ folder, and stuff related to my websites and that sort of stuff will be dumped in ’site’ and the corresponding sub folder.

Hmm the first topic is probably a quick glance at the screwed up .eu registration, it was a good idea but the way they’ve got about it is pretty screwy, they’ve thrown together a badly managed system and can’t be assed to fix it. There’s a nice article here about it. The result is cheating firms get cheap .eu domains to sell for thousands of pounds.