_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

It's true. We're finally on to BT's Superfast package! Finally our internet connection at home is fast enough to download a server backup each day without sacrificing the whole connection.

After doing a speed test this morning I have noticed that we've had a huge increase in speed. From 12Mbps all the way up to as high as 48Mbps, we're getting a much better all-round experience.

Upload isn't bad either - we're getting 8Mbps which is 16 times faster than the 0.5Mbps upload we got yesterday!

I thought I'd share some Linux wisdom with you all. Today I'm talking about symbolic links.

Until recently I have been making my live site a direct duplicate of all content of the development site. This meant that I needed to have two copies of all static files. Uh oh. For instance, my photo gallery on my website is about 400MB in size, so that's 800MB used for the photo gallery between the development site and the live site. 

Overall, the method described is expensive and isn't necessary. I have been for quite a while considering symblinking the two to avoid static content being duplicated. Alas, it has been done. I now have a new section on the web server called user_content - a place where all user content that is identical between the live and development websites will go. This not only simplifies the copying of content by no longer needing a manual copy between the development and live sites, but it also reduces the storage space that was wasted with the old design.

For example:

ln -s /www/user_content/jamiebalfour.scot/files/gallery /www/sites/jamiebalfour.scot/public/live/gallery/content

simplifies the whole process of the gallery updates on both the development and live sites.

Overall, using symbolic links has made huge differences to my web server.

Today I attended the Amazon AWSome conference and today I decided in the next few weeks I will move over to use AWS in more and more of my projects.

The conference was very useful because it gave me an insight into how I would use AWS but it also covered the basics of getting started and how I can migrate to the Amazon cloud service. I found the talk interesting and I found that the presenters were well informed on what they were speaking about and within the first part of the day I decided it's time to move to using it.

So what did I learn? Well, perhaps most crucially, I learned that it's not as daunting as I first imagined and that they have most of the features I currently have available from day one. I also learned that it's not going to be overly expensive to make the shift - perhaps cheaper in the long run too.

For a fairly long time (since I moved into my halls of residence in 2013) I've been obsessed with something more than computers. Phones.

I'm not talking about smartphones, I'm talking about IP phones. VoIP or voice over IP is something I've been interested in since about 2003 when I got to use Skype for the first time. I found it incredible that we could do these things and Skype just kept getting better and better. But Skype had and still has one problem - you need a PC or some other device running the software to use it. 

As I mentioned, in 2013 I got my own IP phone in my halls of residence. I had longed to be able to test one like this so it was really awesome to get to test it for the first time. I had a Cisco one if I remember. About early 2014 I spoke with my father about getting an IP phone for the house and moving away from the standard PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and with both of us being in some part of the computing industry (we both work with networking regularly), it seemed only right that we now trial this technology at home. In both of my previous offices, I got the wonderful experience of using IP phones, in particular, my last job, where we used Grandstream phones which had all the bells and whistles. I looked the phone we had at work up and to my surprise, it was only £70 odd to buy one on Amazon.  

Last Friday we officially began moving to IP phones across the house (and it's all been down to me to do it, but hey, I guess I've managed, even though it's been completely a new concept). SIP, or session initiated protocol, is the backbone of our new network. Our network is powered by a Raspberry Pi which handles all outgoing calls currently and will soon deal with incoming calls. Our original DECT analogue phones will be slowly moving to SIP, with one set of them moving this week and one will remain on the analogue line until we transfer entirely to SIP. My bedroom will use my new Grandstream GXP2170 (which was only £100 so only £30 more than I was going to pay and I got a much better phone). I'll also be finally getting my own private number in the house. 

As it happens, BT wants to switch the whole country from the basic PSTN to an IP based network to make it more competitive and it's a good move too. There's more about this change that BT wants to bring to us here.

It's often been laughed at by my friends, but now it was too much (or too little). Our broadband connection was abysmal - often only achieving a paltry 2Mbps (0.25MBps). This meant that simple things like SSH couldn't even work properly and would often timeout. 

I will point out, where I live was one of the pilot locations for broadband when it first came to the UK, so we had faster broadband than quite a few people at the time. On October 26th we decided to complain about how slow our internet connection has become. During a complaint about the speed, we were told that an engineer would be out to have a look. The engineer did arrive and mentioned about the speed that we were able to get superfast broadband (up to 56Mbps or 7MBps) now according to the system. We were, of course, delighted, although a remained somewhat sceptical about this, but we decided to move to it straight away.

Now the fun starts. We were originally promised that it would be Tuesday the 31st of October and there would be absolutely no disruptions to our service until then. We were sent a BT Home Hub 5. Then within a few days, a new BT Smart Hub (aka the Hub 6). We were told to disconnect the old router and connect our new BT Smart Hub. We immediately lost our internet connection. On the 31st of October, after getting all excited for our new superfast connection, I was let down. 

On the 2nd of November, after having had no internet now for a week, meaning no maintenance on my web server or anything and only one backup downloaded in that time (thanks to my friend Calum, who allowed me to download a backup at his place using his superfast connection) I was beginning to get weary. We were annoyed that we had no superfast on this day but when we phoned BT to find out why, there were a bunch of excuses, but in the end, we figured out the main problem - the line wasn't supported. Wait a minute, didn't the say it was?

What BT said originally was not true, our house was not suitable for fibre; because we did not have a connection to the cabinet but a connection direct to the exchange, bypassing the need for the fibre-enabled cabinet. 

So we were then promised the following Tuesday (7th November) for our superfast connection. I again remained extremely unsupportive that this would be all done and dusted by then. My dad, on the other hand, kept firmly believing that this would happen.

As you guessed it, we didn't have it on Tuesday 7th of November, but we were told it would be there on Thursday the 9th (the day I was originally meant to be moving it my own house but that's for another story). We were then told on Friday the 10th that it wasn't going to happen then and would definitely be in place by the next Tuesday (14th).

All in all, I'm just so angry with BT for messing us around. I once believed they were a good company but this has changed my opinions entirely.

As a developer, there is one thing that is at the top of my list of things that I need to decide on - the text editor.

The development environment needs to be pleasing and make you feel comfortable (whilst developing Dash I feel quite the same way, if the content management system isn't user friendly, you can't be comfortable using it). I've been through a lot of editors - starting with a bunch of versions of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2013. They are all brilliant and I'm glad that I made the choice to use them for about 7 or so years whilst I was a .NET developer.

Things changed quickly though as I became a developer based on Mac OS X. I was forced to find a new editor that suited my development purposes. When I stopped developing in VB.NET and C# and began developing Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP etc. I found that I needed to find a new IDE that would suit those purposes. For the vast majority of those (all the web based ones) I used Aptana Studio 3. Aptana was brilliant but it quickly felt dated but I just could not afford the time to get a new editor without being certain that it was right for me. A good IDE needs to be extremely colourful (because that helps highlight different syntaxes), be fast and not prone to crashing (as Aptana eventually started doing) and be feature rich. For me one of the most important features of the IDE is support for SFTP. Aptana offers this out of the box. I then moved from Aptana to Eclipse with the Aptana plugin - pretty good to be honest. 

Eclipse is brilliant for Java development, and I still use it because it can compile a JAR file in so few steps, it can interpret and debug programs well and it just feels like it was designed for Java. However, Eclipse was eventually laden with the same bug that Aptana has and would crash from time to time - particularly when in the Web perspective.

So I made another move, this time to Adobe Brackets. I jumped on the Brackets bandwagon when it was pretty young, and I loved it. Syntax highlighting is lovely, it's feature rich and it's open source. Unfortunately, this jump was too early - Brackets just didn't have everything I needed. In 2015, I started an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. As a result I gave Dreamweaver a try and I liked it (looking back, I don't know why I liked it really other than the fact it had SFTP built in). 

Introducing Atom

Atom is now my favourite text editor. After being introduced to it by a colleague at work, I feel like I've come to love it. It's colourful, well designed, doesn't crash and has everything I need from a text editor or IDE. 

Atom is my new IDE of choice

Why is Atom nearly the perfect editor though? Well my first reason is that Atom has clear colouring - it's dark interface clearly defines the background from the foreground and its syntax highlighting is bright and stands out well. On top of this, Atom features a plugin system that means that if the feature you want is not available, it's likely to be available as a plugin somewhere. Atom is fast - it doesn't slow down too much as files get larger - I'm talking about PHP files, which I always break into logical files which rarely exceed 3,000 lines. 

People may say what about Visual Studio Code, since being from a Visual Studio background surely I'd like that? Well yeah I do. But I found Atom to be even nicer.

I think that if you are reading this and looking for a new text editor with a beautiful touch to it, Atom is well worth a try.

If you have a different favourite, I want to know what your favourite editor is. 

Whenever I am asked why I bothered building a personal website or why someone needs a personal website my reply is often something along the lines of 'it's fun' or 'it's my hobby'. But I very rarely touch on the benefits of my personal website.

There are a huge number of benefits to my own personal website. I get around 500 visitors a month on my website. I use it to showcase my work to potential employers, to get myself on the internet in a public way that people can connect with me through but there are also other things. I enjoy learning and teaching, so my website is also a source of information where I put tutorials to help others learn stuff that I know. 

But really what's the benefit? My first answer is that it's professional. The brand that my website pushes forward gives me a uniqueness that appears on all of my work now. The orange and blue theme of my website is also apparent on my CV, any letterheads I send and on certain emails. This looks highly professional and people like to see this. I also believe that having your own brand puts you above others who do not. 

The second reason that having a personal website is that the website is, well, personal - it's all about you. LinkedIn is great for connecting but it's full of other people too. Go to jamiebalfour.scot and who do you think you are reading about? That's right, some guy called Jamie Balfour. There's nothing about John Szymanski or Murray Smith on there (well there might be). This keeps the reader focused on you. You can write soley about how good you are and all of your achievements and yeah, be a narcissist, blow your own trumpet!

The third reason I would say having a personal website is a must is because it gives people an easy way to read about you. A personal website allows people to read about you from all corners of the globe. Social media is great, but it's also ladden with other things, like other people, a like LinkedIn.

I will admit my website is more of a personal project that evolved into something more. For anyone in computer science it's pretty nice to show that you can build a website from scratch, so I did exactly that (it shows a lot of perseverance too). 

Ultrabooks are amazing devices - combining high end mobile computing power with a slim design and decent battery life. The first ultrabook released was probably the MacBook Air, a moment I remember like it was yesterday. I've always really liked them and have always had an interest in them but never went out and got one.

In the last few years I've been following the development of one or two of them but one came to my attention - the Razer Blade Stealth. This ultra portable features two USB 3.0 ports and one USB-C port. The USB-C port also supports 40Gb/s over Thunderbolt allowing Razer to take advantage of the PCI-Express standard built into the laptop itself. As a result, Razer have developed the Razer Core, an external dock which features a full PCI-Express x16 slot in it. This allows you to insert a discrete desktop graphics card into the dock and use this as the laptops graphics processor. This is why this Ultrabook excited me so much.

Now the latest Razer Blade Stealth has arrived in the UK and is available to buy from their website.

The thing is I'm saving my money and until I decide to sell my MacBook Pro, if that ever happens, I cannot be buying this laptop. 

A couple of months back I was the victim to a website (not to be named) that was hacked and ultimately gave the information of it's users away that ultimately included my information. The reason behind this was that passwords were not stored in a effective manner. This meant that the minute you have access to the database you have access to all of these passwords.

What this now meant for me was that they had my email address and my actual address and began to subscribe me to many things I would never sign up to whilst also sharing my user name and password details on the web. It's a cold and horrible thing for someone to contemplate doing because I had done nothing to them in the first place for them to launch an attack at me. And to be honest the website who was a website who's sole duty was to help others - so it's pretty cruel to do that. Anyway, storing details about people in a secure manner is an important factor of online security.

What an unsecure database may look like

In a world where security is not a thing, algorithms such as the SHA (secure hash algorithm) would not exist in the field of security. In fact, the field of security would not need to exist. But unfortunately, because there are people who want to either steal something or just for the sake of it damage something, we have to compensate for this by developing secure ways of storing information.

In the world without security however, passwords could be stored as plain text - simply as they were typed in to the text input. This means that anyone who has access to the database can then scroll down to the appropriate field and read their password. Unfortunately however, if a hacker gains access to this information, they have access to the raw password - that's the password they can use to login to the system. This is not good. So database designers and web developers and so on go a step further and use some kind of algorithm to conceal the password.

How to store sensitive data effectively

When data like a password is put into the database it should be encoded using some kind of algorithm.

The first way of storing passwords is to create or use an encryption algorithm to encode the password and a decryption algorithm to re-obtain the password from the cipher text. This method is uncommon because it means that there is at least one method to decrypt the password in the database, and therefore leaves open a security vulnerability (if someone obtains this decryption algorithm and the key needed to decrypt the passwords, they can simply decrypt every password and it's easy enough to figure the key out if you have a password and it's cipher text). 

The most common algorithm is the SHA because it's been guaranteed to have a one-to-one mapping from the plain text to the cipher text - meaning that no two passwords generate the same cipher text. When this algorithm is applied it is designed to be irreversible, that is it is impossible (or at least near impossible) to figure out what the original text was (at least without going through each combination of characters and testing it against the cipher text). This method is more secure than the former since it does not offer a quick way to take a cipher text and turn it to a plain text. 

These are just two ways of storing passwords but you can probably find other ways. I use a combination of both on my website (my own hashing algorithm and my own encryption algorithm on top).

Windows 10 was an amazing operating system for a few days when I first installed it on to my gaming PC. My gaming PC, The Zebra X2, is a beast of a machine which can run most games that I play like Starcraft II and GTA V in the highest available settings (Core i7 4770K, 256GB SSD, 8GB DDR3 RAM and an AMD 7950) but latterly it struggled with simple things like starting up.

After I installed Windows 10 the machine ran fine. However, one day when I was playing a favourite game of mine, Command and Conquer 3, I noticed a slight drop in framerate from playing it the time before. I didn't think too much of it at the time but gradually I noticed that each time I played this game it was getting worse. At the very end before I ridded myself of Windows 10 it was running so slow that when I used the graphics intensive Ion Cannon superweapon the game would just freeze and the animation for the superweapon would not be shown. The game would resume after the Ion Cannon blast was finished. So what the heck was going on?

My initial thoughts were that the hard disk drives that I stored my games on were starting to fail. I tested them all with SMART tools and none of them showed any signs of failure. I then assumed that it was my SSD so decided to install an old SATA III HDD into the system and installed Windows 7 on to it. It ran fine. I upgraded it to Windows 10 and again, it ran fine. So I assumed it was the SSD. I left the SSD in the system just disconnected. 

After time, the same weird thing happened to my system - it began slowing and the graphics were getting messed up in games. So now I assumed it was the graphics card or the PCI controller that had failed on me. I took the GPU out of the system and used the dedicated graphics built in to the CPU. The system ran just the same so I now knew it wasn't the graphics card that had failed, but wasn't sure if it was a motherboard fault such as the PCI controller or the memory controller.

I decided to reinstall the SSD and flash my BIOS. Clearing the BIOS meant that I could set it back to the factory defaults and test it with them (I had tried this several times before but to no avail). Nothing changed. 

My next choice was to clear the SSD and install Windows 7 on it. After reinstalling I panicked slightly as it wasn't working well at all with the Desktop Window Manager crashing on startup. After installing Service Pack 1 everything seemed to work perfectly. I would like to say that Windows 7 was the solution but I can't be sure. 

I would probably put the problem down to several things: Windows 10 was clogging up the system (don't know why), the original BIOS was not designed for Windows 10 and would have required an update (I have since updated again and may try it again in the future with Windows 10) and that Windows just needed that little reformat that us Windows users need to do on a regular basis.

My fix appeared to have come from the reinstall of Windows 7 and the BIOS reset. I will keep everyone up to date with my progress with Windows 10 again in the future.

The Windows 10 upgrade tool can be a pain!