Saturday 27 September 2008

Mom-on-Demand

Gee, it's tough being celebrities ...! We've done our second TV interview in a matter of months, this time for Mega Media, a local company that produces HD material for Singtel's mio TV. The piece about the toy rental club is for a channel called Mom-on-Demand, "Asia’s first on-demand channel for parenting and women’s issues".

You'd be surprised how much time these short television segments take. Initial meetings; checking out the playground to plan camera shots and anticipate lighting needs etc; the actual interviews (the two of us quizzed separately in this case, like suspects in a police cell!); and a couple of filming sessions, including a Saturday afternoon birthday party.

We don't know yet when it will be broadcast, but we'll add details here once we know more.

Monday 15 September 2008

Website Woes

Our website disappeared this afternoon and is still offline. Really really frustrating as we are so reliant on it: that's how clients can see what's in stock and place their orders.

According to our hosting service (here in Singapore), their servers have been hit by a "distributed denial-of-service" (DDOS) attack. Sounds scary, huh? Basically, the internet server gets swamped with useless traffic until it drowns. The motives vary but usually someone is trying to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning. It seems unlikely that we are the target since hundreds of sites are down. (By the way, major sites such as Amazon, Yahoo and eBay have been shut down by this kind of attack in the past - so we're in good company!)

Postscript: In theory, our hosting service got us back online about 8 hours later but due to the wait time for "DNS propagation" it was mid-morning of the next day before the site actually became usable. It seems all ISPs are vulnerable to this kind of attack but clearly we'll have to investigate whether there is any form of backup we can employ in future.