Posts on mattous.co.uk

Restoring its-all-g00d.co.uk

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Before Facebook, Discord servers, and WhatsApp group chats, there was a time when everyone just had their own little corner of the web. Between 2001 and 2006, mine was its-all-g00d.co.uk.

It started out when we were in sixth form as a place to share inside jokes, post photos, and keep in touch as we all headed off to different universities across the UK. Over five years it grew into a proper archive of that time in our lives. There were thousands of forum posts, party and festival photos, exam results, guestbook messages, and personal blog posts. Eventually, university finished, life moved on, the hosting expired, and the site quietly disappeared. All that was left was a folder on an old backup drive labeled “its-all-g00d backups” a collection of .rar files, raw .sql dumps, and old scripts from twenty years ago.

Recently, I stumbled across these backups on an old hard drive and decided to see if I could bring it all back to life. What started as a bit of nostalgia turned into a surprisingly fun project with some help from AI: getting ancient Perl and PHP running in Docker, fixing broken databases, scrubbing old personal data, and turning dynamic twenty-year-old web apps into static HTML sites.

its-all-g00d.co.uk: 3 remaining versions of the site

Looking through the old files, what remained were 3 versions of the site. I do remember an older version of the site but it didn’t survive it seems. Not even the internet archive shows this version, the oldest record there is from 16/12/2001.

The first version (2001–2002) was built entirely on Perl CGI scripts and flat files. There was no database at all. It used an EncoreLite c-board message board where every post was just appended to a .dat text file on disk, NewsPro for news updates, and Image Arcadia for pictures. It had all the hallmarks of the era: neon text, animated GIFs, and a simple guestbook. The internet archive here helped restore the splash & index pages which weren’t in my backups.

The second version (2002–2003) was PHP-Nuke 6.0 running against MySQL 3.23. This was the classic early-2000s portal style with the DeepBlue theme, multi-column blocks, polls, and an early version of phpBB integrated into it.

The third version (2004–2006) was the peak university years. By then I’d moved it to a standalone phpBB 2.0.10 forum in the iconic subSilver theme, alongside a 4images photo gallery and a personal PHP blog. There were over 4,700 posts across 178 topics, and hundreds of photos from proms, student nights, and festivals.

Containerisation with Docker!

We have something now that we didn’t have 20 years ago - Docker! Getting these old sites running locally in a container was the most logical way forward. Also, you can’t just run PHP 4 code in modern PHP 8, it will crash spectacularly!

Version 1

Perl’s backwards compatibility meant that scripts from 2001 still run today without having to touch the original application code. The original site ran on a Windows server so there was some work to do replacing line ending characters with ones that Linux likes. Path references also needed to be updated to work with Linux. In 2017 modern Perl removed the current working directory (.) so there was some work to get things working there, also apache needed configuring to enable CGI execution.

Looking at the backups of version 1 of the site, the script does end with:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 11:11:45 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 186
Content-Type: text/html

<head><title>CGI Application Timeout</title></head>
<body><h1>CGI Timeout</h1>The specified CGI application exceeded the allowed time for processing.  The server has deleted the process.

So I assume the backup I have isn’t everything from the original site, 247 messages were backed up then the server timed out. I guess 19 year old me didn’t notice or care at the time.

Version 2

Getting Version 2 (PHP-Nuke 6) running was mostly a battle against ancient PHP features that modern runtimes got rid of years ago—things like register_globals and $HTTP_*_VARS. In the end, I used a php:5.6-apache container with old MySQL drivers compiled in, and wrote a quick globals_compat.php script to fake the old globals and silence the thousands of deprecation warnings that would otherwise flood the screen.

On the database side, MySQL 8 wouldn’t touch a 2003 dump, so I paired it with a mariadb:10.1 container which is much happier with retro MySQL syntax like TYPE=MyISAM. A simple startup script pulled all the scattered bits together—the PHP-Nuke core, the photo gallery module, and a few symlinks for missing theme assets so the pages wouldn’t crash.

Version 3

By Version 3 (phpBB 2.0.10 and 4images), things had moved on from PHP-Nuke’s all-in-one portal into separate apps. phpBB didn’t need the messy register_globals hack anymore, but it still relied on old mysql_* and GD libraries to handle thumbnails and user sessions.

The database side was trickier here because this was our biggest dataset, and the backups were a bit of a mess with mixed table prefixes (phpbb_ vs phpbb2_). Modern database defaults also hated phpBB’s vintage queries—strict GROUP BY rules and invalid zero-dates (0000-00-00) kept killing the queries. Spinning up MariaDB with --sql-mode="" and --default-storage-engine=MyISAM was the magic fix that finally got the 179 topics and forum rankings loading without errors.

Once everything was running happily on localhost, the next question was how to actually host it. Exposing twenty-year-old PHP-Nuke and phpBB installations to the public internet would be asking for trouble—they’re full of vulnerabilities that have been known about for decades, and bots would compromise them in minutes.

Going Static

The sensible solution was to turn everything into static sites. I kept the dynamic stacks running safely inside local Docker containers, then wrote a Python crawler to scrape every page, topic, user profile, and gallery album into flat HTML, CSS, and images. The scraper rewrote all links to relative paths, so the whole archive can run on any static web host (like CloudFlare Pages) or even directly off a USB stick with zero server maintenance and zero security worries.

Privacy

One thing that quickly became apparent was privacy. Back in 2002, none of us thought twice about posting personal email addresses, phone numbers, or even university halls room addresses on a public forum. Before putting anything live, I made sure the Python script scrubbed the HTML: stripping mailto: links, removing email addresses, redacting physical addresses, and converting full names of school mates into first names and last initials (like Emma T or Ben S). That way, the conversations still read naturally, but without sharing full names twenty years later.

This is the main reason for keeping the source code and scripts private as well. I want to keep those private details private.

Now it’s one thing for me to look at this data locally in a Docker container, but quite another to put these forum posts from 20 years ago back on the public internet for anyone to see. While full names and addresses have been removed from the data you could still figure out who made many of these posts, particularly the ones I posted for example. Users of those forums back then consented to post that information online but they didn’t give permission for it to be re-posted 20 years later.

Many of these messages reveal quite a bit about people’s lives, or at least what their lives were like back then. They probably wouldn’t be too happy to have all that info made public now that they are in their 40’s.

Legally and morally speaking I’m not comfortable putting all this data out where search engines and AI bots will index it within days. So I’m putting the archived sites behind CloudFlare Access so the data won’t be on the public internet but I can grant access to old friends and forum users if they request it.

The results

I’m very happy with the results. Reading through the posts brought back a lot of memories. Thankfully the domain was still available so I snapped it up, looking back through my emails it expired in November 2007 and as far as I can tell it’s been available ever since.

Main Portal: its-all-g00d.co.uk – the landing page with the original branding, introducing the site and linking to each preserved version (requires access).

What I Learned

Resurrecting this corner of the internet taught me a few valuable lessons:

Docker is a great tool for this kind of project, you can run anything locally and iterate over and over until you get it working.
Static sites work perfectly for this kind of project because they will never change, they cost nothing to host.
Locking these archives down was the right thing to do, this data is interesting to me because of the memories but I can’t go sharing this online again without consent. Data Protection law is a good thing!

Browsing through 20-year-old threads reminded me of what made the early web so endearing. There were no engagement algorithms, no influencer metrics, and no corporate branding—just a group of friends building something together because it was fun.

It really was all good.

mattous.tk moved to mattous.co.uk

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:00:00 +0000

I had to move this site to a different domain, freenom who I have to thank for mattous.tk seems to have had some trouble lately. I can’t complain really since I had it for free since March 2015. So I’ve moved the site to mattous.co.uk.

Theres not much more to say really, I’m disapointed to lose a domain I’ve had for around 10 years. It would of been nice at least to redirect traffic from the old domain to this new one but from what I’ve read Feenom is finished. People on Reddit are saying they tried to buy back their free domain names and haven’t had any luck, support requests go unanswered so I guess theres nothing I can do about it.

I’ll just have to make do with this .co.uk domain that I already had anyways.

On Leaving CAP after 14 years

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 23:59:59 +0000

You don’t work somewhere for 14 years without it having a big impact on you. Christians Against Poverty (CAP) has been my employer for 14 years, that’s 35% of my life.

Looking back on 14 years at CAP. I’ve learned a lot… I started out as a 1st line IT support technician, then became a PHP systems developer somehow. I then went back to Operations as a Senior IT Specialist, which eventually put me at the top of a pretty shot list of IT operations staff, having to find the answer to all the questions no one else could. Then being moved into a Senior DevOps role, which was essentially the same as before except I was in a different team but with maybe more of a dev focus doing auto deployments/docker etc.

When I started at CAP, we were still using windows XP, which dates things somewhat. One of the earliest things I remember doing is automating the formatting / installing of XP, or at least improving on it. We did this using bootable CD’s, which seems pretty outdated now when compared to zero touch deployment. It was great though, broken PC? Just whack in a CD, reboot then watch it wipe and reinstall. A year or so later we’d decided to move everyone onto Mac minis which was well mostly. We ran our core infrastructure on 3 apple xserves, email, LDAP, DNS etc. This turned out to be a pretty bad decision as Apple stopped making them, they essentially became ticking time bombs of unreliability. We spent years moving to open source alternatives and eventually smashed the Xserves to bits in the car park.

One of the highlights for me has to be moving our unreliable self hosted mail solution to gmail. Our IT director put called it a “solved problem”, why are we hosting our own email when Google will do a much better job of it essentially for free (because we were a charity). That saying has really stuck with me, yes we can host these things ourselves, and part of me likes the challenge that was, but it takes a lot of time and effort. I remember having to go into the office on Saturdays on occasion to physically reboot servers because email was down on a key fundraising day, no-one wants to do that.

Another highlight was project 1D, or One Directory. As I said we have apple xserves that ran or LDAP and when they went end of life we had a problem because everything was integrated with them. This lead to a multi year project where we slowly migrated to a new LDAP, running on openldap, with a schema of our own making. We wanted to remove most of the apple schema, though we needed some of it still. We built this new openldap and synchronised with the apple LDAP, and slowly migrated all our systems over openldap before eventually turning off the xserves. Running duel systems like this is never great as it adds complexity but doing a big bang switch from the old LDAP to the new would likely have not gone well either. It presented a real technical challenge, keeping everything in sync, while migrating systems over gradually, there was a lot of moving parts. We did eventually get there, and we really did smash the xserves up in the car park. LDAP and identity management is also another “solved problem”, we could of likely just purchased a solution here and I expect CAP will do that at some point, what they have now though is “free” and identity as a service can cost quite a bit.

There’s a lot more I could say but my journey at CAP has been a blast. I’m looking forward to the next chapter in my career as I go to join the civil service as a DevOps. During my time at CAP I had 7 different managers, 3 IT directors and CAP had 3 CEO’s, there’s been a lot of change. I’m exceptionally grateful for all of my time there, I learnt so much, made some great friends and had a lot of fun. So thank you CAP for all that you allowed me to do, I hope the work I’ve done there will continue to have an impact for many years to come.

2023 Retrospective

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 23:59:59 +0000

This year has been a difficult one, work has been rough, with redundancies looming over everything right from the start of the year, good friends losing their jobs, and many good people choosing to move on. I managed to completely avoid the redundancy process, though it did come with a lot of change. The IT Ops team I was in was disbanded and I was moved into a DevOps role in a dev team, which has been good but at times I’ve felt like not a lot has really changed other than my job title. I’ve learned a lot though and with the long term prospects of work looking like they were going to be very Salesforce focused, with the next 2-3 years moving towards retiring almost all our linux systems. I decided to start applying for jobs in the summer.

Through applying for jobs I realised some important things, I actually am missing quite a lot of skills that employers are looking for out in the market place. Specifically around public cloud skills, docker, Kubernetes, these are the skills people are looking for. I do have some experience with these technologies but not enough really to land a job, or so I thought. One key bit of feedback I had was that the way CAP does things is too ‘old school’. The impression I get is not a lot of organisations out there are doing manual deployments to single servers. This isn’t really new news to me, I wanted to move CAP to a more modernised infrastructure for years but that takes time, and investment. Combine this with the organisations desire to move to platform based tech and retire our open source applications… well, the competing goals don’t really line up.

Then I got a job offer from DWP Digital for a DevOps engineer role. Following previous interviews I’d really not expected this to happen, but went through the interview for the experience. Following a very long process of getting various checks done I’ve now actually expecting to get an actual offer from them in the coming weeks. I’m excited for what opportunities might come from this role, but also it’s hard to think of leaving CAP. Despite all the challenges over the last year it will still be hard to walk away from something that’s been part of my life for the last 14 years. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my time there (which likely warrants it’s own post), and while I’m leaving a lot of good people behind, and a lot of ideas unfinished, I still believe in the charity and all they stand for.

With the long lead time on DWP I started experimenting more with AWS and Terraform. I’ve enjoyed getting stuck into learning some new tech. I might of bitten off more than I could chew, trying to get a ECS cluster built with terraform has been a challenge, but that’s how I learn best. There’s a million courses out there that will teach you this stuff but I like to get hands on when it comes to learning. I like to learn by doing, by figuring something out for myself. Anyone can follow a guide, but when those guides don’t quite work anymore I like to work out why and find my own way though. I’m hoping to share some of what I’ve learned here.

My daughter started school this year, so now we have 2 children in school. She has taken to it really well, is happy to go and seems to be learning all that she needs to learn. She is a very different character to my son, who is in year 3 now and has struggled. He likes school once he’s there but getting him in can be a battle, we need to help him find the positives in it. He’s always happy when he comes home, and when he talks about his day it’s actually really positive. With both kids out of the house 5 days a week, my wife has started her art work again which has been great to see. I’ve built a website for her which is very basic at the moment but thats what she wanted.

We had another action packed summer, I started it by turning 40. Something that’s not really bothered me to be honest, I don’t feel like I should be 40. I still just feel like I did at 30. I have a bit more responsibly now sure, 2 kids to look after as well as a wife. I still feel like I always did though, like I’m going though life and working it out as I go. We spent a number of weeks camping in Filey again, and some time down south. One thing we need to make sure we build in is more time at home, the kids really value this, and so do I. We also now own a sailing boat, which we haven’t really spent much time on. Hopefully we’ll find more time to get out on her this year.

Gaming has been very light touch this year, my most played game was Stardew valley. I brought Balders Gate 3 when it came out but haven’t found much time for it, though I did really enjoy it when I did play. I write this now on a computer that we actually own as a family, this was a bit investment for us, but it felt right to not use the CAP laptop for personal reasons and combined with the CAP laptop going away sometime soon, it felt like the right time to be moving on. Natalie was, surprisingly, relatively easy to convince.

What does 2024 hold for me though? Well the big thing this year will be the new job, leaving CAP and starting a the DWP. It’s going to be a huge change to adjust to but one I’m excited about for sure, meeting new people, learning new ways of doing things and progressing in my career. I want to get back into learning game dev, which I haven’t touched this year. I want to write more on this blog. Time will tell how well that actually ends up going. So 2023… you sucked in many ways but there were some good times, here’s to 2024 being way better.

2022 Retrospective

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 23:59:59 +0000

This last year has been a significant one. Perhaps the biggest thing for me, and for my family, is we haven’t had any major DIY projects. Sure there’s been a few bit done, but nothing involving time off work or rooms out of action. It’s the first year since we got married that I can say that.

My son started school, and he’s been loving it. That’s been a big adjustment for the family. No more freedom to choose when we go on holiday. He has settled into school life well. Our daughter has missed him but is also learning to find her own way when he’s not around. My wife has also found it hard not having him around, but her life is a little easier because she only has one child to look after for 6 hours of the day.

It’s been a unique year at work as well. We moved out of an old building into a new one. A massive project unlike any we’ve had before, or will probably have again. We are finally Cyber Essentials certified. After years of talking about it, we actually got it! Our dev team has just about doubled in size, with no increase on the ops side, which has meant a lot more work supporting them.

With the lack of DIY to focus on, I found myself with free time, which I’ve spent learning game development in Godot. Its early days still, but I am enjoying a new challenge. I have done programming before, but nothing quite like this. There is a lot of maths that I just don’t understand at all. I’m excited to get into making some pixel art next year.

After a year or so break, I’m back at the D&D table. This time it’s actually a real table as well. Playing a wizard call Arthur, who’s the old man of the party. He isn’t worldly wise as he’s spent his entire life studying. After finding an unusual book, he’s been drawn out into the real world to uncover its secrets. We are only a few sessions into the campaign, but I’m enjoying playing a more complex class that doesn’t just shoot or hit things.

I’m not a big reader at all, but I did read some books this year. Most notably, I finished reading the Narnia series to William. It was my first time reading them as well, which is perhaps surprising for someone who’s a fantasy fan. I enjoyed them thoroughly but felt the ending was a bit of a letdown. Game of thrones book one was the first book I read this year. It’s not for me. Too many stories going on at the same time, too dark. I reread the first two King Killer chronicle books, probably my fourth read of these - I still hold out hope for book three being released! The Rithmatist was the first Brandon Sanderson book that I didn’t actually enjoy. I restarted Harry Potter with books one and two; I want to continue the series again next year. I’m just over half way through book one of the wheel of time, I’ve found it a struggle to get into, at this point I’m not sure I’ll continue the series. I also started but didn’t finish the Invisible Library. It’s a cool concept but again maybe just not for me, but I might give it another chance.

With the shutdown of Stadia, I find myself not doing much gaming at all this year. Though I enjoyed revisiting Stardew Valley for a bit. I played some more Witcher 3 on GeForce Now and tried out Xbox cloud a bit. Stadia was a great service. It lacked the games, needed to really do well. I’ve been preferring to focus on learning how to do game development myself these last few months, rather than play other people’s games.

As I look ahead to 2023, our daughter will be going to school in September, which will free up a lot of time for my wife. She wants to be an artist and is already selling some of her work. As she gets more time to focus on this, we really hope she can make some additional income. Having spent this last year not doing DIY, I’m hopeful that we can make our workshop a bit more comfortable in the winter months by adding some insulation and heating. This will be really key for my wife as she starts doing her art work more regularly down there. For me, I’m happy where I am. I continue to find work interesting and challenging. Financially, things are getting tough everywhere for everyone, and in the workplace as well, which is going to bring further challenges. I am thankful for all that I have and all that I’ve achieved this last year.

Game Dev log #1

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 21:02:52 +0000

When I was a teenager me and some friends were obsessed with Sonic. We would play Sonic games in the woods & in the playground a school, we were not cool. We even designed levels and came up with new characters for games we hoped we might one day make.

Skip forward some 30 years and I find myself with time and some skills in programming, so I’m going to have a stab at game development. I won’t be making Sonic games, but I’m going to learn what I can. I’ve been working through some tutorials and getting started with the basics. It’s not like anything I’ve done before and I’m excited to write about what I learn along the way. I hope as my kids grow, it will be fun to make games with them. I have no illusions of ever making any money from this hobby. It’s purely a way to learn something new and have some fun along the way.

I’m landed on using Godot as my tool of choice. It’s open source and runs on my computer well enough. I’ll be starting simply with 2D games and seeing what I can build. I may also get to look at making some of the artwork in time, but for now, there are plenty of free resources out there to get started with.

So funny mistakes have been made already, shooting gigantic fireballs that go nowhere, mobs chasing me way too fast. I’ve also overcome some challenges, things that I thought would be really difficult, like preventing mobs spawning in a particular location so they don’t get stuck in the terrain.

fireballs gone wrong

I’ll be adding what I’ve made to this repo, mistakes and all. I’ve done the basics added a player, some mobs that respawn and chase you. Currently working on level generation, which has mostly been copied/pasted from a tutorial. The mobs no longer chase me around the map, but they are at least spawning now.

It’s been a big learning curve for sure. I expect I’ll share some of what I learn along the way here. If anything I make actually turns into a full game, I’ll be pretty surprised. It’s really early days yet, but I do have a bunch of ideas about what sort of game I would make. I just need to figure out the basics first.