After a fair old struggle, the AMPS Website, www.amps.net is up and running again and appears to be stable, not withstanding men with JCB's digging up cables in the North of England - that was last night...! It is ironic that a system like the Internet which was designed to stand up to nuclear war was knocked out by a misplaced JCB dig up the A1! That took BT something like six hours to fix with considerable bad language (probably).
The main reason for the patchy service in recent weeks was the financial failure of a company in the chain of Internet Services appointed by the British Film Commission. We are currently on the BFC Web space, although this is transparent to users. The BFC appointed new contractors to sort out the mess but the Website data was corrupted in the transfer to a new server. This has now been fixed. Then the US InterNIC Domain Name Registration people started to object to us using www.amps.net because they want to reserve the .NET handle for Companies providing Internet Services and because it had not been properly registered, again due to the financial problems of the old company. We won that battle with the BFC having to pay a second time to register our Domain Name and hopefully it will now remain ours for the future. Then we had a problem with the Demon National Domain Name Server not registering our name correctly but happily that has now been resolved.
Our new Information Service Provider is Tagish Ltd. ( www.tagish.co.uk ) in Alnwick, Northumberland, (hence the A1 problem) and our IP address is 194.70.69.202 for those who want it but www.amps.net is now working world-wide.
We are still updating the Website and have recently formatted and uploaded the Newsletter 25 extracts. Our counter shows nearly 3000 visits to date and we have a trace operating on the origins of these visits and they are coming from all over the world.
A new feature we have added to the Website is an invitation to contribute to the AMPS Newsletter via Email and attachments direct to the Editors at editor@amps.net . Our Editors are always pleased to have any material and comments. We would also like any "who is about to do/doing/has done" material from all aspects of Production and Post-production Sound to hopefully include as a feature in the next Newsletter. We can accept pictures in most popular graphics formats via Email as well.
Please look in and report to info@amps.net .