Surfing The Web So You Don't Have To
I’ve mentioned before how much I love the Fourth of July.</sarcasm>, but no matter your thoughts on it (I’d enjoy it if I didn’t fear my house would burn down), just be safe today. Hopefully they’ll actually enforce the illegal fireworks ban like they promise.
But if you are looking for something to do today (before they burn up the Butte), Jon has you covered.
After spending pretty much every night after work in the backyard digging and cleaning ditches, the sprinkler system is now in and functional (read a couple of my write-ups about it here and here). I’ve basically spent every night after work digging around tree roots, removing beachball-sized rocks that the trencher couldn’t handle (and there were several that took me many hours to dig out). So after finally getting the last of the rocks out on Thursday, on Friday we started laying pipe for the backyard (the front year was already pretty much done last week). We got about 70% of the pipe down on Friday, I spent Friday night getting out a couple more gigantic rocks, and then Saturday we cut and glue the rest of the pipe, hooked up the sprinklers, wired up the controller, and fired everything up — and amazingly enough, it frickin’ worked.
We need to adjust the flow on a couple of the sprinklers, we still need the bury the pipes in the backyard, and we still need to get attachments for the drip system (we have the drip hose ran, we just need to hook into it), but that stuff will be easy compared to the initial task of getting everything dug up and installed.
Clean up is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt. Between all the rocks, the old sidewalk chunks, the sod we’re taking out of part of the front yard, and the piles of dirt, we have a lot of junk sitting around — it looks like we’ve gotten nothing accomplished, but we have. We still need to make a huge dump run with all the crap we can’t recycle (sod, cement/concrete/whatever-it-is, excess rocks, etc…), so that’ll take a bit of time and effort, but otherwise it’s nice to just have to do clean up at this point.
My whole upper body (mostly my hands and wrists) are sore as heck, but it’ll be much easier filling things in than taking it out.
But as is always the case, we don’t have enough dirt to completely fill in everything as when you remove all the rock and don’t put them back, obviously there’s space to fill. And I still have to fill in the sidewalk before the city decides to fine me. So if anybody has any good soil and or bags of concrete mix, let me know and I’ll give you and address to drop them off.
The last couple weeks have been crazy chaotic in my life. With the search for the new web host, the finding of a web host, the moving and fixing of various sites and my irrigation installation (which is still ongoing) to my daughters’ (and wife’s) end-of-the-year dance recitals, things have been a downright crazy mess for the last few weeks. My poor blog has just been getting neglected (it is liking its new server, however) and I’m sure there is still weirdness from the move I haven’t caught yet. I’m still trying to get all the sermons listed on my in-law’s church site, and I still am in the process of getting the redesign for Sunriver Vacations (thanks to Lance‘s help), so things aren’t going to slow down anytime soon, but I will do my best to make time for this site.
Writing and sharing on this site is actually a stress relief for me, as it gives me a chance to share all the crazy stuff that people send me, which generally puts a smile on my face. So I pledge right now so make some more time for this site and try to keep posting. Hopefully. Maybe. We’ll see….
Update: Just realized I had an old version of my MovableType config files on this server for some reason, causing commenting to not work on some entries. I’ve since fixed that, and commenting should be working properly site-wide now.
Damn you LayeredTech for forcing me to move servers. While the transferring of data went smoothly, DNS issues kicked my butt. Then, the other thing I was worried about bit me in the butt: The new server is running PHP 5 and MySQL 5 while the old server was running PHP 4 and MySQL 4. While I did an informal audit of the sites I host and the software packages they ran, I couldn’t really test out some of them that had custom code until I put them on a live PHP 5 install, so I just moved them over and gave them a whirl. Unfortunately, my day job site didn’t like PHP 5 in some small but critical areas and required a few minor tweaks to get it working right. They were beyond my expertise so I had to found outside help to get it working, but things are working fine there now. I also had to update the church’s site with a new version of Typo3 to make it all happy.
Then comments on this site broke. MovableType and the Perl implementation CentOS5 don’t seem to play nice. I had similar issues when I setup Jack‘s site that I had with this one. I implemented a fix I found that involves changing bootstrap.pm. Early in the file, you’ll see this:
sub BEGIN {my ($dir, $orig_dir);
require File::Spec;
if (!($dir = $ENV{MT_HOME})) {
And that needs to be changed to this:
sub BEGIN {$ENV{'MT_HOME'} = '/home/username/public_html/mt'; #<-- this line should be addedmy ($dir, $orig_dir);require File::Spec;if (!($dir = $ENV{MT_HOME})) {
That gets things all working again (I'm mostly documenting that here if I run into this again, which I'm sure I will after I try to upgrade and forget to change the bootstrap.pm file beforehand). I did submit this to SixApart to see if there's a workaround that won't get bulldozed on upgrades. It's apparently a problem with File::Spec::rel2abs in my Perl install, so I'll have to look into that.
Update: Looked into it. Apparently File::Spec versions are vastly different in CentOS 4 than in CentOS 5. In 4, the version is 0.86 while in CentOS 5, it's 3.25. There are some skips in version numbers because of the author's combining of a couple projects, but considering that Movable Type isn't the only script having an issue, so I don't feel so bad knocking my head against the wall for this.
But things are hopefully all back to normal now. My servers are both much meatier than before, and this one has a full 100mbs connection to the 'net (last server had a 10mbs connection) and both have much more processor power than before (quad and dual core versus single core processors). I still have a couple sites to move, but it's mostly all there. I still have the old servers for a couple more weeks, so if anybody has a huge file(s) they want to share on there temporarily, e-mail me and I'll dump them there until the cancellation date.
If anybody notices any other weirdness, please email utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.
Last night I transferred Bend Blogs and this site to a new Web server (after getting my new servers all setup). If you’re reading this, you’re reading it on the new server. The server’s running PHP 5, Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5.1 while the old server was running PHP 4, Apache 1.x and MySQL 4.1. It’s also a much meatier server than before, and Bend Blogs seems to render much quicker than before (the rumors were that PHP 5 would help that a lot).
If you notice any weirdness, comment here or email utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.
Update at 11:30PM on 6/16: DNS issues suck, you know that?
Anyway, after struggling figuring out why CentOS5’s BIND implementation and cPanel 11 didn’t want to play nice (which caused some traffic to the new server to get lost today), I found this forum thread which I’d had to find before, but couldn’t remember how I found it, so I’m bookmarking it here.
Long story short, if you’re running CentOS 5 and cPanel and you find that name server lookups are getting refused even though BIND is up and running fine, run this command: “/scripts/fixnamedviews –force”. Quick, simple fix. And I’ve linked to it before, but for some stupid reason I couldn’t find it. So the more places I bookmark it so that I can make sure to fix its lame nameservers, life will be good.
Man, I need to sleep.
(You can read all about Day 1 here. This is going to be a quick summary as I’m tired and really need to go bed)
Dang you President Bush for giving me that stimulus check — it’s caused me more pain than could have ever have imagined. Read on for the full story…
I mentioned last week that I was shopping for a new Web host. Today I ordered two servers: one from Handy Networks and one from WireSix. They were both recommended to me by a good friend of mine, and were recommended highly on WebHostingTalk. I looked at a lot of companies during the last week or so, and I’m hoping this will be a better bet than my current host. I intentionally split my servers up so I could have agreements in place with more than one company, though I have full confidence in both of them (and they actually recommended each other as well). If anybody’s shopping for a new host, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the folks I dealt with there. They’re both smaller companies compared to the big boys (Handy is larger than WireSix) but they have really smart people running the show. But I’ll basically just be paying a bit more than before, but will be getting much better hardware out of it.
Needless to say, I’ll be busy as heck these next few weeks while I setup the servers and start migrating sites over to the new server (I have four weeks on my old server as I’m paid through the month). Between that and a pile of work projects, I’m just totally buried right now. Just need to quit sleeping.
The Cascade Winds Symphonic Band is presenting their final concerts of the 2007-2008 season this afternoon and tomorrow night. Full details are here. The concerts are free, no ticket needed, and are today at 2:00PM and tomorrow at 7:30 at Summit High School.
I’m in the band, and if you want an excuse to see me in a tux (<sarcasm>I mean, really, who doesn’t?</sarcasm>), now’s your chance.
It promises to be a good show, so hope to see some of you there!
LayeredTech, a dedicated server hosting company that I’ve used for years and have a couple servers with, has decided to raise their rates. Last year, it was a simple $8/month increase, which I was fine with as they promised remote reboot cards for their server. A year later, I still don’t have a remote reboot card for either of my servers, and they’ve decided to raise my rates $28/month for each server, no matter how many you have (and there are folks with dozens of servers with them). Needless to say, the natives are restless, and I tend to be one of them. They recently bought another Web hosting company and secured $11 million worth of funding, but apparently they don’t seem to find a problem with raising the rates for all their clients, cutting into the meager profits I had on these servers (as they’re mostly for hosting sites like this one along with some small companies around Bend).
Needless to say, I’m shopping around now. If anybody has any recommendations, I’d be glad to hear them (I have some emails into some reputable companies around the country). I’d also consider a partial advertising trade for a link on this site as well. Comment below or email utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com. I’d also consider co-location if the deal was right and the network didn’t suck (but I’d prefer just renting the server as that way I can yell at somebody if the hardware goes bad).