Not really your typical office gals, either…
Thanks Cheryl for the link.
My Poor Neglected Blog
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.
What A Nightmare
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.
Testing, 1, 2, 3
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.
Ouch: Day 2
(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)
Ouch: Day 1
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…
New Web Hosts Found
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.
Flash Timekiller For The Day
Antbuster is like Desktop Tower Defense but it’s a bit more free form and you’re defending your picnic from ants.
Damn You AT&T!
Why can’t you open up a store here and get local numbers in Bend without serious work (like porting a number or something) so that I can get the new iPhone 2.0 that’s coming out? That thing is going to kick ass (official Apple site here).
Best Firefox Extension Ever
If somebody would just create something like this for MSIE, I’d be installing it at every office I work at.
This plugin will alert you if you accidently stumble onto MySpace.com, and take you back to the site you came from.
MySpace is actually tolerable to me with this extension along with some of these styles, but I still think it sucks.