I did a little work on my webserver last night, and was able to get the statistics page up and running again. Now, if you’re really bored, you can take a look at just how much (or, more accurately, how little) traffic my webserver actually gets. The page is generated automatically every day at midnight, so the numbers should always be up to date. Purdy nifty.
Blog
Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).
More site work
Work continues on the site redesign. I’ve completed the changeover of the Quotebook introduction and the first page of Amusing bits, and added some information over to the right hand side of this page. In addition to the link to the messageboard, there is now a section of random stuff about me — some biographical, and some small lists. You’ll find there whatever I’m currently reading or have just read, the last 5 CD’s I bought, and the last 5 DVD’s I’ve bought. Beneath that are links to other blog sites, and then links to some of the places I hit on the web on a regular basis.
I wasn’t really down…
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Okay, for any of you who might be interested, here’s the deal. I run my own webserver here at home, and my ‘net connection is provided through GCI‘s cable modem service. Technically, this is a dynamic IP service — my IP address (the four-part number that is the true address of a computer on the ‘net) isn’t permanently assigned to me, and can change every time I establish a new ‘net connection. However, as cable modem service has very little downtime, my ‘dynamic’ IP is almost static — if I don’t have any downtime, then the IP doesn’t change.
It’s because of the dynamic nature of my IP address that I haven’t yet gone for a better web address — i.e., something along the lines of www.djwudi.com or some such — registering for one of those generally requires having a permanent, dedicated IP. Instead, I go through the services provided by www.dyndns.org. This free service allows me to have my djwudi.dyndns.org address, and all I have to do is put the current IP of my webserver into their database.
Occasionally, however, my IP will change — which is what happened today. I’m not sure why my IP suddenly reset today, there was no actual downtime that I’m aware of, and I would have expected it to change when my cable modem was actually disconnected a week ago, but it didn’t. In any case, as soon as I saw that things weren’t working I put the new IP into the database, but it took a few hours for it to propagate through the system. However, between the time I started typing this and now, it’s made it through, so all should be good from here on out…at least, until the next time GCI decides to kick my IP.
Redesign in progress
In case you hadn’t already noticed by the dramatic change in the look of the site, I’m in the process of redesigning. No real reason, other than that I thought it was time for a change — I do this every so often.
Rather than do the whole site in the background and then replace it in one swell foop, I decided to just replace the pages as I get them set. As I’m typing this, the main page is the only one that’s finished so far…the rest will follow eventually. All this really means is that at the moment, the site will look pretty goofy as the pages switch between different appearances, but eventually it’ll all gell. In the meantime…well, WYSIWYG.
Downtime, upgrades, moving to Mars
Grrrr…frikkin’ bills. I dunno why everybody’s so picky about wanting their money on time.
Um…yeah. If you haven’t guessed, the reason for the recent downtime was nothing more than my own stupidity when it comes to billpaying. Sorry about that.
However, bills are paid, and everything’s back up and running again. I took advantage of the server going up and down to install the 10.0.1 update to Mac OS X that hit the ‘net today…and, have to admit, this is nice. Not sure what might be there as far as new features, but it’s a heck of a lot faster. Woohoo!
Anyway, not much going on at the moment — since Studio 99 switched me to Saturdays, I’m not dj’ing tonight…so actually have a night to relax. Went out and rented Mission To Mars and Red Planet to watch tonight. Going off to Mars this evening…see y’all when I get back!
Wudicam down
I’ve taken the link to the Wudicam off the page for now. I’m now running Mac OS X 10.0 about 95% of the time on this machine, and there aren’t drivers for the iRez KritterCam for OS X just yet. I can still turn the cam on if I really want/need to by booting into OS 9, but these days about the only time I do boot into OS 9 is when I want to watch a DVD on this machine…and if I’m watching a movie, I’m not likely to have the cam on. So…until drivers get released…no cam. Ah, well. Y’all will just have to satisfy your voyeuristic urges somewhere else for now. ;)
Relaxation, upgrades – and furrets!
Well, ended up having a very nice weekend. I’m afraid I did oversleep on Saturday — I was supposed to be at work at Suncoast at 10am, and didn’t wake up until sometime after noon — but they were kind enough to understand why. Not only did they let me take the rest of the day off, but they hadn’t scheduled me for Sunday…and they’ll be sure not to schedule me before 1pm on Saturdays from now on, so I’ll be able to get sleep after DJ’ing on Friday nights! Rock on.
I ended up spending most of the weekend working with my computers. I’ve been running this webserver off the Public Beta of Mac OS X since the beta was released, and Saturday was (finally) the official release date of the full retail version of OS X. Ran down to the local CompUSA and picked it up, came home, and installed it first on my main work machine. Everything went smoothly there, so I bit the bullet, backed up the website, and upgraded the webserver.
Luckly, everything went smoothly there, too — for the most part. There have been some under-the-hood changes between the Public Beta and the Retail release that took me by surprise and required some tweaking to get the webserver up and running correctly again (for the tech geeks out there, the Apache webserver, which had been named apache under the PB, is now named the standard httpd again, the various configuration files have been moved and renamed, and the logfile directory is moved), but I was able to find and tweak everything relatively quickly. I was able to bring the webserver down, completely reformat it, install OS X, put the website back, and find all the changes to get the website back up and running correctly in a grand total of three hours — I don’t think that’s too bad at all.
Then, since I was upgrading things anyway, I checked and found a new version of the software I use for my Messageboard/Guestbook, and got that installed and configured. Unfortunately, the new version doesn’t read the threads from the previous version, so things are looking a little sparse in there…but that’s a relatively minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.
The final big news for the weekend — furrets! :) Miranda had two ferrets that, unfortunately, she isn’t able to give as much attention as she’d like anymore, as she just had a beautiful little girl three months ago. Babies being the wonderful, but admittedly time-consuming creatures they are, she needed to find a good home for her ferrets. I gave it some thought, and figured that I could do that…besides, this way, she can have visitation rights whenever she wants. So, the newest additions to the family here at the apartment are Niko and Ash (otherwise lovingly known as Nikkerbokker and Assmaster). This should be a lot of fun — while my family has almost always had pets (usually cats), I realized a bit ago that I’d never had pets of my own — they’ve always either been my mom’s or my brother’s — so, for the first time, I’ve got little ones of my own. All sorts of cool.
However, it’s now Monday morning, and time to go jump in the shower and get back to the normal workaday week. Off and running like a herd of turtles….
Cam improvements
I’m up a bit later than I should be, but it’s all well and good (right), as I stumbled across some JavaScript code that’s allowed me to improve the Wudicam page a bit.
Previously, I was using a ‘refresh’ meta-tag that forced the entire page to refresh every 30 seconds — a fairly ridiculous waste of bandwidth, but I didn’t know any better when I put everything together. While surfing around tonight, however, I found a simple little JavaScript that now updates the image only, without needing to refresh the entire page, every five seconds (much better than the previous 30 second refresh), and will only do so if there is actually a new picture to post. So, less unecessary data being thrown across the ‘net, and a much faster refresh time on the cam picture.
Back online
We’re back!
Sorry ’bout the recent downtime over the past couple of days…problems with the cable modem. In any case, everything’s resolved now, and things are looking good.
The cam is back
One of the side benefits to the new ‘puter is that as I’ve decided to stick mostly to OS 9 on this box, leaving OS X to be my webserver on the iMac for now, it allows me to resurrect some features of this site that had been on hold for a while. The most notorious of these — the Wudi-cam! Well, it’s back folks…for better or for worse, it’s there. No gaurantees on how often it’ll be up or down, though — guess you’ll just have to check to find out if I’m broadcasting, huh?
At the moment, I’m using free software that only allows me to do incremental updates — the picture will update every 10 seconds, and the page will refresh every 30. I hope to eventually get software that will allow me to do streaming video, but until then, this will work.