Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Rebuilding from scratch

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Okay…so here’s the scoop.

In brief — everything died.

Last Thursday, I grabbed a moment during work to check my site, and found out that it was down. This wasn’t immediately a concern — computers do occasionally freeze (though it’s wonderfully rare with OS X), my router has a tendency to lock up on occasion, and I’ve got the occasional tendency to forget about some of the more important of my bills — so I just didn’t worry about it right off.

Unfortunately, when I got home, it quickly became obvious that this was no minor problem. The iMac that I’ve been using for my webserver, was dead — “D – E – D, ded”. No response to any keypresses…no response to the ‘panic button’ reset switch…not even any response after I unplugged it, let it sit for a minute, and plugged it back in. Not a good situation.

Especially when I noticed the faint smell of something burnt lingering in the air.

So, my webserver is no more, and I’m in the process of rebuilding things from scratch. My first priority was to get my blog back up — but to do that, I’m starting with just the default Movable Type template. The rest will fall into place…though it’s likely to be a long, slow process.

On the bright side, I’d done a backup of my website just three weeks ago, towards the beginning of August, so I’ve only really lost about three weeks of posts. On the down side — just copying that backup into the webserver directory of the machine I’m using now, didn’t work, so I still have to rebuild everything. Still, it’ll go a lot faster than if I’d entirely lost all that information, so that’s a good thing.

In the meantime…well, things are likely to be a bit odd around here for a while as I get things going again. Caveat emptor.

Music, music, music

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I found a fun little toy to play with today — a little program called Kung-Tunes that ties into iTunes (my .mp3 player), grabs whatever song I’m listening to at the moment, and writes a small text file to my website. That file is then integrated into the page whenever someone hits my site, giving them an instant readout of whatever I’m listening to if I happen to have any music playing when they visit.

Useful? Not in the least. Just cool.

Redesign in progress

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Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.

More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?

Read more

It just works

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Nathan Torkington, one of the staff over at O’Reilly is documenting his experiences as he moves from a Windows-based PC to an Apple iBook. Gotta love articles that state:

I plugged in the digital video camera (editing be damned!) and it Just Worked. I built wget and it Just Worked. I downloaded VM and it Just Worked. I plugged in a three-button mouse and it Just Worked. I came to realize something: I’d been with Microsoft for so long, who are complacent and hoard their customers, that I’d forgotten what it’s like to use an operating system built by people who want it to cooperate with the rest of the world. It’s good.

(via Daypop)

Well, I’m not surprised

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Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, …tend to be more Web savvy, with more than half having been online for at least five years…are 58 percent more likely than the overall online population to build their own Web page and also slightly more likely to buy goods online, according to the report.

(via MetaFilter)