« Previous Entries

Miscellaneous

GPF, Miscellaneous
Busy, busy, busy…
June 30th, 2008 (1 month, 4 weeks ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Sorry for the silence for the past… good golly… has it really been almost three months? Yeep.

Life’s been a little bit hectic on the GPF Farm. The good news is that GPF has been doing the best it’s done in years, and that alone has kept me hopping so much I haven’t had time to do much else. The bad news is that we’ve also had a lot of personal things going on to keep those few fleeting moments of free time from becoming truly free: several illnesses have swept through the house, hitting each of us individually in turn; we’ve had to fire a nanny and introduce Ben to the immunity-boosting powers of day care (see the previous item); and things have really picked up at work, where I’m currently multitasking on at least four projects. The post title says it all.

I did have a nice little anecdote started for you about the real life events that inspired the recent “iDilemma” stroy in GPF. Unfortunately, I got heavily distracted (see the previous paragraph) and never got around to finishing it. You can get the gist of the backstory in the “RIP PDA” thread on the GPF Forum. GPF Premium subscribers will likely have this condensed and repackaged into the Author’s Notes accompanying the story once I finally get around to it.

I do have a few things I’ve been meaning to blog about, so hopefully I’ll be able to get to those very soon. Again, sorry for the silence.
Viral propagation:
Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
Down time
February 29th, 2008 (6 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
Not sure if anyone noticed, but both the blog and the new GPF beta test site were down last night. Our hosting service, Slicehost, informed us that a breaker blew in their data center and they were forced to bring a number of machines down to protect them. In addition, the blog server (which also hosts a number other private sites I run) stopped responding, so they had to reboot it again.

Unfortunately, while Slicehost was very informative and sent me several e-mails to keep me apprised of the situation, the sites continued to be down until early this morning. That’s when I discovered that for some bizarre reason the MySQL and Apache services were not configured to start at boot time. This is baffling, in my opinion, as I thought this was automatic with Fedora. You install the application package and, if it’s a service like this, it also installs the appropriate links in the init directories to make sure the services start on boot. Not so, apparently. I’m not sure if this is Fedora’s fault, Slicehost’s, or mine, to be honest, but it should be fixed now.

There’s one part of me thinks that this outage is an ominous sign on the eve of my leaving Keenspot. Then again, it also helped me catch a critical flaw that would have been extremely annoying if it happened a week later, after the move when thousands of readers would be hitting the new site. So I don’t know whether to be paranoid or relieved. (O_O)
Viral propagation:
Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
Comments restored… for now
November 19th, 2007 (9 months, 1 week ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
Follow up from the last post: Comments should be working again, although not in a fashion that I’d prefer. I had to completely disable Admin-SSL, thus login and login cookies are no longer secure. If you logged in while it was active, you’ll likely need to log in again before you can post, even if you check the “remember me” box. I’m still looking into why it doesn’t work. There’s a known limitation that shared SSL setups will fail to recognize logins in insecure mode, but they say nothing about dedicated setups like mine, which I would think would imply that it ought to work. Then again, I also had some mod_rewrite rules in place, but I experimented with removing those and so I don’t think they’re part of the problem.

I suppose this isn’t a big deal for you guys, since I doubt anyone will be all torn up over making sure their logins to some random guy’s blog are secure. It affects me more than anyone else, because I’d feel much safer if I could protect the admin parts of the site with a layer of encryption. Still, in places where I really need encryption I can verify it still works, so I guess the blog will just have to be open. :\
Viral propagation:
Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
Comments broken, still working on it
November 19th, 2007 (9 months, 1 week ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
It has come to my attention that comments don’t appear to be working here at the moment. I strongly suspect this is due to the Admin-SSL WordPress plugin that I’m currently using to secure parts of the blog. It seems to forget that you’re logged in when you’re not accessing a secure URL (i.e. you’re not in SSL mode). I’ve tried a few of the workarounds suggested, but none are working. I have a hunch on a few things to try, but that will have to wait until I have more dedicated time to work on it. (I’m currently watching the little guy by myself at the moment.) I’ll post an update when I think it’s been fixed.
Viral propagation:
Miscellaneous
Facelift
September 7th, 2007 (11 months, 3 weeks ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
I was getting tired of the modified default WordPress theme I’ve been using, so I decided to do a little cosmetic surgery. I’m now using the Upstart Blogger Minim theme from Upstart Blogger, modified for my personal tastes. Still doing some tweaking, but I really like the very clean look of it.

I’m pretty busy today, but I hope to post some interesting stuff soon.
Viral propagation:
Miscellaneous, Technology
Back from SIGGRAPH, minor blog structure change
August 24th, 2007 (1 year ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
Sorry again for the silence, everyone. The past several weeks have been rather hectic. Obviously, I’m back from SIGGRAPH, which was earlier this month. The con report on the GPF site is forthcoming; the slideshow is finished, but there’s no link to it from anywhere yet (until this one). Then as soon as I got back, my wife had to first fly to Portland, OR, for a week, then this week she’s in Seattle, WA. Three week-long business trips back-to-back, and whoever isn’t criss-crossing the country is busy watching the little guy. It’s a wonder I’ve had time to do anything except breathe.

Anyway, the second purpose of this quickie post is to let everyone know I’ve made a minor structural change to the blog. I’ve changed the permalink structure from the WordPress default which uses parameters on the query string (http://www.jeffdarlington.com/?p=4) to something hopefully a bit more user-friendly that combines the date and the page “slug” (http://www.jeffdarlington.com/2005/02/17/i-hate-blogs/). I’ve implemented a series of complex Apache mod_rewrite rules that should allow old permalinks to work transparently, not only from the old WordPress query style but also from the old Movable Type links of yore. If anyone encounters a broken link or a link that points to the wrong page, please let me know so I can adjust the rules. Obviously, it would be best if you could update any links you have to this site to the new URLs, but I’ll try to be as accommodating as possible.

I have more interesting things to post, so I’ll hopefully have those up soon.
Viral propagation:
Internet, Miscellaneous, Software, Technology
Move complete… I hope
July 11th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
If you’re seeing this post, then welcome to the new server! Our new host is Slicehost, a small hosting service that caters specifically to online developers. I have to say that so far, I’m pretty impressed. I had a few bumpy points getting SSH started and the initial setup was so bare-bones I had to install a ton of packages just to get functional (including fundamentals like tar and which), but it’s moving a lot faster than the old site sitting behind the cable modem.

Slicehost does one thing that I think is really pretty slick, especially from a hard-core geek’s point of view: Unlike most web hosts who give you a little sandbox to play in and tie your hands on what you can and cannot do, the “slicers” give you your own virtual server with root access. That’s right, you have the keys to the virtual kingdom. That means you decide what gets installed on your box, from the Linux distro (no other OSes are supported at the moment, but they do offer several distros) to the individual server applications. Want a LAMP box? You got it. Prefer Fedora to Ubuntu? (Me! Me!) Here you go. You decide what gets installed. The caveat to such permissiveness, of course, is that if you screw it up, it’s your own darn fault. That’s okay, though, because your virtual server shouldn’t affect anyone else sharing the box and you can rebuild your “slice” at any time, wiping it clean and restoring it to its original pristine state. Pay a nominal extra fee and you’ve got backup snapshots that you can also restore in the case of catastrophic failure.

One thing to watch out for is the waiting list. They appear to allocate hardware dynamically based on their current user base (keeping some servers in reserve for redundancy) and then purchase new machines based on their projected demand. If you sign up for the smallest package with the minimum prepayment plan, you could be looking at several weeks of wait time. However, if you’re willing to pay a little more in advance, you’ll be moved up the list. I decided to prepay for six months instead of three and was told I’d have my “slice” in “less than a week.” I ended up getting it in a few hours. Yep, that’s technically less than a week.

Initial annoyances (I’m not sure I’d call them complaints):
- It appears something was up with their Fedora repository. My initial setup did not include the SSH package, and since that’s the only remote access package installed by default (telnet and FTP are rightly left in the bit bucket) , I couldn’t log on. I contacted their support site and got a response in about an hour or so. Unfortunately, it was already getting late, so I couldn’t stay up to see if the fix they gave would work. However, I was able to log in licketty split this morning with no problems. (I then took the opportunity to lock the box down tight; this site proved quite helpful in that regard.) A small part of me cringes inside, wondering what might happen if I have to rebuild my slice and this repository isn’t working again….
- While it’s great that they give you a clean slate to work with, they really give you a clean slate. As mentioned above, some things you just take for granted on a *NIX box like tar and gzip were nowhere to be found. I think it’s fine that I have to install MySQL, Apache, and PHP on my own; not everybody’s going to use those and they may have a database, Web server, or scripting environment they prefer over those options. But no tar? No gzip? Not even which? I lost track of how many seemingly fundamental packages I had to install, stuff I just naturally expected to be there. Not a major complaint, mind you, but an annoyance, as it took far longer to get the system to the point that I could actually function than it did to get the blog moved.
All in all, though, I think I’m going to like this new home. If you’re interested in checking them out, click the link in the first paragraph and poke around. If you decide to sign up, though, come back here and click my referral link. A little kickback is always nice.

Of course, now that we’ve moved, commenting should be re-enabled. If you created an account before the move, it should have been ported over. (The internal user ID numbers got switched around, but since no one was able to post after I switched to WordPress, I don’t think that really matters.) Feel free to log in and make sure your account is accessible.

Feed readers: Please update your feed links now. You’ll find the new RSS and Atom links in the “Feed Me” section of the sidebar. Remember, the old “domain:port” URLs will no longer work.
Viral propagation:
Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
Return of the move
July 10th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Sorry for the recent silence, everyone. It wasn’t my intention to seemingly disappear for several weeks. As you might guess, it’s been entirely real life craziness keeping me hopping. There were several occasions were I actually planned to post something, only to get distracted and never get around to it.

Well, here’s some news definitely worth posting. I mentioned quite some time ago my plans to eventually move the blog from its current home—my Linux box Demeter sitting behind my cable modem—to somewhere a bit more stable. Not that Demeter herself is unstable, mind you, but the current hoops we have to jump through just to get the blog online have caused casualties to its usefulness, like killing commenting and making our RSS/Atom feeds go through odd channels. While my dynamic DNS service does an admirable job in getting the raw HTML to you guys, it’s not suitable for a long term solution.

The point is that it looks like the move is going to finally take place, only the final destination isn’t where I originally intended. I was planning to move to Keenspot on the back end, largely because I am already familiar with them and how their servers are set up. Of course, this also meant the blog would be loaded with ads to cover the bandwidth costs (unless, of course, you’re a Keenspot PREMIUM subscriber). Not something I’m particularly thrilled about, but I was viewing it as a necessary evil. (After all, it’s the ads (and PREMIUM) that currently keep GPF a float. Lately all our other revenue streams have been high and dry.)

Well, Chris Wright over at Help Desk managed to change my mind. He pointed me to his current web host, and after taking a cruise around their site and FAQ, I was hooked. I have a number of ambitious online plans in the works, all of which require some rather stringent and quirky software requirements. These guys seem to cater directly to online developers, meaning they’re a lot more likely to accommodate my unusual needs, and their prices are ridiculously beyond reasonable. (I’ve never seen a bandwidth plan as cheap as theirs.) So I’m going to move over to them, at least on a trial basis, to see how things go. If everything goes over well, expect to see some rather obnoxious plugging in the future.

So, what does this mean for you? Right now, not much. For the time being I’ve temporarily disabled sign-ups for commenting. Comments aren’t working right now anyway, and preventing anyone new from signing on should make moving the database easier. (Existing accounts should be intact once the move is complete.) The switch in the DNS should be largely transparent, so those of you who visit the site directly shouldn’t notice anything different (other than the odd nested frame set inserted by the dynamic DNS should be gone).

The real funky stuff will come with the feeds. By now, most of you should be using the “domain:port” URLs for RSS and Atom feeds. These bypass the dynamic DNS and go directly to the web server on the port it’s really running on, not being nested through the DNS’ frames. Unfortunately, there won’t be a graceful transition for the feeds, as I have no intention of running the web server on multiple ports after the move. (It’s technically possible, but probably a waste of resources.) So those of you reading the blog via the feeds might want to come by the site periodically and check in for updates, at least until we know the transition has successfully taken place. New feed URLs will be posted once the move is complete. (Of course, I ought to just go with FeedBurner and hide all this behind-the-scenes garbage, but I’m also lazy and I’d rather do things myself.)

So when is all this going to go down? I’m not quite sure yet. The new host has a waiting list as they allocate hardware dynamically based on demand. I’ve been told it should be “less than a week,” which could be anywhere form one to two days. Tack onto that a day or two for me to move the database and debug everything, and it could easily be a week or more before you’ll notice anything. As usual, though, you should be able to just pop in here anytime and get the latest, regardless of which host we’re currently on.
Viral propagation:
Miscellaneous
No move just yet
April 23rd, 2007 (1 year, 4 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
If you haven’t noticed, the blog hasn’t moved yet. I know I mentioned that I expected to have it moved by last weekend, but with the Keenspot server troubles, I decided to hold off and wait until the Keen Tech Crew has finished cleaning up the debris on their end. I’ll try and give you an ETA when I have one. Until then, keep using all the same old links and feeds.
Viral propagation:
Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
So… what happened?
April 5th, 2007 (1 year, 4 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Most of you are probably wondering what happened yesterday with the blog. For those who may not have seen it, folks visiting the site via a Web browser were being redirected to another site. I won’t post its URL, as I don’t particularly want to give them any more Googleshare, but it seemed to be some sort of portal site in a language I didn’t immediately recognize. Some of you have speculated that this might have had something to do with the impending move to Keenspot, or perhaps with Keenspot’s current DNS server problems. While I wish those were the case, unfortunately they weren’t.

It looks like it was a problem with my dynamic DNS service, DNS2Go. As previously stated, DNS2Go has an HTTP redirection service that lets me forward “www.jeffdarlington.com” on standard HTTP port 80 to the site’s real IP address at its real non-standard port. This is the component that seems to have failed. Going to www.jeffdarlington.com took you to the mysterious site; however, if you went to jeffdarlington.com:8081 (the site’s real port number), you got the blog. (The style sheet didn’t work, of course, because WordPress hard codes the domain name in all URLs, including to the style sheet. But the content itself was still available.)

I put in a support ticket last night with DNS2Go’s tech support and got the following response this morning:

It was something on our end and we have resolved that problem.

Not very descriptive, but accurate; the site is obviously now up. My guess? I think they were hacked, and they don’t want to admit it. Their own main domain was also down during this time, and all of my domains that used the redirection service in some fashion were affected. I haven’t had a chance to independently research this theory with the conference going on and all, but it seems a bit more suspicious to me than just a technical glitch.

Anyway, things are back to normal now. The move to Keenspot is currently slated for the weekend of April 20th, just in case anyone is interested in knowing.
Viral propagation: