Month: December 2005

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Server Move Complete

Went for it last night, and Birdhouse Hosting is now in its new home. Four hours to securely transfer 65 accounts totaling ~20GBs of data between two cPanel servers. Considering that there’s a lot more to transferring an account than copying a home dir around*, the cPanel-to-cPanel transfer mechanisms are pretty good at getting it right. DNS propagated overnight, and we’re live with a VPS in a quad-CPU, 8GB, hot-swap setup.

Only two small glitches to mop up this morning – the alternate SMTP port wasn’t open, and apache was configured to choose index.html before index.php when both present. Other than that, the migration was flawless and I can start thinking about making a Christmas shopping list. Let’s see, shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a tally of naughty and nice Birdhouse users…

* Users databases are off in /var/lib/mysql, mail forwarders and aliases are in /etc/valiases/*, mailing list archives are kept deep in the bowels, crontabs are here, quota settings are there, service plan features and packages somewhere else entirely, foobar is behind my left ear, and it all has to be packaged up neatly and restored on the other end inside an accompanying account with all passwords intact — not a fun job to do manually (I’ve been down that road) but pretty much effortless with the cPanel transfer mechanisms.

Music: ABBA :: Thank You For The Music
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Beefier Birdhouse

Birdhouse is moving! We’re about to undertake a migration of customers from our current dedicated server setup into a managed reseller environment, where we’ll be setting up shop on a beefy quad-CPU box under the watchful eye of a dedicated management team. As some of our sites get more and more popular, we’re seeing increasingly frequent load issues on the current single-CPU server that we can’t manage effectively. The goal is to free myself up from server performance considerations, so I can focus more on development and implementation.

To celebrate the move, we’ve just raised virtually all of the limits on all of our hosting plans — more email accounts, more databases, more add-on domains, more everything. It’s nearly impossible to stay competitive in an industry that puts the airline biz to shame when it comes to overselling, but we think these new plans bring us quite a bit closer.

The actual move may not happen for another day or two, but we’ve got nearly all our ducks in a row now. We’re not anticipating any downtime, crossing fingers. See you on the other side!

Music: Rickie Lee Jones :: Danny’s All-Star Joint
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Brilliant Sushi Doc

First foray into Google Video begins with a documentary on Japanse Sushi, with less emphasis on the food than on the customs and etiquette of the sushi-ya. Equal parts educational and comic-surreal. You’ll even learn why some Japanese people’s feet smell of vinegar.

“Maa maa maa maa.” “Oh toh toh toh.”

Thanks baald

Music: Bruce Lash :: Innocent People
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KTG POST Problem Licked

No response from iTMS affiliates program on the POST problem. Total brick wall trying to contact a human there, but I’m not ready to give up on being an iTMS partner while iPod is king. Finally solved it with a workaround (which I hate): If user voted on the previous lyric, the vote is processed, then, rather than displaying the rest of the output immediately, the browser is invisibly directed to the next page through a location header rather than POST. User still gets the same page she would otherwise, but links to iTMS now work without throwing a confusing “Re-POST?” dialog in the browser.

Also signed up as a Rhapsody affiliate, so non-iTunes peeps are not locked out. Most lyrics now have dual iTunes/Rhapsody artist links. Thanks to mneptok for kicking my butt on that.

Love how trivial it is to create links to artists in Rhapsody, e.g.: http://www.rhapsody.com/PatsyCline — which means I can auto-generate the URLs. So what was a 10-hour database population job for iTMS was a 5-minute job with Rhapsody. Hey Apple: Cluetrain!

Music: Chrissie Hynde :: Nebraska
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18-Carat Accuracy

Refreshing, after recent high-profile controversies about the accuracy of Wikipedia, to see the results of Nature‘s blind side-by-side comparison of 42 Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia articles by dozens of scientists. Wikipedia fared only slightly worse relative to Brittanica’s accepted standard of accuracy. But how good is the standard?

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia [emphasis mine]. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. … “People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”

Thanks Paul

Music: Billy Bragg :: Between the Wars
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Biodiesel Paradox

The demand for biodiesel is up so sharply that world-wide industries are ramping up non-petro oil production. Soy bean oil predominates in the U.S., but palm oil is cheaper to produce. So the last remaining vestiges of rain forests in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are being razed to make way for palm oil production. Salon:

Biodiesel activists have responded to the latest depressing news by calling for biodiesel labeling. For those of us in Berkeley, already carefully distinguishing between farm-raised and wild salmon, and searching for our free-range chickens certified to have passed away happily in their sleep, it will be one more thing to pay attention to. Biodiesel from used French fry oil: good. Biodiesel from Thailand: bad.

Better way: Use less oil.

Music: Mark Eitzel :: Auctioneer’s Song
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Hollow Log

Miles In Log Miles visited the Discovery Science museum in Sausalito today, at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge. Outside, found himself a hollow log to play in. He’s looking like such a big boy to me lately. The baby in him is starting to seem like a distant memory — one I find myself not ready to let go of just yet, as much as we enjoy every step in his personal evolution.

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Five Exabytes

How much new information is created each year? According to a 2003 study by UC Berkeley’s School of Information Management, the world produced five exabytes (one quintillion bytes) of content in 2002 — the same amount of data poot forth by all of humanity between 25,000 B.C. and A.D. 2000. “Five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress…”

Music: Nurse With Wound :: Coolorta Moon