Category: moronosphere

Thank you D!

elvisLeave a comment

I got set with a temporary home for moronosphere.com (Thanks Dox, yer a fuckin’ peach), so at least I have pages up that say “we’re down, go to…” Long term prognosis – we’ll see. It’ll be a week before we know if we can recover any data, and I don’t know HOW long until our […]

I got set with a temporary home for moronosphere.com (Thanks Dox, yer a fuckin’ peach), so at least I have pages up that say “we’re down, go to…”

Long term prognosis – we’ll see. It’ll be a week before we know if we can recover any data, and I don’t know HOW long until our old server is rebuilt to a usable state with all the perl packages, php, etc. So we may still be seeking a new home. More on that as we learn it. At least I can still blog, and now readers can find me.

Make backups, people. Make backups.

Found a backup!

elvisLeave a comment

I found a backup from July. Whew. We can patch it back together, somewhere. The later posts can be gotten from google cache. Still, I’d rather we get Seth’s disk recovered. Where and when moronosphere.com rises again, we’ll see. For now I’m here, and soon I hope to have a forward from that address to […]

I found a backup from July. Whew.

We can patch it back together, somewhere. The later posts can be gotten from google cache. Still, I’d rather we get Seth’s disk recovered.

Where and when moronosphere.com rises again, we’ll see. For now I’m here, and soon I hope to have a forward from that address to here.

Blogsaster

elvisLeave a comment

(this entry copied from my blogspot blog) I don’t know why I’m writing this. I have nowhere to post it. Last night sometime – late, I’m not sure when, but late, because readers first noticed it then – our server crashed. Moronosphere.com is hosted by my friend Seth, on a machine he keeps at his […]

(this entry copied from my blogspot blog)

I don’t know why I’m writing this. I have nowhere to post it.

Last night sometime – late, I’m not sure when, but late, because readers first noticed it then – our server crashed.

Moronosphere.com is hosted by my friend Seth, on a machine he keeps at his house. This isn’t a service. I don’t pay for it. It’s something he offers me because we’re friends, because his lady Jen and I have been friends for well over a decade.

But this isn’t a commercial service. There’s no support. I’m on my own, I just get space and bandwidth free. No problem, most of the time, because I’m an old unix sysadmin type; I know how to install perl packages, I know how to hack into a mySQL database if I can’t find the password, I know how to configure a web server. In short, I can do whatever I need to keep MovableType running.

But, this being just some guy’s machine, I’m working without a net. There are no automated system backups. No striped and mirrored drives.

I know that. Sure. I do. And I make my own database backups, automated nightly. For months I’ve been meaning to figure out how to automatically transmit those to someplace off-site.

So last night, my luck ran out and the machine crashed; or more exactly, the data disk crashed, hard head-crash from Seth’s description. I used to work for Seagate building and testing disk drives, I know what this means. I’ve seen the carnage of a bad head crash.

We have no backups to speak of.

I don’t know what Seth lost. I know data was lost there. But my blog – almost all of it – is gone, wiped out. Nearly two years of work. Plus my Fiji blog from last year, and a blog I keep with stories I’m working on.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that I host other people. Ray. Buck. Circe. Samsarra. A few others. I let them down by not keeping my backups, my database dumps, off-site.

Ok. All is not lost. The disk goes to a recovery place tomorrow, and in 5-7 days we hope to hear that the disk isn’t a complete loss. Fingers very much crossed there. And I may still have some of our old files stored in my home directory at work where I archived them after a previous database crash. That’s at least a year back, but it’s something.

There’s also hope that some of our work can be re-gathered from web cache servers out there; I have a few things archived on my laptop (thanks to ecto). Not every word of it is gone.

But I’m without a blog. That’s the thing that hurts right now. I write this and can’t share it. moronosphere.com is my home on the internet, and it’s a dead-end now. I can’t even tell anyone what happened. I shout at the empty space and not even an echo returns.

Seth, friend that he is, will get a basic web server up shortly, so we can at least tell the world ‘yeah we’re down’. He may decide to re-build his machine, he may not, I’m not sure; I may need to find new hosting, someplace where they can give me a unix shell access so I can do this right, someplace where I pay, but get the security of backups. What I’d really like to do is set up a co-located server of my own, but I’d need to charge people to host blogs, and it seems sorta silly

Giant Head, Scourage of Network Cables

elvis4 Comments

So the thing with mooching server space and bandwidth from friends is, there’s an upside and a downside. The upside is, I get all this free for nothing but love.

So the thing with mooching server space and bandwidth from friends is, there’s an upside and a downside.

The upside is, I get all this free for nothing but love. This blog, and several others I host, like Austin Ray.

The down side is, you get what you pay for. You pay in love, you get love back, but love ain’t reliability and support. No redundant network connection.

This means we have a certain level of vulnerability.

for example:

…the network line comes in to Junior’s room, but the hardware had
been hidden under his loft. Since we redid his room we have not yet
rebuilt the loft, so the hardware’s exposed to his giant head to
accidentally bump out of the wall.”

Well. That there explains why we’ve been off line a lot the last couple days. Watch that head, Junior!

MTLJPost

elvis2 Comments

I just installed a new version of MTLJPost, an MT plugin that automatically posts my MT blog entries on LiveJournal. This way, I can blog once, yet I’m not neglecting my LJ user friends.

Hey, this is cool.

I just installed a new version of MTLJPost, an MT plugin that automatically posts my MT blog entries on LiveJournal. This way, I can blog once, yet I’m not neglecting my LJ user friends.

Ray, if you wanna turn this on, let me know, I’ll show you how. It’s super easy.

blog hackery again

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I should not try to hack on my block when I’m fulla pharmacuticals, but Doxy got me started wanting to fix some things. This space may look all fucked up for a bit more. I’m trying to roll back to a fully-functional two column layout so I can start over. Should be better fairly soon […]

I should not try to hack on my block when I’m fulla pharmacuticals, but Doxy got me started wanting to fix some things.

This space may look all fucked up for a bit more. I’m trying to roll back to a fully-functional two column layout so I can start over. Should be better fairly soon though.

Either that or I take the rest of these pills and, well, after that, who will care?

Purple again!

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

Ok. I’m back in a functional three-way layout. Three-Way. Say it with me. It’s still fucked up on Safari. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a Safari bug, though, and am reporting it as such to Apple. If you’re a Safari user, sorry; I feel your pain, I use Safari and it annoys […]

Ok. I’m back in a functional three-way layout.

Three-Way. Say it with me.

It’s still fucked up on Safari. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a Safari bug, though, and am reporting it as such to Apple. If you’re a Safari user, sorry; I feel your pain, I use Safari and it annoys the fuck out of me. But I’m not going to design to a bug in one browser.

Now I just need to find the lead developer for Safari and get him in a sleeper-hold until he fixes this shit.

Under new Deconstruction

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I’m still having layout problems — something is goofed up with my templates and I have not had time to sort it out. I’ve temporarily gone back to a default template without my changes while I sort out what broke. Should be more together in a day or so. Meanwhile, if you have a San […]

I’m still having layout problems — something is goofed up with my templates and I have not had time to sort it out. I’ve temporarily gone back to a default template without my changes while I sort out what broke.

Should be more together in a day or so.

Meanwhile, if you have a San Jose Mercury account, you can read a very shallow bit of an interview I did at PantheaCon:

Pagans work magic, turn some heads at San Jose hotel.

The bit that’s actually relevant is:

…So what’s with the kilts? Turner said she likes “men in skirts,” but they have no great religious significance.

Karl Elvis MacRae of Saratoga, a software engineer for Apple Computer, was volunteering at a kilt stand. He’s not a pagan, he just likes kilts. “Men have worn un-bifurcated garments for thousands of years,” he said. The kilt offers freedom, especially when it’s hot out.

Why not just wear shorts?

“Not as much of a breeze in shorts,” he answered. And he sometimes wears it to work. “You know, it’s Apple.”

Template Troubles

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

I severely broke something in my templates. It’s been fixed now, mostly, though it still doesn’t render right in Safari, the browser I prefer. One or two /div tags in the wrong place and things go haywire, I tellya. Still working on it but it should be fixed for must of you.

I severely broke something in my templates. It’s been fixed now, mostly, though it still doesn’t render right in Safari, the browser I prefer.

One or two /div tags in the wrong place and things go haywire, I tellya.

Still working on it but it should be fixed for must of you.