General

I’m totally exhausted from everything happening at once. I was working until around 11PM Saturday night fixing & monitoring a bad memory leak.

BounceWeb’s problems continued all weekend. Although all of the data was still on the server, nothing worked. They ended up creating a new account for me, and I spent all morning restoring everything for MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet. Everything is finally working once again.

Early tomorrow morning I’m having my new place inspected. I spent most of yesterday afternoon cleaning out the closet where everything I don’t use accumulated. I threw out 3 bags of junk. I’m really nervous about the move, since I’m going to have a lot to do in just one day.

I just got news through Lee Felsenstein that Adam Osborne has died. He was an early columnist for personal computer magazines, book author and publisher, and founder of Osborne Computer. Dan Bricklin has a remembrance of Osborne including an audio recording. [Scripting News]

Osborne Computer is one of the best examples of how pre-announcing a product can backfire. When they announced an upcoming MS-DOS compatible model, sales of their original CP/M based system immediately dropped, and the company went bankrupt in Sept. 1983.

The author of PHP-Nuke posted this rant in which he talks about possibly rewriting it and going closed source as a result of yesterday’s hacks.

This is very wrong and it illustrates one of the dangers of having an open source project like PHP-Nuke controlled entirely by one person. I would like to see PHP-Nuke development moved to SourceForge to allow other community members to take part in its development.

If PHP-Nuke does go closed source, I will probably switch to PostNuke or one of the other variants for MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet.

The U.S. war with Iraq is interpreted as an attack on Islam and Arabs, as violent protests erupt around the world. [Salon]

This is exactly what I was afraid of all along.

Although I don’t agree with the decision to attack in the first place, it’s too late to turn back now. We have to finish what we started. Backing out now would only make things a lot worse. We made our bed, so now we have to sleep in it.

Cody freaked out completely this afternoon. He was standing on the back of my chair as he often does, when he suddenly jumped down, ran to the window and started jumping at it. He then ran away, knocking down a few things along the way, and hid for a few hours. When he came out of hiding, he looked very edgy and upset.

Most likely there was something on my patio. We have a stray cat & raccoons that come around occasionally, and there are lots of lizards.

Check out phpnuke.org: “THIS SITE HACKED BY D.H.T. STOP WAR! THIS SITE HACKED BY D.H.T. STOP WAR! THIS SITE HACKED BY D.H.T. STOP WAR! THIS SITE HACKED BY D.H.T. STOP WAR! THIS SITE HACKED BY D.H.T. STOP WAR! THIS SITE HACKED BY D.H.T. STOP WAR!”

I just got an email from BounceWeb:

Everything is being restored right now, at a rate of 2 sites per minute, all
sites should be restored within an hour. Unfortunately the hard drive
crashed. We apologize for all the problems lately, we have been having
nothing but bad luck with our servers lately.

MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet are down completely, as is everything on BounceWeb’s main server.

I’m temporarily moving those domains to this server and looking for a new hosting company.

The MySQL database which powers MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet (as well as BounceWeb’s own support system) has been down all morning.

Unless they give me a good explanation and a guarantee that this won’t happen again, I plan to move to a different host, even though I have a free reseller account and MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet only cost me $5/month each for a huge amount of bandwidth. My one year advance payment is almost up, so I can start looking for a new host.

If anyone knows a good host that isn’t too expensive, let me know. I switched from PHPWebHosting, which was very fast & reliable, because they provided a lot less disk space & bandwidth and also cost about twice as much.

“In the wake of Apple’s announcement late yesterday that former Vice President Al Gore was elected to the company’s board of directors, President George Bush announced this morning that he would demand a recount….The Bush administration indicated that if a recount was not successful, they would take the matter to the Supreme Court,” reports Crazy Apple Rumors. [Mar 20] [Apple Hot News]