23 Aug 2004 DeepNorth   » (Journeyer)

This post is really about personal stuff. Read if you dare, but it's pretty boring unless you know me personally or are mutually affected by various problems I've had of late.

A lot of my/our troubles would have had much less impact had the tech economy not imploded. It must come back and continue to grow, but the timing of it and the nature of the comeback may not help North Americans that much. A lot of my business has been with Telecomms and related enterprises and we know how that has been.

We are many orders of magnitude of bandwidth below where we all need to be, so this has to make a strong comeback at some point. However, recovery has been spotty so far.

Some friends have had various troubles of late including near death experiences and moving half way across the world. Family have also been having health problems. My goodness. If anyone of you are reading this, my best wishes to you.

Many things have been just a drag on me and my little company this past year or so. I was really hoping to get some time to publish some of my stuff on Sourceforge, but have just been interrupted by one thing or another. Just got back from a trip to Europe for 30 days. It was ok, but really for the wife and kids. I would have liked to take the time to just put my head down and write code, but family comes first these days (as it should).

Like if anybody cares, friends are starting a commercial music site http://www.tzome.com
I am wishing them luck and they have a great idea. Despite note about commercial stuff below, I hold out hope that someone ethical can actually make money in cyberspace. We shall see.

Note that nobody asked about the radix sort, so I have still not prepped this for publication. I am so short on 'hobby time'... This is unfortunate, since that seems to be the stuff that lasts and speaks the best about a person. (Sighs). All of this website activity over the years has been a sink for time/money. I believe in it, but it still seems that only the unscrupulous (sp?) make a financial go of things in cyberspace.

Have struggled with downed sites due to a failed failover (long story) and an unscrupulous primary hosting operation. Oh my.

Sites affected:


arpaul.com
brockvegas.com
brockvilleclub.com
canpsych.com
cleandata.biz
cleandata.us
courtofarbitration.com
datachat.com
datahush.com
dereng.com
dreamweave.com
easydad.com
hushdata.com
hushfinance.com
hushnet.com
hushserver.com
hushvote.com
hushwebs.com
infinikey.com
petertrower.com
purehell.org
purewish.com
randa.hushfinance.com
realphd.com
trantor.biz
trantor.us
truebob.com
truedad.com
truepoem.com
verytrue.com
whiteboxvoting.com
wobbe.biz
yddm.com

Had Advogato not gone down for a while itself, I would have beaten myself up over this, even though all reasonable precautions were taken.

Unlike Advogato, there are a lot of sites affected here and they had more than one backup strategy since they vary in age. It has been a real challenge to restore all of these sites.

Clients sites whose backups we maintain went up quickly once we switched servers. However, a couple of clients maintained their own backups and one is still recovering (very long story here).

We, of course, are the shoemaker's children. Our own sites are the last to be dealt with and we are still in the midst of restoring these. Things could be worse, but disaster-recovery-wise, this was a worst-case scenario.

Looking on the bright side, though, my strategy of paranoid multiple systems and backups paid off. We at least have been able to recover.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!