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Wheels-up 2K8!
(26 Apr 2008 at 15:30) |
Well, they finally unplugged my complimentary high speed internet in my grad student office. Of course I knew they were going to do that eventually but I was expecting a day's notice or two so that I could set up an alternative host. Oh, well! As you can see I've started moving stuff to a new host and some things are working. This has actually been a hilariously complex adventure, mostly because of the peculiar characteristics of the machine formerly known as spacebar.org. This was a very old (Pentium II) Dell desktop that had been running almost continuously for about ten years. Having never suffered a hardware failure, I firmly believe it to be invincible. Unfortunately, its stability was something of a curse: Since I only rebooted it in network emergencies, on average of once a year or so, I began to tolerate increasingly weird startup problems. (For example, having to manually start some services when it booted.) The weirdest of these was when one year it decided that the keyboard would only work if plugged into the mouse port (!) and then maybe a year after that they keyboard wouldn't work at all after reaching the login prompt. This was okay because I could just connect to it over the internet after a successful boot and do the stuff I had to do. Unfortunately when they unplugged my machine they killed its DNS record, and I couldn't figure out what IP address it thought it had so that I could make a fake CMU network at home and connect to it to do that thing and copy data off of it for the new host. And forget about DHCP or anything like that. And its chassis was so invincible that I couldn't figure out how to get one of the hard drives out so that I could copy directly from it with another machine. But I'm not opposed to some hanging-open upside-down case Frankenstein shit when necessary, so that was okay, but then it turns out that MySQL changed the binary database format like 6 years ago and discontinued support for it, so even though I had all the database files I couldn't open them in anything, and even if I could find an old version of MySQL it wouldn't run with the newer linuxes, so I had to figure out how to get it to compile in a VMWare installation etc. etc. but finally I got all that stuff. Now I am dealing with some 64-bit compatibility stuff, like how it says that this post is from August the year 4,461,665 which is cool because I guess that means this new machine is even more invincible having lasted over 4 million years.
I know that some people rely on snoot.org and Escape to keep them from having to do work while at work and some other people need compulsively to look at the inverse mutton chops picture so I apologize for the downtime. It is mostly my fault for not having a good migration path and saving this until the last minute. (Did I mention I haven't turned in the final version of my dissertation yet?) All is well and the sites will be up this weekend if they aren't already. I hope you are well as well. |
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| And they laugh at me for running bleeding edge everything... |
| Yeah, this is sort of the opposite problem. Note I didn't need any Adam help; aren't you proud? |
| Cutting edge techmology. I think the VMWare solution is pretty rad idea. |
| It's actually an e-business solution. |
| Finish your thesis, then do the open upside-down stuff...Although I am happy to visit your site again. |
| I am very proud! |
hello Tom 7.
standardml.org has address 66.35.250.210
www.standardml.org has address 66.35.250.10
http://standardml.org works
http://www.standardml.org doesn't
a typo in the DNS record? |
| Thanks. I never would have noticed that because I never use www prefixes myself. It's fixed now. |
| http://youtube.com/watch?v=aeIxUYiDrXU |
| Ah, I love that show. |
| Thanks for letting me visit your site. I enjoy snooping around here. You guys sound cool. |
Hey TOM
I found out about you when I found your font embedding little hack -- the one that changes the embed flag in a TTF. Nice work; It will be useful for an arcane setup I have for a local teacher that involves a 1998 version of WordPerfect 8, Acrobat, and some chemistry fonts.
Apart from that, re: your post, this is the sad state of computing at the dawn of the 21st century. I commend you for your tenacity. VMWare + old linux kernel + old mysql = deliverance.
This is one of the reasons I don't like depending on huge subsystems for my personal data. Suffering the vagaries of natural change on a regular basis leads to a self-imposed exile from the entrancement of enjoyment.
Such, such were the joys.
Also, you are something of a renaissance man, and an inspiration.
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| Yeah, I don't like it either, but my reaction is to write my own software to do it, which is better in some way (like I kind of understand what it's doing and how to fix it when it mysteriously doesn't work) but I'm definitely at the point in my programming career where I frequently curse my 10-years-ago self for his foolishness, so it's really like using other people's garbage anyway. |
Damn, that was exhausting to read. What a headache, but good job on the solution. As another reader said, you score major points for tenacity. And I hope you've learned a lesson. :-)
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