dsandler.org

I realize I haven’t written here in quite a while. I have a draft or two that I’ve been idly poking from time to time, like uneaten peas, but nothing really ready to go.

You’ll find I’ve spent most of my time the last few months on teaching; some of my slides are over here if you’re bored and looking for edu-tainment.

For once, E has been more prolific than I, so if you’re looking to read something, pop over there. For my part, well, expect me to have something to say—and time to say it—come late April or May.

Have you been keeping up with the posts on erinmak? It’s an excellent substitute for the gripping bloggery lately absent from this very page. (I’ve been busy. Um, super busy.)

So, I’ve gotten a couple of complaints about the automatic cross-posting from my del.icio.us links. So, I’ve turned it off. You’ll just need to remember to visit over there once in a while (or subscribe to the feed) to see what I’m busy reading (or planning @toread) instead of posting here.

You probably noticed the Links for 2006-09-18 post this morning; it’s a dump of the previous day’s links in my delicious bookmarks. Let’s try this for a few days; it might be useful or it might just clutter up the place.

Ex-Be dope Mike Popovic takes my critique of iTunes 7 to the next level:

Yeah, we’ve been down for a few days now. A RAID failure on the database server at DreamHost, plus some corrupt backups, plus nine hundred other support requests, equals serious downtime. Add to that the fact that their offsite status page had information about at least four other failures/outages this week—before the status page itself went offline—and you have a pretty lousy week for DreamHost.

It’s been frustrating for me, not because the downtime has hurt me badly (it was just the dsandler.org tables; my other sites, including toastycode, were unaffected) but because I’ve been such a big fan of DreamHost and have recommended it to plenty of folks. It’s embarrassing to have your blog offline for a few days when a simple DB restore is all you need. On the other hand, it was an honest mistake; they restored what they thought was the correct table dump, and my plea for help was at the bottom of nearly a thousand open tickets.

I guess the lesson here is if you don’t like stress, don’t work at a major hosting company.

dsandler.org is having a backrub while I migrate from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.3 (finally!).

Update, 8:43pm: Almost there. The tags are still broken, but everything else should be OK.

Update, 9:59pm: Phoo. Done. I had to dig into my (deeply hacked) version of WP-Tags (actually now a variant on WP-Shadows); lots of incompatibilities with the way 2.0 loads plugins, handles rewrites, etc. Very fragile. The sooner WP gets built-in tagging the better, I say.