Okay, so it looks like I made the jump to the new host fairly successfully. Wordpress is up and running and all my data transfered okay. The only hitch, right now, is that the forum is down. I’ll fix that soon.

It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.

For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run Wordpress (with some hacks), do Wordpress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.

Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…

It’s seems I’m back online again. The admins of Redbrick, the host of thedeadone.net, turned Redbrick off after it was discovered that people’s personal webpages had been hacked. Now it looks like everything is up again (if you find something a-miss on the site, drop me a comment). The admins have re-installed everything from scratch and re-instated all the user-data from back-ups before the attack. A pretty large amount of work for admins-slash-students to do.

In all the time I’ve been on Redbrick, this feels like the longest it’s been gone. And it’s a strange experience to have lost my online presence for such a longish unexpected period. I felt like I couldn’t connect or speak about anything, nearly as if I ceased to exist in an online context. Not that I would have hade much to say, having just gotten over the vomiting bug and having to work from home while my daughter recovers from chicken pox. I’m absolutely shattered. But anyway, I’m back online and I do have a small queue of posts to put up.

I’m sure everyone is already aware that Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dunegons and Dragons, passed away on Tuesday. Was never a fan of D&D but without it, I wouldn’t be playing Nobilis or writing roleplaying stuff today. Muted feelings really.

Also announced on Tuesday (before the news of Gary’s death): STOCs (irishgamingwiki link) one of the oldest running Clubs in DCU proposed “merging” with the Games Soc. STOCs is/was the gaming & roleplaying society in DCU and even though I’ve been long out of college, I still have strong ties to the club. The “merging” is rather actually being subsumed into the Games Soc which is oriented towards Computer Games (though originally the Games Soc was an off-shoot of STOCs, I’ve been led to believe). STOCs ran the small annual games convention Sillicon with it’s popular Pub Quiz (irishgaming wiki link). I’ve even ran and wrote games for Sillicon in the past. I do not know the fate of the future of Sillicon. This has saddened me.

Kidic are number 26 in the Irish IRMA charts with their first official signal. I have copies of all their previous stuff at home and I remember when they were “Kid Icarus”!

(For those who don’t know or who aren’t members of Redbrick, Kidic are a rock band formed from various people who attended DCU. For the record, I did my third-year computer applications project with the guitarist).

Their music is pretty cool, similar to Radiohead before they went all weird. They have a music video, available online which is hilarious - only because I know them all from before, it’s so hard to take them seriously!

I wish them all the best! (And, yes, I did buy and download their single. So, eh, Spock, any chance of a physical copy of the single, for the collection? )

If your running Wordpress on Redbrick, more than likely your using a version of Wordpress modified by me (see the wiki for more details).

One of the big problems of Wordpress on Redbrick was that Redbrick is behind a proxy so all outbound connections have to go through the proxy. Wordpress has no build in support for it. I worked out all the changes needed (here). I also submitted a bug report to Wordpress (#3082) detailing the issue.

Well, they’ve closed the bug. Because someone else has submitted a fix for it that supports it properly. So hopefully, in the next release of Wordpress (2.1.4?), it’ll be much easier to install Wordpress on Redbrick. You’ll be able to configure the proxy in wp-config.php and off you go. More stuff will just work “out of the box”!

Now it’d be perfect if the mighty admins of Redbrick get CURL up and running. I’ve been informed this in progress but should be soon.