Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Apologies to those of you who noticed a brief downtime last night.  My hosting company was moving the database from one IP address to another, and they have warned me about it a few times early on the way.  All I had was to update configuration of the blog, but somehow that slipped through my memory.  Once I noticed the problem, it was trivial to fix.  Everything is back and should be working just fine now.

This blog wasn’t the only one affected - I’m hosting quite a few  web sites, and most of them had the same problem.  As far as I can see, all of them are up now.  Let me know if you notice that something is still broken.

I’m doing lots of silly stuff.  Who else could post a few articles in the morning, and then start with major WordPress upgrade?  Surely, there was a disruption of service while many of your came to read the posts.  Sorry, guys.

The good news is that I finally did it.  The blog was lagging behind the recent security updates and new features, running on WordPress 2.2.2 .  Today I updated it first to 2.2.3, which went without any problems.  Then I went for 2.3.1, which broke a few things.  I had to remove a few files and re-upload them and then fix a few places in the database and adjust the theme a bit.

All my posts were under a single category, and were tagged with Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which WordPress 2.3 provided an import for.  That thing didn’t work properly.  Probably, because I have a few thousands of posts, and a few thousands of tags, and importing them all takes more time than a browser is willing to wait without timing out.

But I don’t care for that right now.  It was a mess anyway.  Some posts got tags imported, others didn’t.  I’m not going back to fix them all. What’s done is done and it’s time to move on.  All posts will still remain under the single category (General), but that won’t be displayed.  Instead, you’ll see the tags to each post.  I’ll try to keep them orderly, and maybe even organize them a bit later.  For now, if you want to find something, use the search box of this site, Google, or drop me a line and I’ll try to locate the bit for you.

If you notice any misbehavior of the site, please let me know.  Thank you.

I try to stay as further away from hardware jobs as I can. But sometimes there is no way around…

I’ve been promising some fixes to Olga for about six month now. No music played in our living room during this time. And Maxim was continiously getting closer to power cables and outlets.

So, today I fixed everything. Appologies for a little downtime, by the way. I had to rearrange my harddisks and move about 80 GBytes of mp3s and oggs. I also had to disconnect power cables in order to properly move all cabling behind the table, so that Maxim won’t reach it. Or at least where he won’t see the cables so often.

Now everything is done and back to normal. I even got a bit of free disk space that I can use to refresh my music collection…

I just woke up and logged in. News time. I navigated to BlogLines, but it greeted me with “There is a problem with the database. Please try again later”. I thought - “yeah, well, that’s perfect time to read something that I’ve bookmarked a long time ago and never had a chance to come back to”. So I tried to load my del.icio.us bookmarks. Nope, no chance. I got only “del.icio.us is down for maintenance. we’ll be back in one hour.”…

Oh, my! What’s going on? Who’s next? Slashdot? Google? I rushed to check both of them, but they seem to be OK. Good. I’ll have something to read for the next hour.