Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Something just have to be there. Like good ventilation in computer case. Otherwise it is very easy to run into problems.

I have mentioned previously that my computer case was missing a fan or two and that caused it to overheat several times a day. Well, today it did it for the last time. I suspect that the IDE controller on the motherboard got burned.

So, instead of buying a couple of fans I had to buy a new motherboard now. But buying just the motherboard is way too boring. I had to get at least the CPU as well. But I didn’t do even that. Instead I bought the whole new computer. Actually, it’s not brand new. It is second hand. But it is a brand one - IBM. It is very similar to the one I have in the office.

So, now you can enjoy this site running on a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU with 1 GByte of RAM. I’ve moved in all the hard drives from the old computer, but I think I will be upgrading my disk space soon too. Fitting five IDE devices into a medium tower case was rather tricky. And they make too much noise too. I didn’t hear much of it with the old machine because it was very noise itself. The new one is totally silent. The loudest sound it makes is me banging on the keyboard. It is impossible to say if the computer is on or off by only listening to noise it makes.

Anyway, I think I got a good deal for 240 CYP.

They say that your unpatched Microsoft Windows machine will live for only 12 minutes on the net before getting 0wned. Now, a lot of people are saying a lot of different things about Windows security, but I tend to agree to this particular one. I’ve seen it plenty of times at work. In fact, we now have a requirement for all colocated clients to fully patch their servers before connecting to our backbone.

Slashdot has a story. And a dup.

I have finally upgraded to this blog to Wordpress 1.5.1.3. A couple of security issues with XML RPC are fixed by this release. I was a bit slow, since the fixes were released for over a week now, but not to worry - my PHP installation already had all the fixes for XML RPC installed.

Slashdot is running a story on the issue. One of the comments shows an easy way of upgrading PEAR that not everyone might be familiar with:

pear clear-cache
pear upgrade XML_RPC

As you all had probably noticed the server was down for a looong time - about 18 hours. It all started as minor hardware upgrade, that didn’t went right, that was turned into major software upgrade. The server is currently running Fedora Linux Core 4. Not everything is fixed and reconfigured, so, please stay with me for the time being. I am trying to fix everything as fast as I can. Yes, that includes your hosted websites.

I will let you know when I’m done so that you could check if everything is back to normal. I will also provide some more details about what went wrong and how I worked around it.

So long for now…

I have finally managed to migrated to WordPress. Database statistics inform me that:

There are currently 1,884 posts and 479 comments, contained within 22 categories.

As of now I am still fixing minor glitches here and there, but major things work. Just to let you know what is broken:

• Permanent links. They are not working yet at all. Fixed.
• Old links. None of the old links are working. Partially fixed. All of them won’t work anyway. Let me know if you find anything that I missed.
• Users. I haven’t created any except for amdin account and myself. Feel free to register though. Not a bug. My brother managed to register all by himself, thus there is no problem.
• Thumbnails. Some pictures come out in their original size and thus really mess up the look and feel. I will attend to this problem shortly. Too much editing required. Only new posts will have proper thumbnailing. And those that I will fix manually. Please complain.
• Google Ads. I don’t yet have it installed. I will fix the temlate very soon. Fixed. Google Ads will now appear only on full item pages. This should improve the click-through ratio due to better ad suggestions. Keep clicking.
• Blogroll. WordPress has an excellent tool for maintaining a blogroll, but it is not very useful to me, since I have mine at BlogLines. I’ll fix the exporting script shotly. Fixed.

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