I got bored tonight and upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, tada!

I also decided that it was time to find a new theme since my last one (BigBlue) was feeling a little old to me.   I’m not all too impressed with my web design skills, so I don’t mess around with creating my own themes.  It didn’t take long to come across the one you’re seeing right now (called Cutline 3-Column Split), so I figured I would spend a little more time and go through my photo collection looking for header images to display here.  I’ve uploaded 30+ for the time being, I hope you like them.

Slashdot just posted an article about some new “3D” browser that AT&T is building called Pogo.   Meh.  Big deal.

Why do so many “3D” applications really bring nothing new to the table?   The screenshots for Pogo show a Vista-style “3d-flip” sorta thing, with nothing but the page title and DATE displayed next to it.  Oh boy, that’s useful. 

Sure I’ll try a 3D browser, if maybe it used “3D” for something other than switching between tabs.  Can we not somehow use this capability/”technology” to really bring some more value to the table? The requirements for this new browser are pretty steep, so how about we get something for it?  How about using a “3d” capability to view the history of a page as it has changed over time as you’ve been sitting there on the page?  Hell, I don’t even know if that would be useful.  

Maybe the BLINK tag should be brought back and shown in ultra-cool-3D mode.  That’d be worth it.

Made a big OOPS tonight, something that could/should have been avoided by a slightly better UI/usability design on the part of VMWare Server.

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I have started running my web server (the 0ne hosting this blog among other things) in a virtual machine, using VMWare Server.  I happily got everything installed and up and running, but then noticed what appeared to be a bug in the version of Apache I was using that caused some hiccups with mod_proxy.   I looked it up and it appeared that the next point release of Apache took care of the problem – but I’m running Debian stable and it wasn’t available.

I read up on running mixed stable/testing packages in Debian, and thought I was ready to go.  My plan was to take a VMWare Snapshot before the upgrade and if something messed up I could quickly roll it back.

Well, something went wrong and apache wouldn’t start after upgrading it to Testing.  Getting annoyed, I decided to rollback to the snapshot and deal with it another night.  Here’s where the OOPS comes in….

I click Snapshot…Take Snapshot instead of Revert to Snapshot (they’re right next to each other on the menu).  CRAP, my safe snapshot was now being overwritten without any prompting and I was effectively hosed.  A nice little confirmation prompt would have been great to have, VMWare.  Thanks.

This reminded me of the great UI design I ran into once when dealing with an HP server’s RAID controller.  At one point you’re prompted to confirm a delete action.   Every time we hit clicked to confirm the action (we did it 2-3 times), nothing would happen but the prompt disappearing.  Upon further inspection, HP had swapped the OK and Cancel buttons so you wouldn’t easily and accidentally destroy your data.

The hard drive on my webserver took a dive this afternoon, so I’m in the process of getting things moved around and back online.

To alleviate these sorts of problems in the future I have installed a new webserver in a virtual machine running on one of my windows servers – meaning it’s running on 2 year old hardware instead of 6 year old, decrepit hardware.   And the virtual disk is sitting on a RAID array so it’ll be further insulated from hard drive failure.

This all started as I was going to upload David’s 4 Month photos, btw.  So those are still en-route.

When we found out that Ana was going to be in surgery this week, I went on a hunt for a way to get a good internet connection at the hospital.   In past visits the free St. John’s Hospital wireless had proven to be slow at best, and oftentimes unreliable.  So I  was very interested in having a backup plan since we were going to be there for a couple of days.

My searching resulted in me renting from RovAir.com. How it works is you tell them when you want to reserve a wireless broadband card (3-day minimum), pay $15/day, and they ship a card to along with an envelope/package to send it back when your reservation is done.  I was skeptical that I would receive the card in time, but it arrived as planned before 10am on Monday.   There’s not much more to say than it worked and I would definitely use them again.

Back to the free wireless connection – it was fast and worked great this visit.  However, due to the power being out for a few hours at the hospital today I did end up using the broadband card.

I’m sorry the blog was down for so long today. When I got to the hospital this morning I realized that my webserver ran into some (yet-to-be-determined) hardware problems and had shut down.  Ana’s surgeon was supposed to stop by in the morning so I didn’t get to go power it back up.

Sorry folks!