Sunday, 25th of January, 2004

From this week’s Rocking Vicar, which I’m only just reading… the old “SPLIT PERSONALITIES” thread again:

REMinem
Sean Paul Simon
Underworld Party
The The Who
Olivia Newton John Cooper Clarke
Gypsy Kings Of Leon
Pointer Sisters Of Mercy
Gracie Fields Of The Nephilim
Sugababes In Toyland

I’ve always liked the idea of Badly Drawn Boy George Michael Jackson Browne.

Thursday, 22nd of January, 2004

Via Charlie’s Diary: Around the turn of the century (that’s the 20th century, kids!) a Russian photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed a technique for taking colour images, by taking three black and white photographs through green, red and blue filters, and then projecting the three images on a wall through the same filters. Via the Library of Congress’s large archive of those plates, somebody has used Photoshop to composite those images into some really beautiful colour images from the early 20th centry. Check it out: link

Some especially cool ones: River1, Yurts 1, Bridge 1 (amazing colours!). It’s amazing in this crowd shot how little had changed between the three shots.

Sunday, 18th of January, 2004

Via David Langford’s Ansible newsletter I’ve just heard the sad news that Joan Aiken died on the 4th of January this year at 79. She was the author of the wonderful “Dido Twite” sequence of alternative-history fantasy novels that I adored as a kid (The Wolves of Willhougby Chase, Black Hearts in Battersea, Night Birds on Nantucket - dark and endlessly fascinating adventure with a strong female heroine. I’m sure these books (and some short stories and at least one other novel I read and re-read at the time) affected my psyche a lot more than I now recall. Will have to re-read them again, after probably 15+ years’ gap.

Thursday, 15th of January, 2004

Did you notice I was gone?
Some you may know the saga of the server… On the 27th of December 2003 the hard disk of the server on which this site (among many others) resides had a brain-fart. Well, it had a physical crash, which is, like, fucked-up mate. So it was completely off-line for a few days, until the guy hosting it bought a new hard drive, reinstalled RedHat Linux and got ssh up so I could login and start tweaking. So I practically learned how to get a server up and running again, hosting 16 different domain names, getting email coming in, re-creating users… The list goes on.
My joy when, at about midday on New Year’s Day, I managed to get sendmail working (found the right config file to replace), was inestimable. Extreme. Profound. Suddenly all those emails that had been waiting in cyberspace started flooding in. Wow!

In the meantime the old hard drive was off at a data recovery place… Not the best time of year for this all to happen, so it took a while for them to get it all happening. I heard late last week from them that there were a lot of bad sectors, so there could be data loss…

Well this evening I finally got an email from the data recovery people (oh, and recovering data from a fucked-up hard drive is EXPEN$IVE!), and checked with some trepidation.

The guy had made everything available via ftp so I’ve spent the last couple of hours checking through everything, and in a recovered directory I found what looked like the mysql database files.
It took a good half-hour to reinstall mysql (after a couple of wrong turns - I’d copied over the mysql executables with the old ones, but they were the wrong version, so I had to reinstall the rpm…) and the mysql server on the new machine, then start the mysql server.
So imagine how I felt when I pulled up the Movable Type logon page once more, and it all worked! Logged in fine, and the four blogs I’m hosting all turned up, all entries and comments there…

I truly almost had a heart attack. All it took really was copying the entire contents of /var/lib/mysql
It looks like the FourPlay mailing list is pretty much gone for good - I can’t find it anywhere. A lot of the directory structure is still there, but one or two partitions seem pretty much lost. I’ll ask them further tomorrow, but luckily the /home partition is still there, so users’ own data is fine, but /var was fairly chopped up. Lucky that /var/lib/mysql was there, although it was in a directory with a random name, so it was obviously rescued…
/var/spool/mail was the location of all the Inboxes for all the users, so that seems to be gone too… Two of the most important bits :( But anyway, at least the blogs are back, and a few other things. I’ll see tomorrow what else can be rescued! *shiver*