Mt. Buller panorama

Just to get bandwidth utilisation back to normal, or something ;) The file is 14424 pixels wide, and 407 high. It’s been manually stitched, and isn’t too bad, given I shot the sequence in under two minutes with no great degree of accuracy. 623KB JPEG. Click the image above to be taken to a full size version of the photograph.

If you do happen to click through, note the cloud of smoke spreading from the bushfires! It looks even cooler in these photos:

This one reminds me of the spreading cloud of darkness around… that bad place in Lord of the Rings (I’ve read it, but only endured the first movie–no, I’m not a fan, sorry world). Only it’s not quite so dark. But it reminds me of it anyway. Picture Lord of the Rings with an ugly damn and some sheds in it, or something (I couldn’t satisfactorily crop it, sorry!)…

I’m convinced it looks like there are mushroom clouds in this one… but… there’s not. Looks like explosions in the distance, but the colour (once tweaked a bit) comes out nicely in the photo, in my opinion.

Back on the air, with piratical Scandinavians!

At approximately 22:09, web services came back online near-completely. This weblog should be functioning perfectly, though there’s a few quirky things happening around the place which will be attended to as quickly as possible.

Hi again. Glad I figured out how to take off that lens cap… (and thanks, Michael, for getting stuff sorted out!)

Update, July 19: Michael has posted briefly about it, apparently there’s more to come, though.

&#8230;And I&#8217;ve learnt to use the <code>&lt;INS&gt;</code> tag!</ins>

Now, we&#8217;ve got (slightly less pot-bellied than the one pictured) VIKINGS to protect us with their <abbr title="Redundant Array of Independent Drives">RAID</abbr>!! Tis exciting times indeed! Yarrr!

Okay, so we don&#8217;t have vikings. We do, however, have a redundant array of independent drives, which is <em>nearly</em> as exciting as those piratical Scandinavians&#8230;

Lens cap on? An update.

This message was originally posted on a temporary “outage” page, hosted at an alternate location. It is retained here for archival purposes. The timestamp has been altered to reflect this fact.

An update

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 11:15:27 +0000

There is now a server back up, official status updates can be found here.

It turned out this wasn’t the normal server–I’d assumed it wouldn’t be–but Michael did provide updates online from that point onwards (though mailing list reports were both more comprehensive and frequent).

Lens cap on?

This message was originally posted on a temporary “outage” page, hosted at an alternate location. It is retained here for archival purposes. The timestamp has been altered to reflect this fact.

Technical Difficulties

Due to a hard drive failure at approximately 5AM EST today, this website will be offline for a period of at least two days.

The web server is maintained by Michael Dale, and the hosting of this website is provided free of charge using his own resources. My personal website has been hosted there since the end of February 2004, and for nearly a year and a half uptime has rivalled that of servers sitting in datacenters.
This, in and of itself, is hardly unimpressive. However, when you consider this has been achieved with only a “consumer-grade” ADSL connection and open source software, the quality of service—especially a service provided pro bono—is brilliant.

StreetComputing will return shortly, with the same host, running the same software.

In the interim, this holder page is temporarily being hosted by base10solutions, a web-development and multimedia company for which I work.

What does this mean for this website?

As stated already, this website will remain hosted by Michael for as long as he is willing. However, as a result of the failure of a hard drive, a small amount of information has been lost.

Whilst database backups are automatically made by the server daily, I have been a little lax with backing up files. Consequently, a small number of images assoicated with posts have been lost. This only affects some posts, identified as the following:

• Why not to use prebuilt templates;
• H.264 scares me;
• If I swam, and;
• On rails

I hope to have replacement content for these posts in the near future. Until this content is prepared, the posts will continue to be available (when the server is again live), albeit without visual content.

Michael’s announcement

The following was sent via email to web hosting users.

Subject: [dg-support] Hard Drive Failure
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 06:56:54 +1000
The hard drive in the web server (metro) died this morning at about 5am. Unfortunately I am leaving to the Hunter Valley in 10 minutes and do not have time to look at it. I will be back on saturday and will start looking into the problem then.

I do not know what the state of the drive is. I’ve never had a Seagate drive die on me.

The last backup of mysql databases was today at 3am and home directories on the 8th of this month. I do not know if I can recover any data from the hard drive.

Please expect the webserver to be offline for at least 2 days, although a full rebuild may take much longer.

Very very sorry about this.

During this time email will continue to work as it is handled on a different server.

Please email me if you have any concerns.

Thank you,
Michael Dale

Why not to use prebuilt templates.

This highly respectable ISP has had their website designed by a highly respectable web design firm, and has consequently come out looking substantially different from every other third- or fourth-tier web services retailer on the market.

Note their wonderfully original Flash banner. Look closer. Right click on the movie and hit “Rewind”. What you thought you could see before but didn’t really want to believe anyone could be stupid enough to do has come true. For those who can’t be bothered going to their website and/or don’t have Flash installed, observe my screenshot above. Beneath their logo there is indeed text that reads “Company Name.net”.

Charming. But not quite so charming as this little gem from Driver Web Designers: “We offer our customers the services of a professional inhouse Graphic designer to give your Website the edge over the competition.”

Ummm.

Better than all that still, of course, is the fact that their brand name as proudly displayed not only on their own banner, but also on the Driver Web Designers website, points not to their own website (which is switch.com.au) but rather that of Union Switch & Signal.

Yeah, I used rel="nofollow" on some links in this post to prevent Google from counting them in its index. It’s because some stupidity doesn’t bear following.