Checksum Arcanius

I made some optimizing and security changes to the Apache config files. Let me know if I broke anything.

I just finished categorizing the several hundred posts that I recently imported from GreyMatter. About half way through, I stopped editing the posts for numerous question marks that had replaced em dashed and apostrophes. Maybe some day I’ll get on my horse and fix that stuff too, but don’t count on it. For the foreseeable future, I’ll keep the original Greymatter posts around too.

Going through this process has given me a lot of insight as well. Certainly, my blogging style has changed significantly from the early days. I still post a lot about my life, but generally my posts are much less rambling, and much more focused on the title. On the other hand, I have kept the same website address for quite some time now, which is better than a lot of people do. Also, this website has grown into a veritable cornicopia of information about my life and my recent history. I remember things because of this blog that I certainly would have forgotten. I see a lot of how I used to be, and realize that I have changed, much but not all for the better. I reflect on past struggles and triumphs, and I feel good about who I am and what I’ve done, even while recognizing that I still have a lot of room to become a better person, and I certainly haven’t even scratched the surface of what I want to accomplish. All in due time.

I finaly (after-several-years-finally) imorted my Greymatter Blog archives into WordPress. It probably would have been a lot easier had I done it at the beginning, but I wasn’t very advanced then. This time, it took a little bit of php hacking, but the import itself was relatively painless and quite quick. I’ve just spent the last few hours cleaning up and categorizing the November and December entries (including the entire Roadtrip series!).

I have a few more months to go (I think I had Greymatter for 8 months), but I’ll get around to fixing up the rest of the months as well. Its just tedious, and I feel the need for a shower.

My venerable WRT54G (version 1) began giving me all sorts of trouble last night. Accordingly, it has been hard reset and firmware upgraded several times since then. If I screwed anything up, chances are there are services missing that you are used to having. But I think Web, FTP, SSH for both boxes, and Mail are all up. Did I miss anything?

Last list night, I noticed that my random photos were having issues. Delving deeper, I discovered that my entire photo gallery system was relatively broken. I changed a few obviosuly broken directory pointers, and things started working better. Unfortunately, the main Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery page was stopping after only a few galleries, instead of displaying all 35 albums, as I had instructed it to. It wasn’t clean either — it appeared that the script had simply stopped running. Furthermore, I noticed that the random pictures script was dying saying that it was running out of memory.

This surprised me, since I wasn’t doing any actual image manipulation, only display of already exisiting images, and the php.ini limit of 8M should have been plenty, I thought, for this. Nevertheless, I tried increasing it, first to 16M. I reloaded apache and then my site. More of the gallery page loaded, but the random block script was still dying, this time using up all of the 16 Megs it was allocated. Never one to give up that easily, I bumped the number up two more times, until it stood at a ridiculous 128 megs. The main page started to work, but the random blocks were still dying from lack of memory.

I decided it was time to try Gallery2 again, even though my last experience was less than stellar.

Bad Idea.

Everything is still wrong with Gallery2 that was wrong with it before. And its a bigger memory hog than its younger sibling (Gallery 1.5) that I am currently using. When trying to import single albums, php died citing too many open files, and the memory usage soared into the hundreds of megabytes. Ridiculous.

So after giving the problem some time off, I came back to it tonight. I bumped the memory allotment up to 320 Megs, updated to the latest Gallery 1.5, and updated my custom random block script. The result was — finally — the random block cache was properly regenerated. I have since dropped the memeory limit back to a more “reasonable” 128 Megs; we shall see if this causes the site to break tomorrow when the cache expires. I tried 32 Megs earlier, but this amount still caused the main gallery page to fail to load completely. This is strange, because when this all was running on oasis (it has since been moved to frankenputen) the 32 Meg limit there worked fine, and I never had any issues. Could it be Ubuntu’s Apache or PHP is less efficient?

At any rate, I have decided that not only is Gallery2 still terrible, but Gallery 1.5 is not all that either. My plan is to develop my own photo gallery solution this summer,

A hard drive in oasis, the computer that runs silverfir.net, is whining. In other news, I use 54% of my hard drives:

Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use%
/dev/hda2               12G   6.1G   5.2G  54%
/dev/hdb1               31G    16G    14G  54%
/dev/hdc1               99G    50G    44G  54%

Three hard drives for three purposes, three different sizes…. all the same usage… how weird is that?

Once You Go Brown…

Welcome to the club, Manizzle!!!